Re: [gnome-network]Binary units

[William Jon McCann <mccannwj pha jhu edu>]

Andreas J. Guelzow wrote:
> Since B (Byte) is not an SI unit, what does it matter whether in SI the
> prefix K means 1024 or 1000?
>
> 1 KB traditionally has been 1024 byte, we should not change that!
>
> Andreas

Yes, KB by convention is 1024 bytes.  kB == 1000 B.

The bigger problem is with MB and GB.  How do you define those?

The GNOME style guide doesn't help because it says in 
<http://developer.gnome.org/documents/style-guide/x14800.html>:

Table 1. Decimal Multipliers
 mega	M	10^6

Table 2. Binary Multipliers
 Mega	M	2^20 = 1,048,576

So, therefore, 1 MB == 1,048,576 B == 1,000,000 B.

Now, try throwing kB and KB into the mix.  General confusion.

By the way, the argument that the difference between these units (ie. 
the error) is insignificant is totally obsolete with the size of modern 
logical volumes.

For these values to be *useful* and, therefore, relevant they should 
have real meaning.  These values should not be merely a hint.  Some 
people will actually use them.

What I have to do before I use a size value is go look in the code to 
see how the value was computed.  End users are not going to do that.

We are propagating errors.

The binary units are a reasonable proposed solution to this problem. 
One that offers a large degree of backward compatibility (due to the 
similarity between the prefixes), is used by the Linux kernel, and is 
consistent with the units used by the hardware storage industry.

Jon