News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Base Ten for Almost Everything. Parent comment

Re:Base Ten for Almost Everything by brucedawson on Sunday February 14, 2016 @12:57PM (#11099183)
It is true that non-technical customers often don't care. Although, they do care when they buy a 1 TB drive and get told by Windows (but not OSX) that it is only 916 GB.

Imagine a customer with a 7.7 GB file (as reported by Windows) who purchase an 8 GB thumb drive to hold it. The inconsistent units mean that it won't fit. We should make our units consistent and we should use base-10 because people.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Base Ten for Almost Everything by paulddraper on Sunday February 14, 2016 @02:27PM (#11099591)
Your argument is good for showing the value of consisent units.

But it could be base 2 or base 16.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Base Ten for Almost Everything by khedoros on Sunday February 14, 2016 @05:07PM (#11100209)
Consistency would be better, whichever way was chosen (base 2 or 10).

Although even with base-10 being used all around, I might still end up explaining why an 8 billion byte file won't fit on an 8 billion byte USB key, while a disk image of the same size would because of file system overhead.

[ Parent | on HN ]