a) 1000 bytes;
b) 1024 bytes.
If you have answered [b], then you may be a good programmer (binary-aware) but would sure be a poor scientist. Prefixes 'kilo', 'mega' and so on by standard measure in base 10 units (eg 'kilo' is 10**(3*1), 'mega' is 10**(3*2) ...). Since computers don't really care about decimal system, people started misusing these prefixes by measuring sizes in bytes in base 2 units (kilobyte being 2**(10*1)) creating much confusion in the past which resulted in many lawsuits. New prefixes were needed which IEC added to well known SI in 1998 - kibibyte (Ki), mebibyte (Mi) and so on (the terms are short for 'kilobinary', 'megabinary'...).
Now, these were never wide adopted because they "sounded like cat food" to programmers, but they are an international standard and if we are to avoid future confu sion and ambiguity we should use them.
I apologize for the history lesson for all you who didn't need it, but I wanted to turn your attention to ticket 4661 which fixes Numeric#kilobyte and numeric extensions to measure in base 10 units in Rails. It also changes an ActiveView helper for correct capitalization, and - for those hopeless conservatives - provides a method to switch back to old behaviour. Note that the ticket reporter (anonymous) was wrong about 'mibibyte' - it was a case of misspelling.
What do you think of it? Do you agree Rails should stop encouraging prefix misuse? Do developers need this extra method to switch back to old base units for existing apps or should it be removed to force correct practice?
Thank you
--
Mislav
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