lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2001]   [Dec]   [27]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
Date
From
SubjectRe: Configure.help editorial policy
landley@trommello.org (Rob Landley)  wrote on 23.12.01 in <20011223174227.NCJM25224.femail12.sdc1.sfba.home.com@there>:

> But the binary or decimal nature of the measurement has always been
> application specific up until now, and I'm curious why that's suddenly not
> good enough anymore.

Would you want to live in a world where 1 litre milk was either more or
less than 1 litre water?

Why, then, do you think it was *ever* "good enough"?

I certainly never thought that 1 GB disk being a different number of
usable bits than 1 GB RAM was ever "good enough". *I* considered that to
be plain old fraud.

> The switch appears to be based on the assumption that conformance to a
> standard issued by a bureaucratic body is arbitrarily better than
> established practice. And yet that's not what it does, because it refuses
> to use the long form...

"Established practice" is that these prefixes are decimal. It has been
established practice before the first electronic computer was even built.

> The patch is a can of worms, and abandoning the current domain-based
> defaults (ram is binary, network is decimal, disk needs to pick one) is not
> something I see as an improvement. But you're the maintainer...

I see it as an unequivocal improvement, even though I don't like the
actual choice of prefix. But then, I never liked "Exa" or "Peta" either
...

MfG Kai
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/

\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2005-03-22 13:14    [W:0.098 / U:1.260 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site