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On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 11:35 AM, Ciaran McCreesh |
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<ciaran.mccreesh@××××××××××.com> wrote: |
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> On Sun, 30 Mar 2014 05:23:08 -0400 |
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> Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote: |
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>> To think that counting is the one situation where it is actually |
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>> possible to have perfect precision, and we still manage to mess up the |
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>> units... |
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> |
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> Because the difference between 1000 and 1024 in this context is |
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> completely irrelevant. This is the ultimate bikeshed, and ISO/IEC is a |
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> rather unpleasant shade of mauve. |
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|
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The whole point of SI is that it works beautifully when you start |
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mixing units. |
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|
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Storage density could be expressed in GB/mm^2 or GiB/mm^2. The former |
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is FAR more useful. |
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|
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1 GB/mm^2 = 1PB/m^2 = 1 kB/ìm^2. |
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1 GiB/mm^2 ~= 0.95 PiB/m^2 ~= 1.05 KiB/ìm^2 |
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|
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And heaven forbid you just use GB to mean 2^30 bytes - lots of |
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opportunity for error. However, even with unambiguous units the fact |
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that different elements of the compound units end up converting with |
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different bases makes the math not work out cleanly. |
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As long as you stay trapped in your nicely-discrete world of the |
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computer unit complexity doesn't matter so much as long as you stay |
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consistent (which isn't made easy by the fact that there are warring |
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factions over the definition of the kB). As soon as you start getting |
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into anything that involves the real world and engineering you can't |
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avoid the units used to measure things in the real world. |
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If you don't care about the math coming out cleanly then we might as |
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well go back to using short tons, inches, and torrs. |
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Rich |
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