On Sat, 16 Jun 2007, Eduard Bloch wrote:
#include <hallo.h> * Ivan Jager [Fri, Jun 15 2007, 05:36:33PM]:How about when you buy an 80 GB disk, and you know it's 80 * 10^9 bytes, but your software says /home only has 79 GB and you know it means 79 * 10^9 bytes?First, it would hardly say 79GB. Maybe 79.96GB which is much closer.
Huh, I guess I just have a bigger journal than you, more inodes per byte, and some backup superblocks. (I use the defaults.)
Should we also add filesystem overhead to all file sizes just to avoid confusing newbies?Second, "du" already does that. Go figure.
No, it doesn't. It rounds up to a multiple of the block size. That only accounts for a small fraction of the filesystem overheaad. (Perhaps this will be more obvious if you write a multiple of your blocksize to a file.)
I don't want to read some manual or source code just to know which base is used when I read or write 10G. When I write, how can I unambiguously tell the program that I mean 1000 or 1024? Only using G and Gi, this would be possible.It only solves half the problem. GB is still ambiguous even if GiB isn't.Sure, but it makes it possible to make it _right_ in a good portion of situations. The people who really need binary units can make clear what they are doing there. Otherwise they would deliberately create confusion. You like to be among them? You like chaos and cheating?
No, I like to avoid chaos and confusion. I do not currently have problems telling the size of a file, and adding an extra column of "i"s to the output of most programs isn't going to accomplish more than cause confusion for me when I use a program that doesn't waste the extra space to tell me, "Oh, by the way, I'm doing the sensical thing."
I can't say I adhere to, "Don't fix what isn't broken," but it does kind of bug me when people are encouranging other people to encourage yet other people to fix things that aren't broken.
How about using these prefixes to unambiguously refer to powers of 10? kd kidi 10^3Like in kidigram and medameter? What comes next, midroutopicans?
Yes, my intention was to make a silly set of prefixes whose only purpose was to look and sound silly while disambiguating from the commonly used ones we all know and love.