[Thunar-dev] Some ideas to improve Thunar.

[sofar]

On Mon, 30 Jan 2006 16:34:43 -0800, "Brian J. Tarricone" <bjt23 at cornell.edu> wrote:
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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.


I'm glad someone tops me at being anal at things once in a while =^) -
but as you state before 'kB' stands for kilobyte ... but kb really for
kilobit (of course it really should be "kib"). Anyway Since we now have MB
we can also do Mb - handy for those 1000megabit cards I'm testing right
now, or should I say Gb cards...

Auke