On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 12:01:25PM -0400, Nick Holland wrote: > On 08/26/2013 10:55 AM, Erling Westenvik wrote: > ... > >Lets say I'm happening to have lots of smaller disks that I'd like to > >create partitions for on larger disks. Reading on the label on one such > >small disk that it has a capacity of 160GB, and knowing that this means > >160 * 1000^3 bytes, makes it easy to create a partition that big on a > >larger disk without having to remember the 9 or 10 digit sector size or > >to look up the size in GB (eg. GiB) on the MBR or disklabel for the > >smaller disk. Maybe a stupid example, perhaps, but still. It's just > >about the potential mess with confusing unit values. > > if you are designing your file systems based on marketing stickers > on the drive, you have a bigger problem, really
Please. > happens when your new 2TB disk is actually a very tiny bit smaller > than your original 2TB disk? A friend of mine once spent a lot of > time trying to figure out a RAID Rebuild problem because Seagate > sold drives with the same model number...but different numbers of > usable sectors...in this case, they were off one sector smaller than > the first batch of drives!) > > >I guess all it boils down to is the question why OpenBSD shouldn't use > >standard unit names, that is GiB for gigabytes and GB for gibibytes? > > you keep using this word "standard". I do not think it means what > you think it means. > > I've been following computers since the late 1970s. At that time, > it was not decided if the 8080 and z80 CPUs could access 64K or 65K > of RAM. Really, no one cared. We generally knew it was the same > thing, and no one had the money for that much RAM in a computer > anyway. Sure, a few idiots went for a computer advertising a 65k > capacity because it was 1k more than the 64k computers, even more > comical because they would never put more than 16k RAM in 'em (by > the time people actually started maxing out the 8bit computers, we'd > pretty well settled on 64k. The best would perhaps have been if they back then realizied how sloppy it was to state that "1000 = 1024 -- for computers", and instead took the relativly small effort it would have been to create a logical set of genuine computing units for the future? As I wrote in my answer to Theo, I may not be "binary" enough since I happen to be more loyal to the word "kilo" than to the word "byte". It feels like being forced to say that a kilometre is 1609 meters in the US and 1000 meters in Europe. And that's all there is to it from my point of view. The use of "kilobyte" as meaning 1024 bytes lacks rationale (at least when honoring the meaning of "kilo") and appears to be based on old convention backed up by habit. But I admit that there is more to this than I first realized and that I'm probably doing hair-splitting by now. I'll try to read myself up on the subject. Meanwhile I rest my case. Thanks for the discussion! > Standard set. When 'k' got absurdly small, we adopted "M" and "G" > and now "T". > > Disk makers, in spite of the fact that their drives are accessed in > binary, and the file systems on those drives generally have > structures with limits based in binary, decided that as the computer > industry went mass market, they would switch to using non-binary > data units for binary data to make their drives look bigger to the > novices. May I suggest you instead spend your time trying to > persuade the drive manufacturers to revert their drives to > appropriate data processing units of measure? At least that would > be a positive change for the world, unlike codifying committee crap > "standards". > > >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte > >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(data > > > >Wouldn't it be according to OpenBSD's goal to follow standards, avoiding > >ambiguities? I don't think users will have problems remembering what > >units they are in, at least not if the units are correct. > > no, this is just plain stupid, a bunch of people spent someone > else's money to come up with a unneeded and non-accepted standard > that doesn't need to be there. And a few more people feel the need > to make a name for themselves by pushing this nonstandard on those > that actually make things happen in this business. (How could I know this was a topic considered "banned"? I noticed that IEC has defined a base-10 standard which is adopted by most harddisk manufacturers and it made sense to me, that's all. For all I know this could have been an issue of interest, just with low priority.) > Repeat bull**** enough times, some people might start thinking it is > fertilizer. But not here. (I guess. Hopefully such people don't try to make fertilizer bombs. Whoops, there I accidentally triggered PRISM and surely will have NSA on the door later tonight...)
