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 7:54 PM, Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:

> 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.

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