On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 03:06:22PM +0200, Erling Westenvik wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 11:27:36AM +0000, Stuart Henderson wrote:
> > you will then end up with some of them switching to dreadful MiB etc. ;)
>
> Kinda off topic and I take it you were being sarcastic, but your
> mentioning of the "dreadful MiB" reminded me about the LibreOffice
> spreadsheet I'm using to calculate from GiB/GB to sectors so that I can
> have disklabel(8) partition my harddisks according to standard units.
>
> Are there strong opinions against following standards and start
> converting to the proper terms for gigabytes (decimal, base 10, 1GB =
> 1000^3 bytes) and gibibytes (binary, base 2, 1 GiB = 1024^3 bytes)?
>
> After all it's been a while since it was logical (!) to infer that since
> 1024^1 (kibi) is *almost* 1000^1 (kilo), then 1024^3 (gibi) must
> *almost* be 1000^3 (giga).. ;)
>
> Personally I would love to see disklabel(8) default to display sizes in
> base-10 and with something like an optional -i or -2 switch to display
> information in the old (current) base 2 definition. At least it would be
> nice if it were using proper units - like GiB instead of GB.
Imo you are introducing a new meaning of "proper". Disk sizes have
been in base 2 units since forever. The fact that marketing material
uses base 10 units does not change what's proper.
-Otto
