On Mon, 2003-12-08 at 12:46, Patrick Costello wrote: > 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 To quote the National Institute of Standards and Technology, "It is important to recognize that the new prefixes for binary multiples are not part of the International System of Units (SI), the modern metric system." However, even with the availability of prefixes for binary multiples, I believe that only prefixes for decimal multiples should be used, due to their ease of use and users' familiarity with them. I feel it is also important to point out that uppercase K is neither a prefix for a binary multiple nor a prefix for a decimal multiple; in relation to SI, it is the symbol for kelvins. Only the lowercase K, "k," is meant for decimal multiple prefix duty. The GNOME documentation and applications should reflect this. For more information regarding this, see Bugzilla bug #127175 <URI:http://bugs.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=127175> and the Guide for the Use of the International System of Units (SI) <URI:http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/>, published by NIST.
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