crazy_maths_man

So my sleeping pattern got really thrown off thanks to wintereenmas and I was awake at about 4am last night and reading a Firefox developer blog that suddenly made me think about SI and IEC standard prefixes. For those who don't know under SI:

kilo = 1'000 (10^3)
Mega = 1'000'000 (10^6)
Giga = 1'000'000'000 (10^9)
etc..

Now this gets a bit confusing, because a kilobyte is often meant to be 1'024 (2^10) bytes not 1'000 bytes, and equally a Megabyte is often referred to as 1'048'576 (2^20) bytes. This can lead to weird situation where a Megabyte as either been 2^20 bytes, 10^6 bytes or in the case of 1.44 MB floppy disks the MB actually means (10^3)*(2^10).

So how do we stop all this confusions you might ask yourself? Well ISO (International Standards Organization) to the rescue! They went and defined when referring to SI units, e.g kilo, Mega, Giga etc.. you will ONLY mean powers of 10! When wanting to refer to powers of 2 you should use the new IEC prefix system which works like such:

Kibi = 1024 (2^10)
Mibi = 1'048'576 (2^20)
Gibi = 1'073'741'824 (2^30)

So if you want to refer to powers of 2, rather than using kB, MB, GB etc.. you use KiB, MiB, GiB etc.. You'll find a few applications that use this set-up, not exactly a difficult change to make, just a bit over the top on correctness and standards. But I thought 'correctness and standards' that's right up Firefox's street! Apparently not, I checked it out in the download manager and instead of using KiB, MiB, GiB etc.. it uses: KB, MB, GB etc.. and what's bad about it is:

The use KB to mean KibiByte, but KB actually means Kelvin Bytes (lol the well known unit of information heat). kB means kiloBytes.
The rest are all the same, they use the SI unit (MB, GB etc..) which means 10^(3x) when it's actually representing 2^(10x).

So I make a bug about it in bugzilla and it quickly gets marked as a duplicate of another bug which is already marked as WON'TFIX, not hard to work out what that means. So what's Firefox's rational for not using either SI or IEC standard prefixes?

"It's too confusing to the user"
"It's what Microsoft use"

¬_¬! I think Firefox should support standards by integrating with the IEC units to bring itself inline with other software being released at this time. You really think the user will not know how to deal with a change from KB, MB, GB etc.. to KiB, MiB, GiB etc.. or even the correct SI prefix of kB, MB, GB etc..

Well apparently so, such a 'trivial' change isn't worth changing from Microsoft, I clearly missed the whole point of Firefox!

Anyway, hilariously ridiculous rant over!

Hope everyone is happy today as about almost everyone finishes for Christmas. Have a messy Christmas all :D.

Also remember it's a party round at ours New Years eve, invitations are viral so if you're reading this (and you know who I am) you're invited and if you want to bring friends, do so.

--Damian

Bit of a muck up, but there isn't actually a screening of Snakes on a Plane at the AMC at 8.

Plan seems to be to meet up anyway, get our tickets sorted out for the 8:45 screening (with all the hype it might be worth it). Then play some DDR or go and grab a couple of pints to deal with how bad it will likely be.

Hey, this is Damian, just thought I'd make a quick post so it's not entirely empty and people can see who it is when I add them.

Forum username: Quantum