I have become increasingly frustrated with people refusing to adopt the IEEE 1541-2002 standard. There is no real good reason why it should not be adopted. I think the most common argument I have heard against it is, “That’s stupid! The people who made that up are stupid! You’re stupid for using it!” That is to say, there are no very good arguments against it.
In fact the longer people continue to use the old terminology, the longer the hard drive manufacturers have to use the old terminology to rip off consumers. Did you ever wonder why your hard drive isn’t a full 80GiB? That’s because it said 80GB on the box.
Some argue that it makes no sense to have the extra terminology because computers operate using base 2. The problem with this argument is that the International Bureau of Weights and Measures published a paper in 1998 stating that SI prefixes should only be used with powers of 10.
I think anyone familiar with science understands the necessity for proper measurements. Without them, your data is bad. Let me present a quick example. Let’s say you were looking for a place to store copies of your digital movies. Your computer says they are 4.7GB (but it really means GiB), so you decide to get a 1TB hard drive in which you think you can store 1,000 / 4.7 = 212 full movies. However, the 1TB hard drive is really only 909GiB, which means you can only store about 193 movies. If you leave 20% free space to keep performance up, then that’s only 154 movies.
But the data on the hard drive box was not misrepresented, it was misunderstood. The reason it was misunderstood is because the neglect of the standard passes from the programmer to the average user via the software they use. There I said it, it is your fault programmers.
If you think you have a real reason why not to adopt it, please leave a comment.
A quick explanation of the standard, courtesy of wikipedia:
IEEE 1541 recommends:
- a set of units to refer to quantities used in digital electronics and computing:
- bit (symbol ‘b’), a binary digit;
- byte (symbol ‘B’), a set of adjacent bits (usually, but not necessarily, eight) operated on as a group;
- octet (symbol ‘o’), a group of eight bits;
- a set of prefixes to indicate binary multiples of the aforesaid units:
- kibi (symbol ‘Ki’), 210 = 1024;
- mebi (symbol ‘Mi’), 220 = 1048576;
- gibi (symbol ‘Gi’), 230 = 1073741824;
- tebi (symbol ‘Ti’), 240 = 1099511627776;
- pebi (symbol ‘Pi’), 250 = 1125899906842624;
- exbi (symbol ‘Ei’), 260 = 1152921504606846976;
- that the first part of the binary prefix is pronounced as the analogous SI prefix, and the second part is pronounced as bee;
- that SI prefixes are not used to indicate binary multiples.
I don’t see how anyone can deny that the standard names (but not so much the abbreviations) *are* stupid. If a standard defined a specific technical thing to be called an omnipotent pink flowery unicorn, I’d probably ignore that standard, too. They probably would have had less resistance if they’d gone for “binary megabytes (MiB)”.
But IMO, it’d be better to just switch to base 10 for most user-facing stuff. Your OS starts labeling files properly in GiB? Great, but you still have to do a bunch of math to compare to disk sizes. Why not just measure files in real GB? Besides, I’m sure most people would unconsciously skip right over that little i, because it doesn’t mean anything to them. Then you gain nothing by switching.
RAM still has technical reason to use binary units (and should be labeled as such), but I don’t think that’s a problem, since the layman never compares RAM size to disk size. Other technical areas don’t matter much either, for the same reason.
Again, the calling it stupid argument is not really an argument.
I would like to note that Apple will be updating their OS to treat the old prefixes (GB, MB, etc) to be multiples of 10. They will no longer do the calculation as if it was GiB and mislabel it. So yes, I suppose I can agree for using base 10 for user-facing stuff. But that also means another terminology needs to be adopted for the multiples of 2, and this standard does exactly that.
“calling it stupid argument is not really an argument.”
I don’t think you get to decide that.
You are right, other people seem to have decided it already.