On Sat, 2016-01-23 at 19:18 +0200, Andy Shevchenko wrote: > On Sat, Jan 23, 2016 at 6:44 PM, James Bottomley > <James.Bottomley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Not an attack on you patch per-se, but I really hate the IEC > > convention > > that was essentially a ploy by disk manufacturers to inflate their > > disk > > sizes by 10% simply by relabelling them. > > > Everyone was happy when a GB was 2^30, > > No, not everyone. It was a misspelling done by some first storage > producer. No, it was the adopted convention in computer science to use units in 2^10 since all sizes were usually binary. It actually began with memory sizes. So a GB never meant 10^9 bytes before 2007 because the classical unit users had no idea what a byte was. The first bytes were counted in powers of 2. > Try to look at the problem from physics point of view. Units > are essential part of a value. There is an agreement how to use > multipliers and their code names. 1000 x Unit means kiloUnit. As per > agreement. It's not about physics (and certainly astronomers, who often take pi to be 1 would be happy with 2^10 = 10^3) it's about politics: disk manufacturers wanted a way to report bigger sizes, so they made a huge fuss about the "inconsistency" of computer science using units in increments of 2^10 and forced through this IEC standard. > > now everyone's simply confused whenever they see GB. We had > > to pander to this in block devices because people got annoyed when > > we reported a size that was different from the label but are you > > sure we have to extend the madness to memory? > > I actually don't know who is from us is being more conservative. I > could call a madness to mess things from ancient (classical > mathematics and physics) with something which has less than hundred > years in development. In engineering terms, counting in powers of 2 makes a lot of sense for quantites using binary address busses and the IEC even recognised that by inventing a new unit for it. Having GB mean 2^30 up to 2007 and 10^9 after it is confusing for everyone born before about 1990. James -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-efi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
