Quoting [Gary Mazz] (May 26 2009):
Andre,
Maybe I've misinterpreted what was proposed? I though if a particular industry infrastructure, like broadcast and telecom, natively uses a terminology like bits, the spec won't support their native terminology. For example cable channels, satellites and mpeg is commonly referred to bits.
By not supporting the native units of an industry, you infer that is not an industry your specification recognizes. I'm sure that's not the intent, but that is how it may be interpreted.
No, I think you understood correctly. Still, you can't make all happy if you want to have a well defined and finite! set of units. The units are supposed to be applied to disk space, memory size, and network bandwidth only - is the industry you are refering to specifying network bandwith in MBit/second? I doubt it. Where would you stop? Would you allow bit/minute? TB/decade? That would mean free form units, yet another registry, and yet another set of conditions where implementations will fail to interop. Instead agreeing on a well known, fundamental unit which can trivially be converted to other, domain specific units, seems like an excellent and *simple* thing. IMHO, we should do as was proposed: either use always bytes (or always bits if you want), or always KB, or MB, or [GB for disk, MB for memory, MB/s for network]. I don't think some industry will feel ignored when we specify disk space in gigabytes... Cheers, Andre.
-gary
Andre Merzky wrote:
Quoting [Gary Mazz] (May 26 2009):
I think units are a very important issue. More significant than atom/json/xlm discussions. I think someone pushed a satellite into mars over a foot/meter discrepancy.
What if its an e911 or other emergency application running on a cloud. It really helps to reduce operational risk with a page of text in a spec.
I am not saying they are not important - but it does not matter on *which* one you agree, as long as we agree on something, and the spec is clear about that...
Andre.
-gary
Andre Merzky wrote:
Oh well... - you can't make everybody happy. At the end one needs to decide on one of the options, and either way, just getting rid of units (by defining them as fixed) seems like a good solution. As others stated: a UI can always represent a more suitable version...
A
Quoting [Gary Mazz] (May 26 2009):
Just as an fyi, media folks work in "bits"
-gary
Andre Merzky wrote:
Quoting [Sam Johnston] (May 26 2009):
>>a 4th option, which i rather prefer since the units stuff tends to be >>relevant to and consumed by humans via UI rather than machines via >>API, >>is not to use units at all. >><memory>2147483648</memory> >>either of the above is far easier to transform to and from non-XML >>representations, in my experience, with the latter being zero effort. >>a couple extra bytes won't harm us and we adhere to my first >>engineering rule: the best solution to a problem is not to have it in >>the first place. >> >> >> > Andy and I spent a few hours on the phone tonight getting ourselves > aligned and this was basically the conclusion we came to as well > (though we were talking about choosing e.g. megabytes for memory, > gigabytes for disk and gigahertz for processors). > > > I think that is a great compromise: simple format, + human readable.
Andre.
-- Nothing is ever easy.