On 1/10/25 04:50, Dan Purgert wrote:
On Jan 09, 2025, Timothy M Butterworth wrote:
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.
It takes 8 bits to make one byte, should we change that to 10 too....
Please no, 8b10b encoding is hard enough. :)
Wider bytes were tried early on, flopped. I was once gifted a thing made
by NCR in 1985 whose cpu , about 18" square was all TTL stuff. Stripped
of memory, I recall its byte was 12 bits. Now of course memory bandwidth
is obtained by 128 bit wide busses with 256 in the higher end servers.
Useless to me, I built a ups for my full house Amiga 2000 out of
motorcycle batteries in its box. That, like the Amiga eventually was,
was a failure. Another time and place.
Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
- Louis D. Brandeis
