Review Request: The KSystemActivityDialog uses MB as default unit.

[Matthias Fuchs]

Am Dienstag 30 November 2010, 19:21:18 schrieb Aaron J. Seigo:
> On Tuesday, November 30, 2010, Matthias Fuchs wrote:
> > Actually the first suggestion would use KLocale::formatByteSize , while
> > the second one would keep the current state, yet still makeing the
> > numbers more readable imho.
> 
> using a separator (giving "600,000") is probably a reasonable idea, but i
> have to agree with Sebastian and John about the readability factor.
I fear I did not see "readability factor." in Sebastian's mail, rather 
consistency. And now the question is consistency with what.
At first I thought with the rest KDE provides one with i.e. 4 GiB and 2 KiB at 
the same time.

> the columns should be vertically scannable; with different units they won't
> be, at least not quickly. it will also require that the user is familiar
> with the units and their relationships to do necessary conversions for
> comparison.

Same problem exists in Dolphin and nearly any other file browser.

> this gets even trickier when we take into consideration that there are
> different numbers in the same row: e.g. Memory vs Shared Memory; IO Write
> vs IO Read. having to convert between Kb, Mb and Gb just because it's
> taking "600k" of "Memory" but "15.8 MB" of "Shared Memory" is just
> annoying.
> 
> the question, for readability, comes down to this, imho: "Are people better
> at distinguishing between number values or unit types?" iow, can most
> people get useful information quicker and more accurately from "60,000
> versus 500" or "60 MB versus 500 KB". the answer is almost certainly going
> to be "number values".
> 
> also, i don't think it makes sense to show MB (or MiB, depending on
> KLocale's whims :) rather than KB because many process still take far less
> than 1 MB and to have useful accuracy it would require multiple decimal
> points (0.004 MB for several processes here on my laptop, in fact) which
> just leads to a whole new issue with meaningful alignment of numbers along
> the decimal point.

ksysguard uses MB by default here, while  KSystemActivityDialog does not.
Not sure if this is distro specific (Arch) though.

If it is not, then the 0.1 MB problem for processes using 4 K is a non-issue.

> no, keep it simple. kb is a good granularity. one unit keeps visual scan
> comparisons easy. adding separators would probably help with that.

Yes I like that myself as it is clean and simple. So I'll see if I come around 
updating my patch to add seperators by default. :)

Still the difference between ksysguard and KSystemActivityDialog -- at least 
on my system -- remains. That is why I thought the change to M was not such a 
big deal as it is _already_ that way at the place that introcuded system 
monitoring for KDE 4.