[Thunar-dev] Some ideas to improve Thunar.

[Brian J. Tarricone]

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On 1/30/2006 3:22 PM, sofar wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 31 Jan 2006 00:14:37 +0200, Mikko Linnalo <mlinnalo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> One tiny issue that I noticed: filesize shown in status pane is using
>> "K" instead of "k" when size is shown in kilobytes. Megs (M) and gigs
>> (G) are shown with correct capitalisation.
> 
> I'm not entirely sure what reasoning was followed by Benny originally but the
> uncapitalized letters 'k', 'm' and 'g' stand for the SI expansion of the
> number by 1000, 1 million and 1000 million. Consequently kiloByte (kB) is
> then shortened to 'K' to make sure it's not misconfused with 'kilo-nothing'.

That logic doesn't really track, though.  If you're going to use M, then
use k.  If M isn't confused to mean 'mega-nothing', then k shouldn't be
confused to mean 'kilo-nothing'.

> Hence the consequent naming 'K', 'M', and 'G'.

Which is incorrect on several levels[1].

> of course, it would be better to write kB, mB and gB, but people misconfuse
> this with 'kb' etc, which stands for kilobit. annoying. especially in a 
> network lab!

No, that's wrong too.  kB = kilobyte, mB = millibyte, and gB doesn't
mean anything, IIRC.

> 'K' sounds the least confusing of all of these ;^)

Not from my perspective.

If we wanted to be *really* pedantic, we'd recognise that k-, M-, and G-
are meaningless in this sense since they deal with powers of 10, and
instead use KiB, MiB, and GiB.  However, I personally can't say
"kibibyte" or "mebibyte" without collapsing into a fit of giggling, so
this is a dubious approach at best.

To take the other view, and not be pedantic at all, I bet that anyone
who knows what a byte, kilobyte, megabyte, and gigabyte is will
understand what the UI is trying to tell them regardless of whether it's
capitalised or not.

Having said that, I think doing anything but what the standard says is
sloppy and lazy[2].

	-brian

[1] If you do a little research on the issue, you'll find that, by
convention -- not by any actual standard -- both kB and KB are used
interchangeably to mean "kilobyte".  Personally I think that's
unfortunate, and just a case of enough people doing it wrong so it
somehow becomes de facto "correct".

[2] Of course, I'm lying, since we really "should" use KiB, MiB, and
GiB, which I don't prefer.  I mean kB, MB, and GB, or, abbreviated, k,
M, and G.

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