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From: | Christian Groessler |
Subject: | bug#17505: Pádraig: does this solve your consistency concern? (was bug#17505: dd statistics output) |
Date: | Mon, 28 Jul 2014 19:54:22 +0200 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.6.0 |
On 07/27/14 19:11, Linda Walsh wrote:
It is more common to specify transfer sizes in SI and mean IEC if you are in the US where the digital computer was created. People in the US have not adopted SI units and many wouldn't know a meter from a molehill, so SI units aren't the first thing thatthey are likely to be meaning. Computer scientists and the industry here,grew up with using IEC prefixes where multiples of 8 are already in use. I.e. if you are talking *bytes*, you are using base 2.
I didn't grow up in the US, and grew up with the metric system, but when I'm talking about memory sizes I always mean IEC (2^10) and never SI (10^3).The only pitfall here are hard disk sizes where I have to remember that "they"
mean SI.
It is inconsistent to switch to decimal prefixes when talking about binary numbers.
Agreed.
BTW I was playing devil's advocate with my mention of the SIGUSR1 inconsistency.I'm still of the opinion that the dynamic switch of human units based on current transferred amount is the lesser of two evils, since this output is destined for human consumption.
I don't get the reason for the dynamic switch at all. Can somebody enlighten me?
regards, chris
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