tags 757831 +wontfix
thanks
I stand in good company with Jeff Attwood in [1] who observed why
Kibibytes, et. al will never take off:
1) They sound ridiculous. I hear the metric system used more often in
the United States than I hear the words "kibibyte" or "mebibyte"
uttered by anyone with a straight face. Which is to say, never.
2) Hard drive manufacturers won't use them. Drive manufacturers don't
care about being correct. What they do care about is consumers buying
their drives because they have the largest possible number plastered
on the front of the box. If a big lawsuit wasn't enough to get them to
mend their ways, I seriously doubt that the recommendation of an
international standards body is going to sway them.
3) Tradition rules. It's hard to give up on the rich binary history of
kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes, particularly when the
alternatives are so questionable.
Or, as Alan Green noted[2]: "Yotta getta life".
As I recall, I added the statement in the resize2fs man page due to
some SI weanie kevetching on a Debian bug. Otherwise, I would have
been completely silent on the issue, since everyone reasonable in the
computer world besides SI weanies (and HDD manufacturers, who
originally started with the SI meaning to pull a fast one on their
customers) understand that kilobytes and megabytes mean 2**10 and
2**20, respectively
"What I have written, I have written."
- Ted
[1] http://blog.codinghorror.com/gigabyte-decimal-vs-binary/
[2] http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200709/si_prefixes.html
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