On Thu, 26 Oct 2006, Dan Price wrote:
> For applications like this, this is silly and useless--- human beings
> are pretty damn good at understanding things in context-- and 30M and
> 17G have real meaning here. To me the two character prefix is just
> wasting precious columns-- a significant consideration in the UNIX
> world.
Nico's suggestion would allow apps with tight constraints to specify the
(ambigious) single char prefix.
The base might be well-known for certain long-standing applications,
where the context of:
- who wrote it?
- what audience was it written for?
but for arbitrary applications the prefix is just is meaningless. What
does
"100M"
mean? You will often be wrong, even with applications you *think* you
can derive the 'context' for. E.g. if the above figure is presented to
you by, say, Apache's directory-indexing module - which prefix is it?
Other than to context-sensing gurus, this is just plain confusing..
> don't embrace your routine can just go it alone indicates that you're
> not interested in solving the problem in a way that meets the needs of
> the primary consumers.
Then let's ask the consumers, I guess.
It's confusing enough that hard-disks typically have to explain the
difference on their labels..
regards,
--
Paul Jakma,
Network Approachability, KISS. Sun Microsystems, Dublin, Ireland.
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/quagga tel: EMEA x19190 / +353 1 819 9190
