On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 12:27:32PM -0500, Jon LaBadie wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 08:24:00AM -0800, Kevin Till wrote:

> INMNSO the default precision for the "*Rate" parameters and
> maybe for the "Compress" parameter also, should be changed
> to "0".  As in:
> 
>   -    { "TapeRate",   1, 6,  1,  0, "%*.*f",  "KB/s" },
>   +    { "TapeRate",   1, 6,  0,  0, "%*.*f",  "KB/s" },
> 
> Does anyone really care if the rate was 1231.3 or 1231.4 KB/s?
> Not only does a percision of zero get rid of the useless digit,
> also the decimal point is eliminated.  Thus two character
> positions are gained.

I agree with you when the difference is between 1234.3 and 1234.4.
OTOH, a difference between 0.1 and 0.9 is of much more interest.

A better way (IMHO) would be do automatically adjust the value
to 2..4 digits, strip off the dot and append the unit.  With this,
1234567 would become 1234k, 123456 would become 123k and 12345678
would become 12M.  Please check the kb() subroutine in the amandatape
program to see what I mean.  I find this a good compromise because
the witdh is always between 3..5 characters and the error is always
below 10%.