Re:Modern HDDs have gotten somewhat better
by jopsen on Wednesday June 22, 2022 @06:59PM
(#31842984)
Yes, but let's not allow the Americans to "reinvent" the SI-prefixes for computers..
If you want base-2 then use kibiBytes (kiB) and move on..
You need to have some domain knowledge to know -- did someone think the power of 2 was important here?
For communications they mostly haven't (we tend to deal with decimal clock rates, bandwidths, etc-- and even when we have 128-QAM or whatever that's going to not result in powers of 2). For memories and caches we generally like them to be powers of 2 to use all the bits of our addressing and decoders well. For secondary storage, ... we tend to have a non-round number of lumps that are a small power of 2 sized, and we might as well use decimal.
This is subtle and has been woefully inconsistent. It would be better to just use powers of 10.
(Me of 20 years ago would be very disappointed in myself for writing this comment).
Only slightly familiar. Binary number systems are explained in introductory first books on computers. I knew binary nearly 10 years before I got my hands on a computer.