news.daily: human-readable numbers

[Ben Rosengart]

The output of news.daily contains a strange mix of human-friendly
and human-unfriendly numbers.  E.g.:

  Outgoing Feeds (innfeed) by Articles:
  [...]
  TOTAL: 25          50978494 10389298 36494427 2040964  98368 11279269  20% 5650:31:10

This is an extreme case, since it was the first time news.daily had
run in some time, but it serves well to illustrate the problem.
Compare:

  Outgoing Feeds (innfeed) by Volume:
  [...]
  TOTAL: 25          476.1 GB  100.1 GB  576.2 GB   29.7 KB/s   48.6 KB 5650:31:10

Much nicer, isn't that?  (Though I sometimes find it hard to visually
sort a column of numbers when some are in KB, some in MB and some in GB.)

The by-articles numbers are in units of articles, of course, so
there's no convenient abbreviation.  However, writing 50978494 as
50,978,494 makes it clearer, to my eyes at least.  Europeans would
presumably prefer 50.978.494.  I doubt news.daily is localized, sigh.

Some people are undoubtedly processing these reports with scripts,
but perhaps an option could be introduced to add thousands-delimiters
to numbers over (say) 5 digits long?  If people are receptive to
this idea, I might be able to contribute the necessary code.

-- 
Ben Rosengart                                            (212) 741-4400 x215
 To accuse others for one's own misfortunes is a sign of want of education.
 To accuse oneself shows that one's education has begun.  To accuse neither
  oneself nor others shows that one's education is complete.    -- Epictetus