Messages in this thread |  | | | From | "Per Jessen" <> | | Date | Fri, 21 Dec 2001 20:55:52 +0100 | | Subject | Re: Changing KB, MB, and GB to KiB, MiB, and GiB in Configure.help. |
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On Fri, 21 Dec 2001 11:43:40 -0600, Bob Glamm wrote:
>On Fri, Dec 21, 2001 at 03:48:22PM +0000, Mike Jagdis wrote: [snip] >> Go look up "SI binary prefix" and "SI prefix" on Google. You might >> not _like_ the binary prefixes (I don't either) but they're what's >> been standardized and they're unambiguous. It does no good to claim >> that it's enough that *you* know what you mean. This isn't Alice in >> Wonderland (you can look that reference up in your spare time :-) ). > >SI standards have been around for years. Yet many mechanical >engineers in the US still use English units. Convention and >economics dictate that they do so; any change in this field is quite >slow.
Did the US ever go metric ? Europe (minus the UK of course) did, and rarely looked back. AFAIK (please correct me), the US never went metric. Don't they still use Fahrenheit and all that weird stuff ? Oh, and btw - those non-metric units are not "English units", but "Imperial units", if you want to picky :-)
> >Somehow I expect that the same convention and economics factors will >also dominate the argument over prefixes for bits of information >in this field for years to come as well.
That I agree with - although I suspect manufacturers increasing will go for the IEC standards - I used to work for StorageTek where an argument just like this went on about 2 years ago - the IEC side won. Generally the hardware people were all for IEC, and the software side less so.
rgds, Per Jessen, Zurich
regards, Per Jessen, Zurich http://www.enidan.com - home of the J1 serial console.
Windows 2001: "I'm sorry Dave ... I'm afraid I can't do that."
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