Euric, you and Marcus continue to see this in terms of right and wrong, truth and error, or even moral goodness and badness (as in the reference to Hitler).
The use of a particular terminology is not the same kind of question as the flatness of the Earth. One is truth, the other is just a matter of convention and agreement. The fact is, the use of powers of two *is* the correct way to build memory structures in computers, if you accept that the simplest and cheapest way is the correct one. This includes primitive data types, caches, and memory. Now, you may think that it would be a good idea to use different prefixes when referring to these. Fine. But no computer engineer will misunderstand someone who speaks of a "32 kilobyte L1 cache". They will know that it is 32 * 2^10 bytes. If there is a high level of agreement, understanding, and usage, then it is part of language. It is no more "wrong" than is the "Usted" form in Spanish (which breaks the "rules" of grammar, since it is a third person form used for second person). How we should refer to hard drive sizes, I don't know. It probably doesn't matter. But it will not help your position to compare a nonmoral issue to a moral one, or to see matters of convention as matters of truth. Carl
