landley@trommello.org (Rob Landley) wrote on 23.12.01 in <20011223174227.NCJM25224.femail12.sdc1.sfba.home.com@there>:
> But the binary or decimal nature of the measurement has always been
> application specific up until now, and I'm curious why that's suddenly not
> good enough anymore.
Would you want to live in a world where 1 litre milk was either more or
less than 1 litre water?
Why, then, do you think it was *ever* "good enough"?
I certainly never thought that 1 GB disk being a different number of
usable bits than 1 GB RAM was ever "good enough". *I* considered that to
be plain old fraud.
> The switch appears to be based on the assumption that conformance to a
> standard issued by a bureaucratic body is arbitrarily better than
> established practice. And yet that's not what it does, because it refuses
> to use the long form...
"Established practice" is that these prefixes are decimal. It has been
established practice before the first electronic computer was even built.
> The patch is a can of worms, and abandoning the current domain-based
> defaults (ram is binary, network is decimal, disk needs to pick one) is not
> something I see as an improvement. But you're the maintainer...
I see it as an unequivocal improvement, even though I don't like the
actual choice of prefix. But then, I never liked "Exa" or "Peta" either
...
MfG Kai
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Dec 31 2001 - 21:00:14 EST