On Nov 3, 2007, at 9:50 PM, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
On Sat, 3 Nov 2007, Mike Hommey wrote:
On Sat, Nov 03, 2007 at 04:30:27PM -0400, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
On Sat, 3 Nov 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:
On Sat, 3 Nov 2007, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
Receiving objects: 100% (5439/5439), 1.60 MiB | 636 KiB/s, done.
I mostly like this, but can we please just use "MB/kB" instead of
"MiB/KiB"?
I hope it was some kind of joke on crazy EU bureaucrats that
just wasn't
caught in time.
I don't care either ways. In fact my own preference is for MB/
kB, but
if I had used that first I'm sure someone else would have asked
for the
purist notations.
As far as you don't claim 1MB is 1024KB, it's okay.
[ heh, I knew someone would say something ]
Yes, to me, 1MB is 1024 KB. Always been, until those idiotic hard
disk
manufacturers decided to redefine the common interpretation of what
everyone else used to consider what a MB is just to boost their
marketing claims.
I believe it doesn't matter what prefix we use for a
_progress indicator_, as long as we use the same prefix for
the the amount already transferred and the bandwidth. A precise
language doesn't matter here.
Here is a short excerpt from a discussion of the standard.
I haven't downloaded the full document "IEEE Trial-Use Standard
for Prefixes for Binary Multiples" but copied from Wikipedia <http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix>:
“This standard is prepared with two goals in mind: (1) to
preserve the SI prefixes as unambiguous decimal multipliers and
(2) to provide alternative prefixes for those cases where binary
multipliers are needed. The first goal affects the general
public, the wide audience of technical and nontechnical persons
who use computers without much concern for their construction
or inner working. These persons will normally interpret kilo,
mega, etc., in their proper decimal sense. The second goal
speaks to specialists—the prefixes for binary multiples make
it possible for persons who work in the information sciences
to communicate with precision.”
Binary multiplier make it possible to communicate with
precision. If you use the binary prefixes it is absolutely
clear what you are talking about. The meaning of the old
prefixes depend on the context.
But all this does not matter here. We are talking about a
progress indicator. Precision doesn't matter. The user wants
to be sure that something is happening and get an idea of how
much longer it will take to finish the fetch. An approximation
is sufficient.
What matters though is saving two characters, because the line
width is limited. So lets take "MB, kB".
Steffen
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