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

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 7:44 PM, Douglas James Dunn
<djdunn.safety@×××××.com> wrote:
> The system you are most familiar with really depends on what Operating
> System you use.  if you don't use computers you probably were exposed to
> either the SI units or imperial base 10 units.

SI units ARE in base 10.  Most imperial units aren't in base 10, and
the SI prefixes aren't generally used with imperial units.  You don't
usually report height in centiyards, etc.

There seems to be some kind of misconception that this has something
to do with imperial vs metric units.

Bits and bytes are such a modern concept that they were pseudo-metric
from the start, but programmers tended to use the SI prefixes in
non-SI ways - defining a kilobyte as 1024 bytes.  "Kilo" is an SI
prefix, but the SI defines it as 1000, not 1024.

The 1024-byte kilobyte was never metric or SI or imperial.  Fairly
recently JEDEC codified the 1024-byte kilobyte, but also endorsed the
1024-byte kibibyte, and the usage obviously predates that standard.
Before then, programmers never really had a "standard" for the
kilobyte.  Since programmers don't tend to do a lot of compound units,
getting their terms endorsed by a standards body was probably not much
of a priority.  If they had gone to the SI/ISO (or whatever was around
in the 60s) they'd almost certainly have been shot down on having a
1024-byte kilobyte.

Rich