Shawn Walker wrote: > Chris Ridd wrote: >> Danek Duvall wrote: >>> On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 02:53:30PM -0700, Brock Pytlik wrote: >>> >>>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1541 >>>>> >>>>> "After a trial period of two years, in 2005 IEEE 1541-2002 was >>>>> elevated to a full-use standard by the IEEE Standards Association, >>>>> and as of 2007, it was scheduled for maintenance." >>>>> >>>>> In short: to address the fact that manufacturers, consumers and >>>>> others often disagreed on the interpretation of numbers the IEEE >>>>> and other organisations decided enough was enough and standardised >>>>> on a particular system for unit of measure. >>>>> >>>> Interesting. I'll be curious to see if KiB (or the other XiB) >>>> notations every become commonly used. My guess that KB, MB are >>>> fairly firmly entrenched, but it will be interesting to watch the >>>> social effect this has. >>> Yeah, please don't use the "i" versions here. They're just nasty and no >>> one in their right mind cares about them. >> >> +1, as the cool kids say. The "i" notations are confusing and plain >> silly, though I'd have no objections if they were only made available >> in some locale that I didn't have to use. > > How are they confusing or silly?
Do they mean a power of ten, or a power of two? It is *so* common to see KB/MB/GB meaning a power of 2, that seeing something else (the i notations are uncommon) suggests that it is a different unit. So that's confusing. Other parts of OpenSolaris appear to use the power of 2 definition, using something else would again be confusing. Silly is attempting to redefine something that's well-entrenched and well-understood. > The old way of doing it left things open to a great deal of > interpretation. Hence the long-winded paragraphs hard drive > manufacturers or digital media player manufacturers plaster all over > their product now explaining what they mean them to be. There were only two possible interpretations - one used by everyone, and the other one was only ever used if you were in the business of selling bits of spinning rust. A very special case, and I note the vendors measuring disks in powers of 10 measure their SSDs in powers of 2, so perhaps even a diminishing special case. Cheers, Chris _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
