Re: Configure.help editorial policy

Timothy Covell
2001-12-22T02:05:24Z

On Friday 21 December 2001 14:24, Chris Ricker wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Dec 2001, Timothy Covell wrote:
> > On Friday 21 December 2001 13:12, David Weinehall wrote:
> > [snip]
> >
> > > Whatever the choice ends up being, KB is always incorrect, unless you
> > > intend to specify some strange formula where the number of bytes (B)
> > > combined with the temperature in Kelvin (K) has anything to do with
> > > things.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > /David Weinehall
> >
> > The way the metric prefixes work is that multiplicative prefixes are
> > capitalized and divisional prefixes are in lower case.
>
> Nonsense. Some of what you're calling multiplicative prefixes (as if they
> weren't *all* multiplicative ;-) are capitalized, and others are not. kilo
> (10^3) is k, hecto (10^2) is h, and deca (10^1) is da, for example. See
> <http://www.bipm.fr/enus/6_Publications/si/si-brochure.html> for the
> official guidelines (page 23 if you read English, and page 28 if you read
> French).

Dude, I don't know why you are being so pedantic on this.
You pointed to the stupid exceptions instead of the norm.
100% of the negative power prefixes ARE lower case, and all of the
positive power prefixes ARE UPPERCASE except those three stupid
exceptions which you cited. Here, SI is being stupid. Uppercase
is a GOOD IDEA (TM). And, NIST should fix this because the
point of standards is to create logical consistancy so that people
don't get into these stupid discussions.

Finally, I'm an American, so that means if someone tells me to do
something stupid, I tell them where they can shove it.

>
> More relevant to the whole Configure.help discussion, if you want to
> pedantic, official SI guidelines also state on the same page that:
>
> "These SI prefixes refer strictly to powers of 10. They should not be used
> to indicate powers of 2 (for example, one kilobit represents 1000 bits and
> not 1024 bits)."

And I already agreed to this, as have most of the others.

>
> later,
> chris
>

--
timothy.covell@ashavan.org.