On 2/16/2013 9:54 AM, Pascal Hambourg wrote:
Jerry Stuckle a écrit :
On 2/14/2013 4:52 PM, Pascal Hambourg wrote:
And now there are "official" binary prefixes, so there is no
excuse for not using them when powers of 2 are more convenient instead
of abusing SI decimal prefixes.
And who declared these made-up prefixes "official"?
BIPM (SI), NIST (USA), CENELEC (Europe) IEC, IEEE.
Are these official enough for you ?
See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix>
Making up prefixes for something which has always been that way is
confusing.
Abusing already-existing prefixes by giving them a different meaning is
confusing too.
It's simple. When dealing with computers, it's powers of 2.
Actually not in all cases but mostly in storage capacity only. When time
or frequencies are involved, i.e. in clock, speed or data rate (bus,
network, disk...) use of powers of 10 has been constant. 10Base-2 speed
is 10 000 000 bits/s.
True, I will agree it is storage capacity.
But this is not the point. I repeat, the use of powers of 2 is perfectly
acceptable. What is not acceptable any more is the abuse of decimal SI
prefixes for powers of 2. I have abused them too, but always felt
uncomfortable with this practice because of the potential and real
confusion it caused. I felt happy when standardized binary prefix were
adopted, and used them right way. Hey guys, it just takes a tiny "i"
inserted in the notation to avoid confusion ! Are you just so lazy ?
Using an extra "i" will be confusing to the majority of the world.
Please show me one major manufacturer which uses it, for instance. Or a
mainstream publication.
Saying something is a standard does not make it so. Only acceptance by
the users makes it a standard. And that has not occurred.