(I posted the original bug on Launchpad. It's not a huge big deal, but I'm going through old unfinished bug reports...)
amule uses K = 2^10 convention because we're talking about file sizes, and in computers, "K" (or "k", doesn't matter) means 2^10.
No. Lowercase k means 1000 and uppercase K means 1024. For M, G, etc. the meaning is ambiguous.
The definition of "correctness" varies whether you respect IEEE more that IEC or visa versa.
Both the IEEE and IEC recommend the KiB standard. IEC 60027-2 says the same thing as IEEE 1541: k = 1000, Ki = 1024
For an explanation, type "man 7 units" in a terminal.
In the networking, K (or k) means 10^3.
In networking, lowercase k means 10^3. K does not.
Nobody measures transfer speed in units of power of 2.
In telecommunications they don't, but I think some software does for file transfers. I'm not sure which is more appropriate for aMule, but please use consistent symbols.
Moreover, in most cases "bps" which is "bit per second" (not byte, bit!) is measured, since networks doesn't transfer bytes, but bits.
Yeah, but in software, file transfers are usually measured in bytes, for obvious reasons.
Bittornado, for instance, shows file transfers in kB/s (1000 bytes per second), and file sizes in KiB (1024 bytes), with standardized symbols.
Some use a notation of "b" for bit and "B" for byte, but this is not a common requirement.
The IEC standard says "B" for byte and "bit" for bit.
And file sizes are measured in units of power of 2, which you can write as k or K.
No. You either write them with the old convention of uppercase KB, MB, GB, or with the standardized convention used elsewhere in the linux world of KiB, MiB, GiB. I would prefer the latter, because it is unambiguous, but lowercase kB for 1024 bytes is just plain wrong, under any convention. Things like nautilus-cd-burner use the MiB convention because you can see quickly, for instance, what size CD you'll need to fit the ISO you downloaded from aMule.
Nobody will understand "file with size 2k is 2000 bytes" no matter what is your idea about meaning of "k".
Of course. I hope no one is misinterpreting this as a request to use 1000 for file sizes. (Although apt does it this way: kB = 1000 bytes for file sizes. Weird, though.)
So, in order to make speed of transfer, file size and transfer time to correlate, aMule displays speed in bytes per second and power of 2.
Good. I'm just asking you to use consistent symbols. Follow one convention or the other. Preferably the standardized one, but whatever.
Conclusion: write prefix any way you want - it won't be become "correct" and won't change meaning.
The reason that people want things to be "correct" is so that apps are consistent with each other and meanings are clear. It often doesn't matter (though why are you showing file sizes with such detail if they don't matter?), but in the few circumstances that it does matter, the user shouldn't have to waste time digging around to figure out the exact meanings of things.
