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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: How to configure konqueror to show KB and MB instead of KiB and
From:       Daniel Winter <dw () danielwinter ! de>
Date:       2009-07-01 15:15:01
Message-ID: da5733de0907010815nd9d179fv9a4ece022810800 () mail ! gmail ! com
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2009/7/1 Josh Berry <des@condordes.net>:
>
> IMO there is no excuse for having promulgated this DOS-era mistake
> (shortcut?) for as long as we have.  I understand the technical
> reasons for using binary units internally, but presenting them as if
> they were SI units has only contributed to the type of confusion that
> spawned this thread.

Another addition:

We (KDE) are not the only one who made the transition to correct use of units.

There are quite a few other FOSS applications (GUI as CLI tools) which
are showing Ki/Mi and so on.

I would like an option to show KB, MB, GB (not only the displayed unit
but also the correct value). The usage of 2^x based units may have
some historical/technical internal reasons. The average user (and even
I not really, other than that it comes from the actual physical
impelmentation of RAM/ROM) sees no reason why for ammount of data such
weird 1024^x units are used.

For humans that is hard to calculate (become more obvious the bigger
the files and disks get). So in the long term we all (all apps and
OSes) should think about showing normal 10^x based units and values
everywhere.

Though that is not that easy... (but nice, for example 1 Million 1 MB
images would just take 1 TB and not 978 GB (or correct GiB))

Btw, google gets it wrong too:
http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&q=1000000+MB+in+GB

Daniel
 
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