Re: [Monotone-devel] Patch

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Wed, Apr 13, 2005 at 05:06:18PM +0200, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> Seriously I learned that messing with the universal 10^3 based
> prefix SI-system is not a good idea. So I would prefer kilobyte
> and megabyte over kibibyte and mebibyte. If you really must use KiB,
> why not label it correctly? 

I got two replies to my comment, but due to the avoid duplication
setting in Mailman, I though they were duplicates and deleted them.  
Still I want to answer from my memory before the archive will have
caught up:

My motivation for SI-unit labeling:

Coming from a science background I saw many conversion errors
between units and thus really like standardisation at those points.
For a scientist it is like following to a technical standard
document like rfc2822 is for a programmer.

I like to correct those source of bugs as early as possible and 
when I started programming (over 20 years) ago, 
actually I learned that K was 1000.
To me it was later that books started to be imprecise on that point.

There are popluar examples for the damages unit-errors might do, like
        http://www.jamesoberg.com/mars/loss.html
        Why The Mars Probe Went Off Course
while not being the reason alone, it might have 
helped triggering the problem.
Examples from my work are not nearly as spectacular.