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Comment by soneil | Hacker News Reader

I always find this to be fascinating logic. Where else in computing is it perfectly normal to hear "I prefer to be wrong"?

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I hereby define 1 megawatt to equal 7^7 watts, because I find that more convenient. Any light bulbs not sold in base 7 units are part of a conspiracy by light bulb manufacturers.

How is this wrong?

Sticking with the GB example: GB is the SI unit symbol for gigabyte. The SI prefix giga denotes 1000³. The proper way to denote a drive size in terms of 1024³ bytes would be gibibytes, or GiB.

The byte notation doesn't make any sense to me if you're using SI. It's kind of like saying Giga Inches or KiloCM, just seems wrong

I'd consider a byte to be like a mole: it's the base unit that we actually use, and it's proper to apply an SI prefix to, but it's defined as a specific multiple of a smaller unit (8 bits vs 6.02 * 10^^23 particles).

"Giga inches" sounds wrong for two reasons: first, that larger distances like that are customarily expressed in units more suited to their scale, and second, that that measurement system generally doesn't use SI-style prefixes.

"KiloCM" sounds wrong because you're applying two SI prefixes to one unit and using the wrong capitalization for both "centi" and "meter". kcm could technically be represented by the "dam" unit, although it's more common to show things in that scale just as meters.

KiloCM does sound wrong, but it is interesting that we happily say "1,000 km", when we could say "1 Gm". Fashion and familiarity in that case.

I need to remember to say "it's 3.8 Gm from Seattle to New York".

Well KiloMol is pretty weird too.

IDK,I just think going with bits is neater.

Because a 2GB file will use 2GB of memory and a 2GiB file will use 2GiB of memory, but a 2GB file will not use 2GiB of memory, just because memory size is usually represented in base-2. It's all about nomenclature.

Oh. Well that's a Microsoft problem, really. Most free software has been using the correct abbreviation for base 2 (KiB not KB) for some time now. Further, the annoying habit of using base 10 for line speeds and disk space is finally dying. For example, if Deluge tells me that I'm downloading a 4 GiB file at 4 MiB/s, I know it will finish in 1024 seconds and take up 4 GiB either on disk or in memory.

Because frankly, opinions and standards are different things. Linespeed is base10, has always been base10, predating harddrives, or computers. So networks, pretty much the only thing we all have in common, are base10. Modems are base10 (14.4k is 14400 baud, not 14745). Almost everything is base10. It's not opinion. It .. is.

Memory is base2 because that's how we address arrays. It's the odd one out. Preferring to believe otherwise just doesn't seem very geek to me.

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