Re: Configure.help editorial policy

Daniel Phillips
2001-12-28T03:20:34Z

On December 27, 2001 12:24 pm, Dominik Mierzejewski wrote:
> On Thursday, 27 December 2001, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> > Kilo, as in memory -> 1024
> > Kilo, as in distance or weight -> 1,000
> >
> > Difficult?
> >
> > /me wonders when the kibblebytes thread is going to end
>
> /me wonders when people will learn to read more carefully
> (no offense intended) :-)
>
> If you look at my post more closely, you'll see I used `kB' (that's small
> k and capital B) for decimal kilobyte. I would never suggest using `KB'
> (that's capital K and capital B) for it. I do agree that `KB' is
> traditionally used for binary kilobytes, but what about MB, GB and so on?
> These _are_ ambiguous. I am in favour of using Ki, Mi and Gi for binary
> quantities.

So would you be happy with kB -> 1,000 bytes, and KB -> 1024 bytes? Likewise
mB for 1,000,000 bytes and MB for 1048576 bytes?

Look, there's some precedent for it here:

http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/dictK.html
"K - an informal abbreviation for one thousand used in expressions where
the unit is understood, such as "10K run" (10 kilometers) or "700K disk"
(700 kilobytes or kibibytes). Note that "K" is also the symbol for the
kelvin (see below). Also note that the symbol for the metric prefix kilo-
(1000) is actually k-, not K-."

If you believe that, then we don't have a problem, we never did:

kB -> 1,000 bytes
KB -> 1024 bytes

So, KiB is a silly fix for a problem that doesn't exist. Let's not have that
silliness creeping into our documentation, making it look silly too.

--
Daniel