I find myself largely agreeing with Carl on this: > 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.
This is exactly correct. Anyone who knows SI knows it is hardly 100% consistent and perfect -- it's just a convention that, if everyone uses, will help reduce the number of units in use. Yes, it's a better convention than most historical measurement systems, but it is just a convention. > 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. . . 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. Carl is again correct -- no one who actually designs and builds products using computer memory has any confusion when using "metric" prefixes for binary numbers. While I find the new "binary" prefixes interesting, I doubt they will ever find any substantive usage. They remind me of the IEEE standard of many years ago to replace the then-common symbols for logic functions (AND, NAND, NOR, etc.) with rectantular boxes and a symbol for the function (e.g., the ampersand for the AND function). When it first came out, Texas Instruments started using it, but no one else did. And, as far as I know, it is pretty much forgotten today. Those "then-common" symbols are still the ones used today. And that is what I expect will happen with these "binary" prefixes. Jim Elwell
