On Wed, 2007-06-13 at 14:29 +0100, Scott James Remnant wrote: > [...] > And we still have many figures in both GB and GiB which are neither of > the two!
okay ... reading on ... > [...] > I see no problem with this "1TB" quote being approximate. It's > rounded anyway. So you don't care if it is approximate? Then you should care less if it's even exact! However, I find that tebibyte, gibibyte, mebibyte and kibibyte sound quite familiar to their base-10 friends so that it should be no problem even for a dumb user to understand its meaning if he already knew what a gigabyte or megabyte is. This is especially the case with the short notation (e.g. KiB vs. KB). The more important case is when a user actually *cares* about the exact number. At the moment base 10 and base 2 numbers are often prefixed both with k for kilo, M for mega etc. This means that there will be confusion if something is labeled 100GB. Now consider introducing SI prefixes. There still will be confusion with "100GB", because apparently not everyone likes SI prefixes and continues using the "old" prefixes with base 2 numbers. However, when something is labeled "100GiB", there is no confusion (remember that we are talking about a user that cares about the exact number, the dumb user will guess that GiB must be something similar to GB). Okay, so we gained some confidence about what is meant. How can we get rid of the rest of uncertainty? Answer: Use the SI prefixes consistently! This will take a while of course, but eventually you can only benefit. Regards, Christof Krüger