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

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

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On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 7:59 PM, Douglas Dunn <djdunn.safety@gmail.com>wrote:

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> On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 7:54 PM, Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
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>> On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 7:44 PM, Douglas James Dunn
>> <djdunn.safety@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > 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.
>>
>> SI units ARE in base 10.  Most imperial units aren't in base 10, and
>> the SI prefixes aren't generally used with imperial units.  You don't
>> usually report height in centiyards, etc.
>>
>> There seems to be some kind of misconception that this has something
>> to do with imperial vs metric units.
>>
>> Bits and bytes are such a modern concept that they were pseudo-metric
>> from the start, but programmers tended to use the SI prefixes in
>> non-SI ways - defining a kilobyte as 1024 bytes.  "Kilo" is an SI
>> prefix, but the SI defines it as 1000, not 1024.
>>
>> The 1024-byte kilobyte was never metric or SI or imperial.  Fairly
>> recently JEDEC codified the 1024-byte kilobyte, but also endorsed the
>> 1024-byte kibibyte, and the usage obviously predates that standard.
>> Before then, programmers never really had a "standard" for the
>> kilobyte.  Since programmers don't tend to do a lot of compound units,
>> getting their terms endorsed by a standards body was probably not much
>> of a priority.  If they had gone to the SI/ISO (or whatever was around
>> in the 60s) they'd almost certainly have been shot down on having a
>> 1024-byte kilobyte.
>>
>> Rich
>>
>>
> I called it imperial base 10, in the fact that you count 1-9 before
> hitting 10 then 10-19 before hitting 20, rather than base 2, or whatever
> base you apply, not the fact that the units themselves are, and i realize
> that SI are in base 10 also.
>

the real issue though seems to be asking if we want the default to be in
base 2 aka IEC, or base 10 aka SI, it seems that almost everywhere the JDEC
binary units are being phased out in favor of IEC to avoid confusion with
the SI.  I believe that the NIST, the national institute and standards and
technology, in the usa, require the IEC units and not the JDEC for binary
byte multiples since about 2008

now whether you want to use base 2 or base 10, it probably comes down to
what you are doing, how you are doing it, and in some cases, HEX might be
even better or easier to work with. in the spirit of gentoo, i foresee some
eselect setting switching between binary and decimal systems?

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