8 ms·
Counterpoint: everything should be measured in SI units.
by noSyncCloud 4y ago
Counterpoint: everything should be measured in SI units.
- selfhoster11 4y agoCounterpoint: disk sector sizes are not multiples or clean fractions of 1000, and it's unlikely to change anytime soon because we'll likely store files as octets of binary information (binary digits) for the rest of time. It makes no sense to count it in 1000-based SI units. You'll perpetually mis-align the data in whichever underlying storage technology you're using, and it's bad for performance and resource consumption.
- diroussel 4y agoAs much as i dislike the names, kibibytes etc, it makes sense not to re-use SI unit prefixes. SI did comes first and it broadly applicable. Ask for disk sector alignment; we don’t have disk sectors any more, we use SSDs with blocks. And the sizes don’t need to have a neat number of kilobytes. Just the same as a litre of water doesn’t have a neat number of H2O molecules in it.
- wyldfire 4y agoExcept for unfortunately because of popular conventions the SI unit names are ambiguous with the power-of-two unit names. Maybe your point is that no one should have used "kilo" prefix to describe 1024. And yes that would've been great. But they did and now it's very much standard and expected to describe kilobytes as 1024 bytes. So now we are stuck with the ambiguous terms that the SI standardized on. Those are consistent with the meanings of other Greek prefixes, but if the standard unit can be easily confused with another standard, it's not as useful.