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I disagree. As Michael Bolton said, "Why should I change? He's the one who sucks!" Kilo, mega, and other prefixes predate computer storage, and SI is beautifu
by pmw 6y ago
I disagree. As Michael Bolton said, "Why should I change? He's the one who sucks!"
Kilo, mega, and other prefixes predate computer storage, and SI is beautiful because it is consistent. The computer industry decided to use standard prefixes with non-standard (base-2) quantities. Now let's cut our losses and return to consistency with everything else.
- dataflow 6y agoYou're not disagreeing. Parent is talking about the measurement units changing, whereas you're saying the meaning of the SI prefixes shouldn't change. You can have both: require KiB, MiB, etc.
- iab 6y agoHow about micro-inches, or kilo-furlongs. Let's get chaotic in here.
- dataflow 6y agoYour proposal lacks what is commonly called a "motivation".
- mattashii 6y agoI'd be all for that. Please standardize your measurements to one unit, and use constant logarithmically incrementing indicators for larger amounts of these units. Better yet: do not base them on (or name them after) a unit that differs for each person (why does my foot measure 0'11"?)
- ColFrancis 6y ago> constant logarithmically incrementing indicators Exponentially increasing? 10^3, 10^6, 10^9, 10^12 (I kind of hate being that guy, but I mean it in a positive and helpful sense)
- beervirus 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5-s-4KPtD8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5-s-4KPtD8
- iab 6y agoReally vibe with this
- BenjiWiebe 6y agoKilofeet are a thing.
- iab 6y agoPleasing to say, if nothing else
- pmw 6y agoGood point, I see I may have misunderstood the parent. Thanks.
- pseudalopex 6y agoUsing MB and MiB is more consistent than using 2 meanings of MB. But it's less consistent than using SI units for everything.
- dataflow 6y agoIronically, "consistency" is ambiguous here. Using MiB avoids confusion, misuse, and ambiguity. Uniformity (what you're also calling "consistency"), if it's even warranted here, would be far lower priority and could wait.
- philwelch 6y agoThe problem is that “kibibyte”, “mebibyte”, “gibibyte”, etc. are extremely ugly words whose existence is fundamentally offensive. If you heard anyone say them aloud you’d think they were a toddler with a speech impediment.
- protomyth 6y agoI'm sure they were picked specifically because they sound bad. Using only the the first letter would probably work for the US (e.g. kbytes) since it wouldn't step on SI's toes.
- jbverschoor 6y agoLooks like me-bit-byte But yeah, phonetically they pretty much suck
- sep_field 6y agoSorry, but you're wrong. They are adorably cute words and I named my cat kibibyte.
- LocalH 6y agoI always thought it should just have been "binary/decimal kilobyte" etc which would have neatly sidestepped the awkwardness of saying those words out loud and would have also likely satisfied most people who preferred using the traditional-within-computing binary meanings. In theory that would be universally applicable to any units and any base. Instead we have this ugly linguistic hack.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- arghwhat 6y agoEnjoy your 17.179869184 gigabytes of RAM. The hardware is using sizes in powers of 2 because it's the only sensible thing to do, and numbers would be very annoying for users if the units didn't account for it.
- lemmonii 6y agoI will enjoy 16 GiB of RAM, this is an already solved problem.
- TaylorAlexander 6y agohttps://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ I say this because most regular folks don’t even know what a gigabyte is so asking them to understand what a gibibyte is does not really “solve the problem” of consumer understanding.
- dataflow 6y agoThe xkcd isn't really relevant here, there are only 2 competing standards here and the proposal is to pick the other one.
- arghwhat 6y agoThere were two standards (different prefix definitions) - the kibi/mibi/... line of prefixes was made as a solution. So now there are three standards.
- arghwhat 6y agoDo you want SI units or not? Changing to gibibytes does very little - the users confused by 1024 do not know about the alternate prefixes. Furthermore, if you just add the "i" to all measurements, then you have accomplished nothing with regards to SI prefix proliferation. Everything but one dialog in a single OS will still use 1024, and HDD manufacturers will still use 1000.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- protomyth 6y agoSectors are 512bytes or 4096bytes and there are base-2 prefixes. Using base 10 in a base 2 world is consumer fraud and they only do it because they can deliver less.
- pseudalopex 6y agoSectors come in other sizes.[1] And mega would mean million still if they didn't. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format