Re: glib uses wrong prefix for base-2 units

[Daniel Elstner <daniel kitta googlemail com>]

Am Mittwoch, den 03.06.2009, 23:10 -0700 schrieb Brian J. Tarricone:
> On 06/03/2009 05:36 PM, Paul LeoNerd Evans wrote:
> 
> > Yes; we messed up 30 years ago and said "k" when we
> > meant "Ki". Oops. Sorry about that.
> 
> Well, no, 30 years ago there was no "Ki".  So people did the logical 
> thing and picked the prefix that represented the correct *magnitude* of 
> the value.

s/correct/approximate/

> > Lets not do it wrong for another 30, please?
> 
> "Wrong" is somewhat relative here.  Things can have different meanings 
> in different contexts[1].

That's indeed the problem.

> 	-brian
> 
> [1] Of course, the marketing departments of some storage media companies 
> arbitrarily decided it could have different meanings in the *same* 
> context too.

The marketing departments happen to have the SI standard on their side,
like it or not.

I completely agree that this is an utterly trivial issue, but if that's
the case then why the hell don't we just change to the now standardized
unit prefix and forget about it?

I think it's either:

a) Who cares about the exact value anyway.  Let's just display
human-friendly quantities as used everywhere else, i.e. powers of 10.

b) Well some people do care, and powers of two are convenient in the
world of computers.  Let's keep that and remove the ambiguity.

Arguing that the exact value isn't important, but then insisting on the
1024 convention just seems silly to me.  Either it is important or it
isn't.  In those situation where the difference matters, you need to
know the factor.

Personally, I don't care about the color of the bike shed, all I care
about is that it gets any coating at all.

--Daniel