On 16/02/13 17:45, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
Powers of 10 make completely no sense. Why not simply dropping the
powers of 10 and using the prefixes *B and *iB both for the powers of 2?
Powers of 2 make sense when you're talking about RAM, where the modules
have a certain number of binary address lines, so they naturally fall on
those boundaries.
For disks, there's no particular advantage, and manufacturers generally
use proper prefixes. For network bandwidth, there's even less advantage,
and 'binary' prefixes are hardly ever used.
But when you're working out how long it will take to fill up your RAM
buffer from disk or network, you'd better be aware of the differences
between the units, and it only adds to the confusion if the same
prefixes mean different things in different contexts.
Of course the ultimate craziness is "1.44Mb" (1440kiB) floppies ...
Richard