241–250 of 430 posts
The author decidedly has expert syndrome -- they deny both the history and rational behind memory units nomenclature. Memory measurements evolved utilizing binary organizational patterns used in computing architectures. While a proud French pedant might agree with the decimal normalization of memory units discussed, it aligns more closely to the metric system, and it may have benefits for laypeople, it fails to accou…
I had a computer architecture prof (a reasonably accomplished one, too) who thought that all CS units should be binary, e.g. Gigabit Ethernet should be 931Mbit/s, not 1000MBit/s. I disagreed strongly - I think X-per-second should be decimal, to correspond to Hertz. But for quantity, binary seems better. (modern CS papers tend to use MiB, GiB etc. as abbreviations for the binary units) Fun fact - for a long time consu…
There's a good reason that gigabit ethernet is 1000MBit/s and that's because it was defined in decimal from the start. We had 1MBit/s, then 10MBit/s, then 100MBit/s then 1000MBit/s and now 10Gbit/s. Interestingly, from 10GBit/s, we now also have binary divisions, so 5GBit/s and 2.5GBit/s. Even at slower speeds, these were traditionally always decimal based - we call it 50bps, 100bps, 150bps, 300bps, 1200bps, 2400bps,…
56000 BPS was the bitrate you could get out of a DS0 channel, which is the digital version of a normal phone line. A DS0 is actually 64000 BPS, but 1 bit out of 8 is "robbed" for overhead/signalling. An analog phone lined got sampled to 56000 BPS, but lines were very noisy, which was fine for voice, but not data.
7 bits per sample * 8000 samples per second = 56000, not 57600. That was theoretical maximum bandwidth! The FCC also capped modems at 53K or something, so you couldn't even get 56000, not even on a good day.
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What are you talking about? The article literally fully explains the rationale, as well as the history. It's not "denying" anything. Seems entirely reasonable and balanced to me.
Yea I don't understand the issue here. SI is pretty clear, and this post explains the other standard a little bit. It's really not all that crazy of a situation. What bothers me is when some applications call KiB KB, because they are old or lazy.
Sometimes, other systems just make more sense.
For example, for time, or angles, or bytes. There are properties of certain numbers (or bases) that make everything descending from them easier to deal with.
for angles and time (and feet): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_highly_composite_numb...
For other problems we use base 2, 3, 8, 16, or 10.
Must we treat metric as a hammer, and every possible problem as a nail?
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All words are made up. They weren’t handed down from a deity, they were made up by humans to communicate ideas to other humans. “Kilo” can mean what we want in different contexts and it’s really no more or less correct as long as both parties understand and are consistent in their usage to each other.
That's a terribly nihilistic outlook on language. We agree to meaning to communicate and progress without endless debate and confusion. SI is pretty clear for a reason.
We decidedly do not do that. There's a whole term for new terms that arbitrarily get injected or redefined by new people: "slang". I don't understand a lot of the terms teenagers say now, because there's lots of slang that I don't know because I don't use TikTok and I'm thirty-something without kids so I don't hang out with teenagers.
I'm sure it was the same when I was a teenager, and I suspect this has been going on since antiquity.
New terms are made up all the time, but there's plenty of times existing words get redefined. An easy one, I say "cool" all the time, but generally I'm not talking about temperature when I say it. If I said "cool" to refer to something that I like in 1920's America, they would say that's not the correct use of the word.
SI units are useful, but ultimately colloquialisms exist and will always exist. If I say kilobyte and mean 1024 bytes, and if the person on the other end knows that I mean 1024 bytes, that's fine and I don't think it's "nihilistic".
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Yea I don't understand the issue here. SI is pretty clear, and this post explains the other standard a little bit. It's really not all that crazy of a situation. What bothers me is when some applications call KiB KB, because they are old or lazy.
...old lazy and wrong! Capital K is for Kelvin.
It should be "kelvin" here. ;)
Unit names are always lower-case[1] (watt, joule, newton, pascal, hertz), except at the start of a sentence. When referring to the scientists the names are capitalized of course, and the unit symbols are also capitalized (W, J, N, Pa, Hz).
[1] SI Brochure, Section 5.3 "Unit Names" https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/41483022/SI-Brochure-9-...
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That's a terribly nihilistic outlook on language. We agree to meaning to communicate and progress without endless debate and confusion. SI is pretty clear for a reason.
> We agree to meaning to communicate and progress without endless debate and confusion. We decidedly do not do that. There's a whole term for new terms that arbitrarily get injected or redefined by new people: "slang". I don't understand a lot of the terms teenagers say now, because there's lots of slang that I don't know because I don't use TikTok and I'm thirty-something without kids so I don't hang out with teenag…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_planning
(Then you could decide what you think about language planning.)
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It means that is fine for Kilo to mean 1024 in the context of computers and 1000 in the context of distances, because you're never going to be in a situation where that is ambiguous.
Except it's not because it's constantly ambiguous in computing. E.g. Macs measure file sizes in powers of 10 and call them KB, MB, GB. Windows measures file sizes in powers of 2 and calls them KB, MB, GB instead of KiB, MiB, GiB. Advertised hard drives come in powers of 10. Advertised memory chips come in powers of 2. When you've got a large amount of data or are allocating an amount of space, are you measuring its s…
And in most cases, using 1024 is more convenient because the sizes of page sizes, disk sectors, etc. are powers of 2.
I had a computer architecture prof (a reasonably accomplished one, too) who thought that all CS units should be binary, e.g. Gigabit Ethernet should be 931Mbit/s, not 1000MBit/s. I disagreed strongly - I think X-per-second should be decimal, to correspond to Hertz. But for quantity, binary seems better. (modern CS papers tend to use MiB, GiB etc. as abbreviations for the binary units) Fun fact - for a long time consu…
This is the bit (sic) that drives me nuts. RAM had binary sizing for perfectly practical reasons. Nothing else did (until SSDs inherited RAM's architecture). We apply it to all the wrong things mostly because the first home computers had nothing but RAM, so binary sizing was the only explanation that was ever needed. And 50 years later we're sticking to that story.
I had a computer architecture prof (a reasonably accomplished one, too) who thought that all CS units should be binary, e.g. Gigabit Ethernet should be 931Mbit/s, not 1000MBit/s. I disagreed strongly - I think X-per-second should be decimal, to correspond to Hertz. But for quantity, binary seems better. (modern CS papers tend to use MiB, GiB etc. as abbreviations for the binary units) Fun fact - for a long time consu…
There are probably cases where corresponding to Hz, is useful, but for most users I think 119MiB/s is more useful than 1Gbit/s.