Quote:
Originally Posted by Teyrnon
Quote:
Originally Posted by msundman
And nobody suggested "byte" as anything meaningful in this sense so that "megabyte" thing is a straw man.
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Hold it right there. That's not a straw man, that's just me using a parlance I'm familiar with. I learned computers and programming in the late seventies and early eighties. Byte and character are synonymous in my head. |
Bytes and characters are used differently even if one would use some encoding with 1 byte/character. Each glyph is a byte (including spaces, punctuation, etc.), but only the word characters and digits (0-9 and a-z in English) constitute characters in the sense I'm talking about.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Teyrnon
Just reread where I said byte as character and my point still applies.
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I don't see how "150 kwords" is more manageable than "1.5 Mchars", and "150,000 words" is even less manageable than "1.5 Mchars".
Quote:
Originally Posted by Teyrnon
Quote:
Originally Posted by msundman
A 500 kchar book would be 500 very small pages or 250 large(ish) pages. No matter which of the page sizes you want to go with the conversion between it and kchars is very easy to do in your head.
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Why? |
Because it's very simple to divide by 1 (or 1,000) and by 2 (or 2,000).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Teyrnon
Pages have no real usefulness here. It's not helpful to convert to pages which are a rather subjective and imprecise means of referencing the relative size of a text.
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I wholeheartedly agree, but others seem to be hung up on pages for some reason.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Teyrnon
Converting to word count would be more useful and that's not something I care to do in my head every time I'm trying to pick a book to be read in an alloted time frame.
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Why would you want to convert from character count to word count?!? (E.g., if it's just about what
you are currently used to then I see no real reason, because you could just as well get used to character counts instead.)
However, if you
really want to get some ballpark figure then X kchars is something between X/5 and X/4 kwords in English, and it's not very hard to divide by 5 and 4. I see no need to do such a conversion, though.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Teyrnon
Now, let me ask. what does character count tell you that's so useful?
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As I've already said, character count reflects quite accurately the length of the text. Much, much better than word count (or page count). It also reflects well the time it takes to read the text, and works in many different languages.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Teyrnon
If it's because it's so easy to convert to pages I don't see that as a selling point for reasons already given earlier in this thread.
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Page counts are not sensible to you and me, but they are to others, so even if this is not a selling point for you or me it certainly is for many others.