I have it worse, my band is called 1023MB, we still don't have a gig.
Yes you do. That's 1.023 Gigabyte. What you don't quite have is a Gibibyte.
Top shelf pedantry
While I usually love a good neologism, this one I refuse.
They don't have a gib
That’s depends on whether we’re talking SI or JEDEC prefixes.
This is why I'm here
Giga, Mega, Kilo...these are all SI prefixes; they differ by a factor of one thousand, which is very clean in base ten.
Ten in binary systems isn't special, but two is; and two to the ten is very nearly a thousand, and a thousand separates the major SI prefixes. This is a neat coincidence, but should not IMHO change the meaning of the prefix.
Metric units are awesome in large part because of the use of prefixes; messing up the meaning of prefixes is a disservice to the SI/metric system. Giga == billion independent of the context. A light-year is close to 10 petameters, but no one would claim it's exactly 10Pm.
Now, if you want to call it an "imperial gigabyte," by all means...
I've always preferred descriptivism to prescriptivism when it comes to language, so when you say "this is what it means in other contexts so this is what it ought to mean in this context", in contrast to the way the word is actually used by computer scientists, no cap, I'm rolling my eyes. But we're not going to agree on that, so let's move on to the the interesting part of your comment:
Metric sucks. Powers of ten are arbitrary, a fluke of biology. Powers of two are the only sensible way to make a system of measurements. Bias disclosure, I am an American, and so more familiar with US Customary units than either Imperial or Metric.
But hear me out: Volume measurements. I literally never need to make ten times as much of a recipe, or a tenth as much. I need to cut a recipe in half, or double it, all the time. USC volume units, despite the stupid names, are beautiful powers of two from the tablespoon up to the gallon. And the units larger than a gallon are so close, 31 gallons to a barrel and 63 to a hogshead could easily be adjusted to 32 and 64.
I don't even need to explain 16 ounces to a pound, so let's move on to length units. Maybe this isn't the case where you are, but it's pretty standard over here to have walks studs 16 inches apart. If we accept this as a new "binary foot" or "boot", we see the world at our fingertips. A mile is damn close to 164 inches, so 163 boots. If we adjusted to mile to be exactly that number of inches, we wouldn't even need to change the road signs! And it goes almost without saying that we'd keep the furlong as an eighth of a mile and size city blocks accordingly.
Metric is irredeemable, but US Customary is so close to being actually good. Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I have it worse, my band is called 1023MB, we still don't have a gig.
Yes you do. That's 1.023 Gigabyte. What you don't quite have is a Gibibyte.
Top shelf pedantry
While I usually love a good neologism, this one I refuse.
They don't have a gib
That’s depends on whether we’re talking SI or JEDEC prefixes.
This is why I'm here
Giga, Mega, Kilo...these are all SI prefixes; they differ by a factor of one thousand, which is very clean in base ten.
Ten in binary systems isn't special, but two is; and two to the ten is very nearly a thousand, and a thousand separates the major SI prefixes. This is a neat coincidence, but should not IMHO change the meaning of the prefix.
Metric units are awesome in large part because of the use of prefixes; messing up the meaning of prefixes is a disservice to the SI/metric system. Giga == billion independent of the context. A light-year is close to 10 petameters, but no one would claim it's exactly 10Pm.
Now, if you want to call it an "imperial gigabyte," by all means...
I've always preferred descriptivism to prescriptivism when it comes to language, so when you say "this is what it means in other contexts so this is what it ought to mean in this context", in contrast to the way the word is actually used by computer scientists, no cap, I'm rolling my eyes. But we're not going to agree on that, so let's move on to the the interesting part of your comment:
Metric sucks. Powers of ten are arbitrary, a fluke of biology. Powers of two are the only sensible way to make a system of measurements. Bias disclosure, I am an American, and so more familiar with US Customary units than either Imperial or Metric.
But hear me out: Volume measurements. I literally never need to make ten times as much of a recipe, or a tenth as much. I need to cut a recipe in half, or double it, all the time. USC volume units, despite the stupid names, are beautiful powers of two from the tablespoon up to the gallon. And the units larger than a gallon are so close, 31 gallons to a barrel and 63 to a hogshead could easily be adjusted to 32 and 64.
I don't even need to explain 16 ounces to a pound, so let's move on to length units. Maybe this isn't the case where you are, but it's pretty standard over here to have walks studs 16 inches apart. If we accept this as a new "binary foot" or "boot", we see the world at our fingertips. A mile is damn close to 164 inches, so 163 boots. If we adjusted to mile to be exactly that number of inches, we wouldn't even need to change the road signs! And it goes almost without saying that we'd keep the furlong as an eighth of a mile and size city blocks accordingly.
Metric is irredeemable, but US Customary is so close to being actually good. Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk.