On Thu, 2003-12-18 at 12:22, Christian Rose wrote: > tor 2003-12-18 klockan 18.55 skrev Andreas J. Guelzow: > > 1 KB traditionally has been 1024 byte, we should not change that! > My point being that just saying that "it's tradition" is as dumb as just > saying "it's wrong". Pardon me? There is a traditional/historic use of KB, MB etc. Moreover, none of these abbreviations are covered by SI since B is not an SI unit. > 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. It may be crawling into use in some places, except counting storage space is not one of those areas. > 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. Well, just because something is new does not mean it can't be dumb. > > 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. We should hope that you have better reasons than just that it is non-traditional. > > 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. Perhaps if you would explain the benefit of using decimal powers to measure something inherently given in binary powers, you could persuade people. But so far the argument in favour of decimal powers eludes me. Andreas -- Prof. Dr. Andreas J. Guelzow Dept. of Mathematical & Computing Sciences Concordia University College of Alberta
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