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

[Joshua Kinard <kumba@gentoo.org>]

On 03/31/2014 02:07, Michał Górny wrote:
> Dnia 2014-03-30, o godz. 23:13:50
> Richard Yao <ryao@gentoo.org> napisał(a):
> 
>> Lets just stick with the JEDEC standard's way of doing things that came from IBM.
> 
> JEDEC itself admits it have failed with the 'standard way':
> 
> | NOTE 2 The definitions of kilo, giga, and mega based on powers of two
> | are included only to reflect common usage. IEEE/ASTM SI 10‑1997 states
> | "This practice frequently leads to confusion and is deprecated." Further
> | confusion results from the popular use of a "megabyte" consisting
> | of 1 024 000 bytes to define the capacity of the familiar "1.44‑MB"
> | diskette.
> 
> http://www.jedec.org/standards-documents/dictionary/terms/mega-m-prefix-units-semiconductor-storage-capacity

The problem is, those of us who grew up in those dark ages, who played with
5.25" and 3.5" disks....we're a lost cause.  No hope to save us.  It'll
always be 1,024 bytes to a kilobyte.  Anything else is blasphemy.  Save
yourselves!

Besides, for an outdated standard, it still gets used a lot.  Last I
checked, one can really only buy RAM in sizes of powers of two.  And the
computer will report that size, in powers of two.  Ditto for L1/L2/L3 caches
(look at the top of any kernel dmesg), etc.

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.

So both have their uses.  Hence my suggestion of making it a
user-configurable setting.

-- 
Joshua Kinard
Gentoo/MIPS
kumba@gentoo.org
4096R/D25D95E3 2011-03-28

"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us.  And
our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."

--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic