On Thu, Jan 9, 2025 at 6:45 PM Michael Stone <mst...@debian.org> wrote: > > On Thu, Jan 09, 2025 at 09:47:11PM +0100, Nicolas George wrote: > >For the people who need exact figures, on the other hand, binary units > >are much more convenient, not just to measure the size of memory > >modules: alignment requirements, maximum sizes of files and devices, > >size of stripes, they are all based on powers of two. > > Baloney. People who need to worry about those things are/should be doing > that programatically and absolutely do not "need" GiB for anything at > all, certainly not for display. For everyone else, basically all the > time and in every situation, power of ten units make more sense. The > entire computing world has been saddled with this "but a computer > kilobyte is really" nonsense far too long, and it actively hurts UX for > everyone other than the vanishingly small set of people who won't shut > up about how important it is to keep that anachronism.
Or it could be precision of terms. Powers of two precisely describes the storage, sans what is held back for swapping bad sectors. I've never seen powers of 10 marketing literature describe a drive as 465.661 GB (500 GiB). The marketing literature will round up, call it GB, and then say actual size may be less than advertised. Jeff
