[ILUG] Shameless plug

[Gareth 'bigbro' Eason]

paul at clubi.ie wrote:
[snip]
> The disk drive vendors have done this since year dot. You can't really 
> blame them for the stupidity of computer scientists and (even worse) 
> *engineers* co-opting existing terminology in incompatible ways.
> 
> The only sane change that can be demanded is to adopt new and 
> unambigious prefixes for the (2^10)^n ones. (And for the bike-shed 
> objectors to the chosen prefixes: too late, tough).
[snip]

	Actually, some manufacturers detailed their drive capacities in
Gigabytes (10-based) while others detailed them as Gigabytes (2-based).
This is, IMHO, the worst possible outcome since there is NO consistent
standard. SCSI and FC drives in particular tended for a while to be 2^
based, since it was important that matching drives could be identified
for the purposes of rebuilding RAID volumes and the like. Consumer level
drives, IDE and the like, tended to be 10^ based, since the market
segment largely neither understood the difference, nor cared.

	It was in the last few years, AFAICR, that drive manufacturers seem to
have agreed that they will stick with the 10^ (correct?) Mega-, Giga-,
Terra-, etc. definitions.

	I largely don't have a problem with either definition, provided I can
say with some certainty that one, consistent definition has been chosen
and stuck to. Of course, the maths would be easier for me if things were
powers of 2 in computing circles, but it looks like I'm going to have to
brush up on my decimal ;-)

	Best regards,
	-->Gar