Re: [gnome-network]Binary units

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

tor 2003-12-18 klockan 18.55 skrev Andreas J. Guelzow:
> 1 KB traditionally has been 1024 byte, we should not change that!

"Broadband" traditionally referred to a wide frequency spectrum. These
days that word is used in who knows what all kinds of "wrong" uses...

My point being that just saying that "it's tradition" is as dumb as just
saying "it's wrong". There are more subtleties here, and let's not
forget that usage can be changing without being "wrong".

Personally, I see the SI proposed prefixes slowly getting more
acceptance. It's still far beyond what one would expect, but it's slowly
crawling into usage in some places.


Also, the biggest complaint I always hear about free software is that it
just copies, never innovates. Free software people never has the courage
to do anything new, but rather just copies what is already there, and is
thus always playing catch-up with copying new ideas.

Even though I believe that is to a large extent false, and that we have
probably been changing a lot of that which was true about this in GNOME
since the GNOME 2.0 days by having the courage to do some controversial
UI changes, I'm still puzzled anytime I see someone rejecting ideas or
concrete proposals just because it conflicts with a "traditional" way,
and just wants the discussion to stop there.
Come on, wake up, anything new is bound to conflict with a "traditional"
way, that's the very nature of doing anything new and being in the lead
of development.

And this is such an excellent example of an area where we could have had
the courage to share the lead of development, instead of cowardly just
refer to traditional use and leave it like that, just the behavior that
we wanted to change.


Christian