[PATCH] Add option to use traditional binary units instead of kibibytes

[Michael Pyne]

On Thursday 02 July 2009 03:09:34 Marcel Partap wrote:
> Hi Michael,
>
> i'm planning to give this a proper kcontrol setting once this has gone
> in...Any further comments or such - bring 'em on ;) regards marcel.

Your patch has one glaring issue: KB and KiB should both be 1024 byte, MB and 
MiB should both be 1024 KiB, etc.

The one thing worse in my opinion than mis-using the SI prefixes, is to have 
two entirely different meanings for KB on the same desktop.  With your patch 
applied, if a user were to say download a file from Arora, it shows up as 
"875.5 kB" (yes, lowercase k).

If you were to view that file in Dolphin with your patch it would show up as 
"896.5 KB".  With my patch it would show as "875.5 KB".

As I said on the kde-devel thread, I understand that k is the SI prefix for 
kilo, which means *10^3.  But as few software exists that uses KiB, I can 
think of absolutely zero which uses KB like this.  There is a tremendous 
amount of people who actually have been trained that for computers KB == 1024, 
MB == 1024 * 1024, and etc., and your patch would break that.  I don't know 
what your proposed KControl interface is that would presumably clear it up, 
but it is a *bad idea* to change KB like that.

Regards,
 - Michael Pyne
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