alt Hacker NewsI'm sticking with power-of-2 sizes. Invent a new word for decimal, metric units where appropriate. I proposed[0] "kitribytes", "metribytes", "gitribytes", etc. Just because "kilo" has a meaning in one context doesn't mean we're stuck with it in others. It's not as though the ancient Greeks originally meant "kilo" to mean "exactly 1,000". "Giga" just meant "giant". "Tera" is just "monster". SI doesn't have sole ownership for words meaning "much bigger than we can possibly count at a glance".
Donald Knuth himself said[1]:
> The members of those committees deserve credit for raising an important issue, but when I heard their proposal it seemed dead on arrival --- who would voluntarily want to use MiB for a maybe-byte?! So I came up with the suggestion above, and mentioned it on page 94 of my Introduction to MMIX. Now to my astonishment, I learn that the committee proposals have actually become an international standard. Still, I am extremely reluctant to adopt such funny-sounding terms; Jeffrey Harrow says "we're going to have to learn to love (and pronounce)" the new coinages, but he seems to assume that standards are automatically adopted just because they are there.
If Gordon Bell and Gene Amdahl used binary sizes -- and they did -- and Knuth thinks the new terms from the pre-existing units sound funny -- and they do -- then I feel like I'm in good company on this one.
0: https://honeypot.net/2017/06/11/introducing-metric-quantity....
Replies
> Invent a new word for decimal, metric units where appropriate.
No, they already did the opposite with KiB, MiB.
Because most metric decimal units are used for non-computing things. Kilometers, etc. Are you seriously proposing that kilometers should be renamed kitrimeters because you think computing prefixes should take priority over every other domain of science and life?
Knuth is not in favour of using kilo/mega/etc with power-of-2 meanings:
> I'm a big fan of binary numbers, but I have to admit that this convention flouts the widely accepted international standards for scientific prefixes.
He also calls it “an important issue” and had written “1000 MB = 1 gigabyte (GB), 1000 GB = 1 terabyte (TB), 1000 TB = 1 petabyte (PB), 1000 PB = 1 exabyte (EB), 1000 EB = 1 zettabyte (ZB), 1000 ZB = 1 yottabyte (YB)” in his MMIX book even before the new binary prefixes became an international standard.
He is merely complaining that the new names for the binary prefixes sound funny (and has his own proposal like “large megabyte” and notation MMB etc), but he's still using the kilo/mega/etc prefixes with decimal meanings.