Re: [gnome-network]Binary units

[Patrick Costello <Patrick Costello Sun COM>]

Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> 
> Hi William,
> 
> On Mon, 2003-12-08 at 16:51, William Jon McCann wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > A few months ago German was kind enough to inform me of the SI binary
> > units: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
> >
> > Last week I sent a patch to Mark for gnome-netstatus to change the units
> > to SI units (MiB, KiB, B).  He responded with these references:
> >
> > http://developer.gnome.org/documents/style-guide/x14800.html
> > http://developer.gnome.org/documents/style-guide/a14657.html#units-1
> >
> > 1. Should we change gnome-netinfo to use the units in the style guide?
> > 2. Should we inquire whether these documents should be updated to use SI
> > units?
> 
>         The best people to ask about this by far is the docs team. These guys
> think long and hard about issues like this.
> 
>         FWIW, my personal opinion is that the abbreviations recommended by the
> GNOME documentation style guide seem like they would be much more
> familiar to your average user and that we should go with them.
> 
> Cheers,
> Mark.
> 

I admit that there is confusion about the meaning of K, M and G as binary
multipliers. However, I have seen no evidence that the SI-proposed Ki, Mi
and Gi have gained universal acceptance, or even common currency. On the
contrary, five years after the SI proposal was published, the common
industry usage is still to use K, M, G as binary multipliers. The
SI-proposed binary multipliers are probably in the process of becoming
established within the scientific and academic worlds. More than likely,
after a certain incubation period, the SI multipliers will be absorbed into
general use. Right now, though, I think that we would be in danger of
confusing end-users even more, rather than clearing up the confusion, if we
switched to the SI-proposed multipliers. 

Pat