[FFmpeg-devel] GSoC with FFMpeg waht a combination!

[Gary Corcoran]

Uoti Urpala wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-03-26 at 00:26 +0000, M?ns Rullg?rd wrote:
>> The Wanderer <inverseparadox at comcast.net> writes:
>>> I was fairly heavily involved in that thread, if it's the one I recall.
>>> The argument in there is what has led me to reluctantly concede for lack
>>> of supportable argument otherwise that others are allowed to use the
>>> term if they want to.
>> I see no reason to tolerate this so-called word to any greater extent
>> than we would the renaming of other established words.  Suppose, for
>> instance, that I began insisting on calling C functions "finctions"
>> (perhaps to avoid "confusion" with the pure mathematical concept of
>> function).  Would everybody be OK with that?  I'd like to think not.
> 
> I wouldn't be OK with it because practical ambiguity is rare. However if
> such ambiguity was common then the terminology would need to be changed.
> Uses of base-10 and base-2 units are not separated clearly enough that
> you could rely on context to disambiguate them.
> 
> If for example 'ls -l' shows file size as 183297384 bytes then I'll say
> it's 183 MB. Would that really be obvious from context if I also used
> 'MB' when talking about base-2 units? Or do you claim that I must
> convert the value to base-2 units?

You don't have to do the conversion, as least not if you're using FreeBSD
(I don't know whether Linux, etc. has this feature).  Just add an 'h',
as in 'ls -lh', and it puts out "human readable" values.  The above example
would show "175M" for the size.  The 'du' command also has a '-h' option.

And if you didn't use the -h option?  Then I would say that file is "183
million bytes", but not "183MB".  And yes, it is only the hard drive
manufacturers, wanting to say their drives were bigger (or at least as
big as) their competitor's, that foisted this nonsensical confusion onto
us.  At least they long ago stopped quoting unformatted bytes (when the
drives came from the factory unformatted) as the advertised size...

Gary