On Wed, Jan 08, 2025 at 09:04:09PM -0600, Nicholas Geovanis wrote:
> TB is about 10% larger. One of the worst crimes in computer history
> was ever talking about storage in powers of 2, I really wish it would
> just go away. It has properties that nobody wants and has been the
> source of endless confusion, for really no benefits whatsoever.
This makes no sense. The number has the same value no matter which base is
chosen. These are integers, there is no fractional part, so there is no
"uncertainty" about its value. People who need to work with binary integers
usually choose to calculate with them in base 8 or base 16 then convert them
back to base 2. Which does not require calculation just copying.
For example...let's take the 18000000000000B drive discussed earlier.
That's 18TB or 16TiB. Annoying, but ok. Now that's also 18000MB but
16763MiB. And it's 18000000MB or 17166137MiB. So if you have a display
in MB and you want to know the value in TB you move the decimal 6
places. But if you move the decimal 6 places to get from MiB to TiB you
get...the wrong answer. Does this actually happen? Yes. All the freaking
time. (A classic mashup is 1024k blocks expressed with power of 10 M and
G.) Now this next part is important: no normal human working with
files and disk space and trying to communicate with other normal humans
calculates the values in base 8 or base 16. Communication of numbers
between ordinary people generally happens in base 10. SI prefixes are
base 10. And when you munge up some stupid base 2 units with what people
want and expect to be base 10, mistakes and confusion happen. And the
benefit of all that confusion and increased cognative load is:
absolutely nothing.
