zlacker

>>surpri+(OP)
I'm sticking with power-of-2 sizes. Invent a new word for decimal, metric units where appropriate. I proposed[0] "kitribytes", "metribytes", "gitribytes", etc. Just because "kilo" has a meaning in one context doesn't mean we're stuck with it in others. It's not as though the ancient Greeks originally meant "kilo" to mean "exactly 1,000". "Giga" just meant "giant". "Tera" is just "monster". SI doesn't have sole ownership for words meaning "much bigger than we can possibly count at a glance".

Donald Knuth himself said[1]:

> The members of those committees deserve credit for raising an important issue, but when I heard their proposal it seemed dead on arrival --- who would voluntarily want to use MiB for a maybe-byte?! So I came up with the suggestion above, and mentioned it on page 94 of my Introduction to MMIX. Now to my astonishment, I learn that the committee proposals have actually become an international standard. Still, I am extremely reluctant to adopt such funny-sounding terms; Jeffrey Harrow says "we're going to have to learn to love (and pronounce)" the new coinages, but he seems to assume that standards are automatically adopted just because they are there.

If Gordon Bell and Gene Amdahl used binary sizes -- and they did -- and Knuth thinks the new terms from the pre-existing units sound funny -- and they do -- then I feel like I'm in good company on this one.

0: https://honeypot.net/2017/06/11/introducing-metric-quantity....

1: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news99.html

>>kstrau+ZK
> Invent a new word for decimal, metric units where appropriate.

No, they already did the opposite with KiB, MiB.

Because most metric decimal units are used for non-computing things. Kilometers, etc. Are you seriously proposing that kilometers should be renamed kitrimeters because you think computing prefixes should take priority over every other domain of science and life?

>>crazyg+RM
Do you often convert between inherently binary units like RAM sizes and more appropriately decimal units like distances?

It would be annoying of one frequently found themselves calculating gigabytes per hectare. I don't think I've ever done that. The closest I've seen is measure magnetic tape density where you get weird units like "characters per inch", where neither "character" nor "inch" are the common units for their respective metrics.

>>kstrau+eQ
I have no idea what that is supposed to have to do with anything.

>>crazyg+m61
It means that is fine for Kilo to mean 1024 in the context of computers and 1000 in the context of distances, because you're never going to be in a situation where that is ambiguous.

>>array_+Ku1
Except it's not because it's constantly ambiguous in computing.

E.g. Macs measure file sizes in powers of 10 and call them KB, MB, GB. Windows measures file sizes in powers of 2 and calls them KB, MB, GB instead of KiB, MiB, GiB. Advertised hard drives come in powers of 10. Advertised memory chips come in powers of 2.

When you've got a large amount of data or are allocating an amount of space, are you measuring its size in memory or on disk? On a Mac or on Windows?

>>crazyg+QD1
And that is because some people didn't like that a kilobyte was 1024 bytes instead of 1000, so they started using 1000 instead, and then that created confusion, so then they made up new term "kibibyte" that used 1024, and now it's all a mess.

And in most cases, using 1024 is more convenient because the sizes of page sizes, disk sectors, etc. are powers of 2.