3 ms·
The only real problem is when 10-base prefixes are used to represent 2^10-base values (or vice versa, if that happens). Everything else is just preference, as q
by DominikD 11y ago
The only real problem is when 10-base prefixes are used to represent 2^10-base values (or vice versa, if that happens). Everything else is just preference, as quite clearly evident here:
"even when dealing with non-technical customers"
Bruce, your implicit assumption is that non-technical customers actually care about units in absolute terms. They don't, that's why some devices (e.g. Nintendo consoles) deal with "blocks" instead of megabytes or mebibytes. Non-technical users care about relative terms. Whether these are represented in 2- or 10-based units, ferrets or chimichangas is irrelevant. My mother wants to know whether data on her 2GB pendrive can be stored on HDD with 20GB space. 2<20, so the answer is yes, case closed.
OS (or ecosystem in a broader sense) should be consistent, that's all there is to it (and since it isn't and won't be, it should at least be honest). Whether 1000 or 1024 "makes more sense", to "some or all" parts of the computer "visible or not" is entirely a matter of taste. "Makes sense" is as meaningless metric as "is natural". Everyone can (and will) twist it any way they like by providing various examples that adhere to their preference.
- brucedawson 11y agoIt is true that non-technical customers often don't care. Although, they do care when they buy a 1 TB drive and get told by Windows (but not OSX) that it is only 916 GB. Imagine a customer with a 7.7 GB file (as reported by Windows) who purchase an 8 GB thumb drive to hold it. The inconsistent units mean that it won't fit. We should make our units consistent and we should use base-10 because people.
- paulddraper 11y agoYour argument is good for showing the value of consisent units. But it could be base 2 or base 16.
- khedoros 11y agoConsistency would be better, whichever way was chosen (base 2 or 10). Although even with base-10 being used all around, I might still end up explaining why an 8 billion byte file won't fit on an 8 billion byte USB key, while a disk image of the same size would because of file system overhead.
- Symbiote 11y ago> My mother wants to know whether data on her 2GB pendrive can be stored on ... four "500MB" drives? Because it won't fit. Using correct units, 4×500MB=2GB. But 4×500MiB=1.95312GiB. That's an excellent argument for 1000-based units.