Re: Using standardized SI prefixes
On Fri, 15 Jun 2007, cascardo@minaslivre.org wrote:
On Fri, Jun 15, 2007 at 01:46:10PM -0400, Phillip Susi wrote:
Because we needed a name, and Kilo is a good one to use. There is no
rule that says you can't use the word for a different meaning in a
different context.
Which context would this be? Computer Science? Computer Engineering?
Computer Networks? Storage Disks? Magnetic or Optical? File sizes?
Memory size? Cache size?
Yes. Any time the unit is bytes. There is even a standard for it.
I agree that in computer science, many (not
necessarily most of) times it would very bad sense to use a power of 10
instead of a power of 2. Like back when they used ten's complement.
However, this makes the point stronger, since 10 was a base used with
some digital computers.
It *was* used. Then people realized base 2 was a lot better for digital
computers.
Some people living on this continent before us used to use base 20. So
this makes the point stronger that if I want change for a $10, you should
give me back four $5 bills. :)
And before computers were invented the word mouse always referred to a
small hairy rodent. I don't see you complaining that it can also refer
to the computer pointing device on your desk. When someone says they
caught a mouse or they clicked with their mouse, you can easily infer
which one they mean.
Yes. But you can't infer which one (1000 or 1024) MB mean. When you buy
a disk, what do the vendor says the capacity is? 80 GB. But your
software states it is no more than 75GB. What the fuck!? If GiB is
confusing to users, so is base 2. People use base 10 and k (kilo) means
1000, M (Mega) means 10^6, G (Giga) means 10^9, etc., because they are
used to base 10.
How about when you buy 80 GB of RAM, and your software says you have
88 GB?
How about when you buy an 80 GB disk, and you know it's 80 * 10^9 bytes,
but your software says /home only has 79 GB and you know it means
79 * 10^9 bytes? Should we also add filesystem overhead to all file sizes
just to avoid confusing newbies?
I don't want to read some manual or source code just to know which base
is used when I read or write 10G. When I write, how can I unambiguously
tell the program that I mean 1000 or 1024? Only using G and Gi, this
would be possible.
It only solves half the problem. GB is still ambiguous even if GiB isn't.
How about using these prefixes to unambiguously refer to powers of 10?
kd kidi 10^3
Md meda 10^6
Gd gida 10^9
Td teda 10^12
Pd peda 10^15
Ed exda 10^18
Zd zeda 10^21
Yd yoda 10^24
Come on, you know you want a yodameter. :)
Ivan
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