Author: olivier.houdas
Subject: Add options for KB/MB etc. in addition to KiB, MiB, etc. ?
Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2016 9:24 am (GMT -6)
The subject was raised a couple of years ago (in 2007 on this forum), but actually I'd like to raise it again in a new form:
Early in computer sciences (some 50 years ago...), it was much easier to count in base 2.
We ended up announcing file sizes, memory available, etc. in multiple of 2^10= 1024, which was easier to calculate for pre-historic computers. OK.
Now we're in 2016, and computers can make operations in base 10 without slowing down anything visibly![Smile]()
For example, I bought a microSD card for my phone recently, and at the back of that SANDisk card, it goes "*1GB= 1,000,000,000 bytes", when it is written on the front "64GB*" (take note of the star).
The card ends up showing 58.27GiB available... (when 64GB = 64,000,000,000B actually equals 59.60 GiB, by the way).
Hence my question: how difficult/costly would it be to add 5 entries in the size display options of TotalCommander to have both KiB, MiB, GiB AND kB, MB, GB available?
I tried the DirSizeCalc plugin, but it requires configuring and adding a user column, + it does not support dynamic units.
It wouldn't be such a big issue if not possible, but why not take a step towards normalization of computer arithmetics? And maybe in another 15 years, we'll default settings to kB...)
Best regards all.
Subject: Add options for KB/MB etc. in addition to KiB, MiB, etc. ?
Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2016 9:24 am (GMT -6)
The subject was raised a couple of years ago (in 2007 on this forum), but actually I'd like to raise it again in a new form:
Early in computer sciences (some 50 years ago...), it was much easier to count in base 2.
We ended up announcing file sizes, memory available, etc. in multiple of 2^10= 1024, which was easier to calculate for pre-historic computers. OK.
Now we're in 2016, and computers can make operations in base 10 without slowing down anything visibly
For example, I bought a microSD card for my phone recently, and at the back of that SANDisk card, it goes "*1GB= 1,000,000,000 bytes", when it is written on the front "64GB*" (take note of the star).
The card ends up showing 58.27GiB available... (when 64GB = 64,000,000,000B actually equals 59.60 GiB, by the way).
Hence my question: how difficult/costly would it be to add 5 entries in the size display options of TotalCommander to have both KiB, MiB, GiB AND kB, MB, GB available?
I tried the DirSizeCalc plugin, but it requires configuring and adding a user column, + it does not support dynamic units.
It wouldn't be such a big issue if not possible, but why not take a step towards normalization of computer arithmetics? And maybe in another 15 years, we'll default settings to kB...)
Best regards all.