On Fri, 15 Jun 2007, Ben Finney wrote:
David Verhasselt <davidv@telenet.be> writes:Perhaps transforming it into a localization problem would do the trick. This way, users would be able to set their preference on byte-count in the same place as their preference on currency, decimal, and am/pm vs 24h. Applications could make use of the localization settings to calculate the amount of bytes, which would hopefully eventually centralize and generalize what counting-method the user sees.A GiB is the same in any locale, and has the same display -- "GiB" -- in any locale. Displaying it another way is misleading.
I like the way ls -lh prints it's output, thankyouverymuch. Adding an extra "iB" accomplishes nothing for me other than causing more filenames to wrap.
I'm not saying "GiB" is always bad, but just because some standards organization defined a prefix to mean something, doesn't mean the same prefix doesn't also have another meaning.
When you see GB, why do you insist that the G must have the SI meaning, when the B clearly doesn't? If I say 1 Ton, do you parse that as meaning
1 * 10^12 on's? :)BTW, I prefer SI units over imperial ones, but there are no SI units for information, so we're stuck using bits and bytes. I also generaly prefer things to be unambiguous when there is no disadvantage, but, fortunately, that is not a problem for me in any of the programs I use. They all use the binary powers. If enough of them started using GiB, and even one of the programs I use regurarly switched to using decimal powers, I would suddenly become mistrustful of a lot of other programs, simply for not wasting an i.
Ivan