Re: [gentoo-project] Call for agenda items - Council meeting 2014-04-08

[Douglas James Dunn <djdunn.safety@gmail.com>]

On Monday, March 31, 2014 01:56:57 PM Ian Stakenvicius wrote:
> On 31/03/14 01:27 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 11:44 AM, Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org>
> > 
> > wrote:
> >> Dnia 2014-03-31, o godz. 06:56:19 Joshua Kinard
> >> 
> >> <kumba@gentoo.org> napisał(a):
> >>> In some respect, if all one cares about is free space on a disk
> >>> drive or how fast they can stream a movie, then the KiB/MiB
> >>> thing works.  But if you play with bits and bytes from
> >>> time-to-time (and worry about byte alignment) or sometimes
> >>> fiddle w/ partition tables in a hex editor...you're going to
> >>> think in terms of powers of two.
> > 
> > KiB/MiB ARE powers of two.  It is KB/MB which are powers of ten
> > (depending on who you talk to).
> > 
> > Drive sizes tend to be reported in MB/GB, and memory tends to be
> > reported in MiB, GiB (though they may or may not use those
> > abbreviations when doing so).
> 
> This is very much old "standard" vs new standard in terms of naming.
> For those of us that have been around long enough, Mega/Kilo/etc have
> always meant 1024 when addressing computational storage, as per for
> instance ANSI/IEEE Std 1084-1986.  However, as people know this did
> become (or has always been) used ambiguously and so these terms were
> apparently deprecated in favour of MiB, KiB etc by the IEC starting at
> around 1996 and with formal adoption 1999 with IEC 60027-2 Amendment 2
> (and expanded adoption in ISO/IEC IEC 80000-13:2008)
> 
> [*] source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
> 
> +1 for usage of {K,M,G,T,...}iB as per standard.


+1, the IEC is the way everyone is going, for reference

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_binary_prefixes