Hello there! > For what its worth I very much agree with Patrick. The binary prefixes > are silly and nobody but anal-retentive ultra-geeks will understand > them, thus confusing the general userbase (who haven't seen them > before).
Well, that's strange. I never considered myself a "anal-retentive ultra-geek". And I certainly never thought that my sister would fit into the category of "anal-retentive ultra-geeks". And yet she was the one who brought up the topic when we upgraded her computer with a new hard disk last week. The disk was labeled "250 Gigabyte". Yet when we installed it,"only" 238 Gigabytes were available. I explained her that the disk manufacturer interpreted the term "Giga" in a other way then the software manufacturer. Being an "anal-retentive ultra-geek", she was bothered by this. My sister is by no means a technical person. But to her european decimalised mind "Kilo" means "a thousand" and not "a thousand and twenty four", just in the way that "Mega" means "a million" and not "one million four hundred forty nine thousand six hundred sixteen". It doesn't bother me, mind you. I know that in IT "Giga" doesn't mean "Giga". But I always thought that only "anal-retentive ultra-geeks" know that and I recently noticed it confuses the the general userbase (who haven't heard of that before). The strange thing is that almost everyone seems to agree (even Patrick) that binary prefixes are a good Idea. However; everyone seems to wait with the adaption of binary prefixes until everyone around has adapted them. Funny thing. I see no need to bother the documentation team; there is to much resistance against binary prefixes. So long, Raphael _______________________________________________ gnome-vfs-list mailing list gnome-vfs-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-vfs-list