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

Timothy Covell
2002-01-02T20:22:34Z

On Wednesday 02 January 2002 11:17, Jonathan Amery wrote:
> In article <3C2315D6.40105@purplet.demon.co.uk> you write:
> >Engineers not (yet) being familiar with the relatively new SI (and IEEE)
> >binary prefixes is just about acceptable. "Engineers" that misuse k/K
> >and (worse!) m/M should be in a different field entirely. The SI system
> >is generally taught as basic science to pre-teenagers. There is no
> >excuse!
>
> How many of them learn it though?
>
> Jonathan (occasionally guilty of s/kB/KB/ himself).
>

For the 10th time, the K v. k issue is due to the standards
body ignoring common sense and following tradition instead.
All positive powers of ten should have upper-case letters
(D,H,K,M,T,P)
and negative powers of ten should use lower-case letters.
(d,c,m,n,p)

The KB meaning 2^10 B instead of 10^3 B is just plain dumb,
and that's why the standards body tried to fix it with KiB.
But again, this solution was considered to look and sound
goofy and to be based on stupid mathematical games;
hence this whole long thread. <rant>A thread which has shown
to me that most comp. sci. folks lack common sense and
are pendantic to the max.</rant>

--
timothy.covell@ashavan.org.