Re: [PLUG] Copying files to multiple volumes

[Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Thu, Oct 29, 2020 at 11:24 AM Walt Mankowski via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Oct 29, 2020 at 10:48:57AM -0400, brent timothy saner via plug wrote:
> > it's not from lack of trying.
> >
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(data)
> >
> > you can thank disk manufacturers for not following proper notation.
>
> It's not just them. Binary and decimal are used interchangeably by
> most people, and hardly anyone uses kibi/mebi/gibi/tebi. As those
> articles make clear, the differences are going to grow dramatically as
> storage increases.

So, disk manufacturers obviously picked a unit that made their numbers
look bigger.  However, it doesn't change the fact that the CS
community decided to use SI prefixes without conforming to their
normal use.

Kilo means 1000 in every industry and unit of measure in the world,
EXCEPT CS.  I guess programmers can all do their own thing if they
want to, but it doesn't change the fact that it is going to cause
endless confusion.

IEC issued the Kibi/etc units to try to resolve this.  I certainly use
them consistently when I mean 1024, but I think programmers avoid them
almost out of spite.

As far as I'm concerned Kilo is 1000, and if you use it to mean
anything else you're wrong, and if you have a problem with it take it
up with SI, which is the authority basically every government and
industry on the planet (including the US/UK) follows when it comes to
units of measure.  Having base-2 prefixes like kibi is certainly
useful in CS, and they should be used where it makes sense, but they
should still be written Ki/etc.  Then when you're looking at a number
you don't have to guess what it means, which is the whole point of
having standardized units in the first place.  Go ahead and call
4,000,588,029,952 bytes 4 tebibytes - everybody will understand what
they mean, and if they don't they'll use Google and then understand
what you mean, unambiguously.  :)

At present, the disk manufacturers ARE following proper notation, at
least in accordance with SI.  Really they were always in conformance
with SI, which has never defined kilo to mean anything other than
1000.  Funny how standards bodies tend to adhere to their standards...
:)

-- 
Rich
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