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

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

On 03/30/2014 12:40 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 12:31 PM, Ciaran McCreesh
> <ciaran.mccreesh@googlemail.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, 30 Mar 2014 12:27:34 -0400
>> Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>> As soon as you start getting into anything that involves the real
>>> world and engineering
>> Which isn't the case here, so this whole thing is irrelevant.
> What prevents the output of a tool from being used in an engineering
> context?  In any case, my concern is more with ambiguity (when
> software tells me I have 1GB of free space, what does that mean?).  I
> think GB are more useful than GiB in most cases (though I explicitly
> stated in my first proposal that there are situations where this isn't
> the case), but I care more about ambiguity.
>
> Since definitions of units are generally standardized across all
> potential uses (do you want a km to be different depending on whether
> you're measuring road length, speed, or wavelengths?), it only made
> sense for the ISO/etc to pick definitions that were useful in the
> broadest sense.
>
> Rich
>
The system you are most familiar with really depends on what Operating
System you use.  if you don't use computers you probably were exposed to
either the SI units or imperial base 10 units. 

Microsoft Windows uses and has historically used the JDEC System, MB,
KB, GB in base 2,

Macintosh OSX uses SI units,

Unix as far as i can rember reading the different different versions of
the programmers manual has always stated things in IEC, i assume they
just used bits before that? i think IEC came about sometime in the mid 90's