Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 20:12:54 -0500 From: Michael Lucas <mwlucas@blackhelicopters.org> To: doc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: inconsistent use of data units Message-ID: <20020221201254.A30956@blackhelicopters.org> In-Reply-To: <20020221034421.AE58A3E35@bazooka.trit.org>; from null@trit.org on Thu, Feb 21, 2002 at 03:44:16AM %2B0000 References: <20020221003116.GA11893@hades.hell.gr> <20020221034421.AE58A3E35@bazooka.trit.org>
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Okay, $0.02 from Mr. Not Enough Sleep And Far Too Cranky for Words: Strong point: Internal docs consistency is important. We must pick a standard for these terms, and stick with it. We need standard symbols for this, preferably entities. Middling strong point: I would also suggest that the developer community we support would probably prefer we document in 2^X. They're here to be computer engineers, after all, and computer engineers work in 2^X. (I think this is fairly well established.) If the developers think that -doc has gone off its head, they won't be amused. We don't need any inter-developer flamewars over something this blatantly silly. Weak point: In all of the computer literature I read, such as books and magazines, they use simple KB and MB. (Capitalization of the B is optional.) This is the de facto standard. As a computing project, we need to follow the de facto standard. These docs are meant to be read by people who read these other docs. Perhaps computer scientists are starting to pick up on these other terms, but most of our users are not computer scientists. They are sysadmins, and developers, and users who read many of those same sysadmin books. The only people who use decimal terms in terms of computing are disk drive manufacturers, who do it for marketing reasons. (I believe this was mentioned earlier, but I'm too damn tired to go look for the exact reference.) Very strong point that I will be furious if it is ignored: Blue. With green poka-dots. Or I torch the whole shed to the ground and salt the earth it stood upon. ==ml -- Michael Lucas mwlucas@FreeBSD.org, mwlucas@BlackHelicopters.org my FreeBSD column: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/q/Big_Scary_Daemons http://www.blackhelicopters.org/~mwlucas/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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