On Thu, May 23, 2002 at 11:26:56AM -0700, John H. Robinson, IV wrote: > here we go, wandering off topic again . . . It's at least as on-topic as any of the flamewars going on, since these idiotic prefixes are now having a discernable impact on Debian which affects my perception of the overall quality of the distribution (c.f. comments regarding ifconfig output). > On Thu, May 23, 2002 at 01:04:02PM -0500, Steve Langasek wrote: > > That the people who put labels on hard drives are incapable of binary > > math, > i believe this is false (i have no proof though, and i suspect neither > do you). however, 172GB sounds bigger than 160GiB. this is why such a > drive would cost, say, 399$ instead of 400$. > 160GiB vs 172GB is a marketting thing, not a capacity thing. Well, I believe it's true that the people putting the labels on the hard drives are incapable of doing binary math, by virtue of the fact that the labels are the domain of marketeers rather than engineers, and I won't hold my breath looking for a marketroid that can do binary math without the benefit of numerous bifurcated appendages. But perhaps more to the point, I would say that the people who put labels on hard drives are incapable of doing the right thing wrt advertising their products. > > That anyone believes this new set of prefixes will /reduce/ confusion > > when RAM, file sizes, transfer speeds, and bandwidth rates (all of > > which have a greater direct impact on the average computer user than > > the total number of bytes available for use on a 160GB hard drive) is > > positively laughable. > of course, RAM, file sizes, transfer speeds, and bandwidth rates all > have exactly _nothing_ to do with proper unit prefixes. s/\) is/\) continue to use the traditional definitions is/ If that makes it any clearer. It supports the principle that within the domain of computing, 2^10 *is* the proper unit prefix. Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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