Re: Changing KB, MB, and GB to KiB, MiB, and GiB in Configure.help.

Lionel Bouton
2001-12-24T13:40:29Z

Eric S. Raymond wrote:

>
>
> This change came as a patch from David Woodhouse. I think the new
> abbreviations are awful ugly, myself, but they do have the virtue of
> not being ambiguous. So I swallowed hard and took the patch.
>

This could even have the nice side effect of teaching something to Linux
newbies (mainly the fact that the difference between 2^10 and 10^3
matters in some areas). I see 2 cases :

- already encountered the kiB/MiB/GiB notation and understood the
meaning: no problem if we take out of the equation the aesthetic of the
abreviations.

- this is a new thing for the reader, 3 cases:
. Computer literate person : she uses her intuition and understand its
meaning : no problem apart the time used to put her intuition at work,
. Computer illiterate person which don't care enough : she doesn't
understand the difference with kB/MB/GB and takes the notation as a
different syntax but with the same semantic : the only problem would be
a temporary confusion (from a fraction of a second to several minutes)
until this assumption is made. It certainly would be made by computer
illiterate people who are lost in the first place: we trade a
misunderstanding for another.
. Computer illiterate person which really tries to understand : she
doesn't understand and take the time to document herself : no problem
she might discover something she didn't even thought about.

This is a simplified view but I believe the actual readers' behaviour
would be somehow a combination of several of the above cases.

So what's the tradeoff :
* aesthetic and shor time spent in temporary confusion or reflexion
* for clarity and education of some people in the end.

Hiding complexity in the docs would only keep some users ignorant.
This is my personal opinion but don't we prefer educated users instead
of ignorant ones ?

I find the choice obvious...
We could argue on the choice of these particular abreviations against
others but as I don't see any other around...

LB