zlacker

>>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.

>>pjdesn+Fw
It makes it inconvenient to do things like estimate how long it will take to transfer a 10GiB file. Both because of the the difference between G and Gi, and because one is in bytes and the other is in bits.

There are probably cases where corresponding to Hz, is useful, but for most users I think 119MiB/s is more useful than 1Gbit/s.