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....
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?
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.
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?
That doesn't conform to SI. It should be written as kB mB gB. Ambiguity will only arise when speaking.
> Advertised hard drives come in powers of 10.
Mass storage (kB) has its own context at this point, distinct from networking (kb/s) and general computing (KB).
> When you've got a large amount of data or are allocating an amount of space, ...
You aren't speaking but are rather working in writing. kb, kB, Kb, and KB refer to four different unit bit counts and there is absolutely zero ambiguity. The only question that might arise (depending on who you ask) is how to properly verbalize them.
Little m is milli, big M is mega. Little g doesn’t exist, only big G.
Note that no one is going to confuse mB for millibytes because what would that even mean? But also in practice MB versus Mb aren't ambiguous because except for mass storage no one mixes bytes with powers of ten AFAIK.
And let's take a minute to appreciate the inconsistency of (SI) km vs Mm. KB to GB is more consistent.