Re:Base Ten for Almost Everything
by brucedawson on Sunday February 14, 2016 @01:15AM
(#11097346)
You may be the first commenter who has actually given a reason for preferring base 2 units for file sizes. I'm not sure it justifies exposing base-2 sizes to non-geek consumers, but it is a valid reason.
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Be careful, this may equally well be a reason to advertise RAM sticks as having 8.589GB capacity :)
I'm not sure why "non-geek customers" should care about files or file sizes anymore.
They really shouldn't; I work in IT, and typically describe file sizes to my clients using the metric prefixes; if they're curious I'll explain the difference (1000 is actually 1024 at each level) but the difference is usually negligible, and modern operating systems round the difference away when displaying the simplified sizes to the user.
I grew up with computers so tinking binary is not an issue for me. Storage capacity has always been wierd. A 1.44MB floppy actually has 2,880 512byte sectors. Base 2 and base 10 in the same measurement!