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[return to "1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?"]
1. pjdesn+Fw[view] [source] 2026-02-03 19:01:03
>>surpri+(OP)
I had a computer architecture prof (a reasonably accomplished one, too) who thought that all CS units should be binary, e.g. Gigabit Ethernet should be 931Mbit/s, not 1000MBit/s.

I disagreed strongly - I think X-per-second should be decimal, to correspond to Hertz. But for quantity, binary seems better. (modern CS papers tend to use MiB, GiB etc. as abbreviations for the binary units)

Fun fact - for a long time consumer SSDs had roughly 7.37% over-provisioning, because that's what you get when you put X GB (binary) of raw flash into a box, and advertise it as X GB (decimal) of usable storage. (probably a bit less, as a few blocks of the X binary GB of flash would probably be DOA) With TLC, QLC, and SLC-mode caching in modern drives the numbers aren't as simple anymore, though.

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2. waffle+mD[view] [source] 2026-02-03 19:27:28
>>pjdesn+Fw
I can see a precision argument for binary represented frequencies. A systems programmer would value this. A musician would not.
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3. AlotOf+oK[view] [source] 2026-02-03 20:00:00
>>waffle+mD
Musicians often use equal temperament, so they have their own numerical crimes to answer for.
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