Standards: IEC Giga [re: FreeBSD image size confusion]

[@lbutlr]

On 13 Mar 2021, at 18:23, RW via freebsd-questions <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 13 Mar 2021 15:52:45 -0700 @lbutlr wrote:
> 
>> On 13 Mar 2021, at 15:07, grarpamp <grarpamp at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> "giga" = "G" = decimal prefix, powers of ten, 10^, base 10
>>> underlying "gibi" = "Gi" = binary prefix, powers of two, 2^, base 2
>>> underlying  
>> 
>> It will be a decade or three before we know if this shakes out the
>> way that ISO is trying to force on people. The simple fact is that GB
>> has been used for a binary number for decades, just as MB and KB, and
>> the moved from MB = 2^20 to MB = 1,000,000 was driven by Hard drive
>> manufacturers who wanted to market their 100MB drives as 104MB to
>> fool people into thinking the drives were larger than they were.
> 
> Proper standards based multipliers have long since been preferred by
> hardware engineers wherever feasible. The misuse of decimal multipliers
> is limited to a few things where size is related to access by address
> lines, such as RAM, and only there for want of anything better. 
> 
> People who think this is driven by marketing

It absolutely was the case when 100MB drives started to becomes common. Cheap marketers selling poor quality drives advertised "104MB" and everyone else used 100MB; the drive were the same size and the "smaller" size pf the usable space on the "104MB" drives was written off to "formatting overhead".

(ad hominem nonsense removed)

> The existence of proper binary multipliers is long overdue. 

We will see how that goes. It may be the "GiB" becomes common for computer storage, but 2^10 2^20 2^30 are definitely "proper", and the use of "GiB" is still well below the use of "GB", and as much as official orgs TRY to force language usage, they have no actual ability to change the language people use.

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