Roger Dingledine wrote: > >> So just so we make sure we're on the same page here, when the docs say >> "K" you mean 1000, and when you say "M" you mean 1,000,000, right? Or >> are you "one of those people" who count bytes in a little over the >> metric meaning of the suffixes? >> > > K is 1<<10, and M is 1<<20. > You tell that to the people manufacturing hard disks. > >> All sarcasm aside, if the whole industry measures a quantity using a >> certain unit, and one program measures it using another, I call that "a >> usability bug". >> > > Right. Alas, I assure you there's a big community of people who'd be > confused and upset if we went the other way too. Taking my case as a usability test case, I did spot that deviation from what I know when I read the docs. I just failed to remember it over time. This brings to mind two possible solutions: 1. Have a global setting saying "bandwidth in bits" 2. Use a suffix (say - 1MB vs. 1Mb)
I think 1 is less confusing. > Most network things > measure in bits, and most application things measure in bytes. > Being as it is that there is no possible way to change the meaning now without breaking stuff, it doesn't matter whether I agree with the above statement or not :-) > most (Windows) users measure application bandwidth in bytes. > I'll idly wonder what those admins do when they buy network equipment. Like I said above - a moot point. I'm not suggesting we remove the byte measurement at this stage. Shachar
