Re: Configure.help editorial policy

Nicholas Knight
2001-12-21T23:16:24Z

On Friday 21 December 2001 02:53 pm, Stephen Satchell wrote:
> At 07:17 PM 12/21/01 -0200, Rik van Riel wrote:
> >As a last point, we shouldn't forget about the inconsistent
> >way in which the marketing departments of hardware vendors
> >apply these units to their products. In many cases binary
> >and decimal units are mixed, leading to something which is
> >impossible to "get right". Disk space would be one example
> >of this, but I'm sure there are more.
> >
> >regards,
> >
> >Rik
>
> OK, how about this silly suggestion: DON'T USE ABBREVIATIONS IN
> DOCUMENTATION.

While pure reason suddenly made me realize that we really shouldn't use
abbreviations in docs, thus rendering MiB vs MB moot, this still leaves
us with another problem:

Gigs or Gibs? Kibbles or Kilos? You're still going to end up with
confusion, because outside of the (limited number of) people who heard
about this "international" standard, nobody knows what the heck a
kibibyte is.