Forget the defaults, or “I said ‘67108864’, not ‘67108684’!”

defaults

Disclosure: This was cribbed from external marketing materials for a product and company with which I have no affiliation.

The obvious question: Aren’t default values the ideal way to express recommended values? What does it mean when the recommended value is so much greater than the default value?

Okay, so that was two questions.

As these numbers are incredibly specific, could data entry be simplified by offering fewer than a near-infinite number of choices?

How precise must data entry be? What’s the effect of entering 1048567 instead of 1048576?