Re: GUC with units, details

On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 05:56:15PM +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Jim Nasby wrote:
> > The truth is, virtually no one, even highly technical people, ever
> > picks nits between kB vs KiB vs KB.
>
> The question isn't so much whether to allow KiB and such -- that would
> obviously be trivial. The question is whether we want to have kB mean
> 1000 bytes instead of 1024 bytes.

The things I wonder about are that memory usage programs use K=1024, so
will we be getting questions like: I wrote 128KB in the config file yet
it's only using 126KB according to program Y, why?

Secondly, if someone wants exactly 1,000,000 bytes, that's easy to
type, but if someone wants exactly 1024*1024 bytes, they need to pull
out a calculator. Ofcourse we could use KiB, MiB, etc..

My main problem with the kibi, mibi, etc is that they're basically
unknown. I polled some random (non-computer) user and they'd never
heard of it. It's not taught in schools which pretty much means it's
never going to happen. When manufacturers like Dell start using KiB in
their glossy magazines, maybe it's time to look into it.

Have a nice day,
--
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog(at)svana(dot)org> http://svana.org/kleptog/
> From each according to his ability. To each according to his ability to litigate.