Re: Using standardized SI prefixes
On Tue, Jun 12, 2007 at 04:21:58PM +0800, Onno Benschop wrote:
> (Ironically, my spell-checker had never heard of a kibibyte :)
Because it's not a correct word.
English linguistic is a descriptive science -- what is correct and what is
not depends on what people use. This stays in stark contrast to
prescriptive languages like French where a government agency is entitled to
ban the use of an established word and enforce using a made-up replacement.
And what version is used is trivial to check. Oh, wait -- in this case not
that trivial, when using the Google test "kilobyte" is so much over the cap
that you need tricks like searching for "kibibite foo" and "kilobyte foo",
using several words to avoid bias caused by a certain term.
The results I got are: "kibibite" has below 0.3% use of "kilobyte".
With such a crushing defeat, I doubt the whole "kibibyte" crap has much of a
leg to stand on, regardless whether a self-imposed "Academie Anglaise" says.
Please, stop this madness. s/KiB/KB/g at least in Debian.
--
1KB // Microsoft corollary to Hanlon's razor:
// Never attribute to stupidity what can be
// adequately explained by malice.
Reply to: