Re: [gentoo-project] Call for agenda items - Council meeting 2014-04-08

[Michał Górny]

Dnia 2014-03-31, o godz. 06:56:19
Joshua Kinard <kumba@g.o> napisał(a):

> On 03/31/2014 02:07, Michał Górny wrote:
> > Dnia 2014-03-30, o godz. 23:13:50
> > Richard Yao <ryao@g.o> napisał(a):
> >
> >> Lets just stick with the JEDEC standard's way of doing things that came from IBM.
> >
> > JEDEC itself admits it have failed with the 'standard way':
> >
> > | NOTE 2 The definitions of kilo, giga, and mega based on powers of two
> > | are included only to reflect common usage. IEEE/ASTM SI 10‑1997 states
> > | "This practice frequently leads to confusion and is deprecated." Further
> > | confusion results from the popular use of a "megabyte" consisting
> > | of 1 024 000 bytes to define the capacity of the familiar "1.44‑MB"
> > | diskette.
> >
> > http://www.jedec.org/standards-documents/dictionary/terms/mega-m-prefix-units-semiconductor-storage-capacity
>
> The problem is, those of us who grew up in those dark ages, who played with
> 5.25" and 3.5" disks....we're a lost cause.  No hope to save us.  It'll
> always be 1,024 bytes to a kilobyte.  Anything else is blasphemy.  Save
> yourselves!
>
> Besides, for an outdated standard, it still gets used a lot.  Last I
> checked, one can really only buy RAM in sizes of powers of two.  And the
> computer will report that size, in powers of two.  Ditto for L1/L2/L3 caches
> (look at the top of any kernel dmesg), etc.
>
> In some respect, if all one cares about is free space on a disk drive or how
> fast they can stream a movie, then the KiB/MiB thing works.  But if you play
> with bits and bytes from time-to-time (and worry about byte alignment) or
> sometimes fiddle w/ partition tables in a hex editor...you're going to think
> in terms of powers of two.

I feel like there's some misunderstanding here. I didn't really intend
to make everything power-of-10. It's just about the extra 'i' in 'KiB'
for unambiguity with 1000 of 'kilo'.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny