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

Pozsar Balazs
2001-12-22T10:24:55Z

Please NO NO NO NO!!

Why on earth is it good to develop misunderstandings and inconsistency
with well- and widely-known historical abbrevs?

I (and I think I'm far not alone) would hate to see those abbrevs. I
really don't want to vomit every time I read configure.help or an
ifconfig output.

This is a 3-year old decision, and haven't seen it in use anywhere before.
If this knew style would be the common use in IT, then this change is OK.
But _not_ now. (and hopefully never).

So may I suggest considering this change a few years later, _if_ it comes
into common use?

On Thu, 20 Dec 2001, Bernd Eckenfels wrote:

> In article <200112201721.KAA05522@tstac.esa.lanl.gov> you wrote:
> > Eric has decided to follow the following standard:
> > IEC 60027-2, Second edition, 2000-11,
> > Letter symbols to be used in electrical technology -
> > Part 2: Telecommunications and electronics.
> > and has changed all the abbreviations for Kilobyte (KB) to KiB,
> > Megabyte (MB) to MiB, etc, etc.
>
> I did this for nettools (i.e. ifconfig), too:
>
> RX bytes:2120660294 (1.9 GiB) TX bytes:341183013 (325.3 MiB)
>
> man page:
>
> Since net-tools 1.60-4 ifconfig is printing byte counters
> with SI units. So 1 KiB are 2^10 byte. Note, the numbers
> are truncated to one decimal (which can by quite a large
> error if you consider 0.1 PiB is 112.589.990.684.262 bytes :)
> ...
> SEE ALSO
> route(8), netstat(8), arp(8), rarp(8), ipchains(8)
> http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html - Prefixes
> for binary multiples
>
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--
pozsy