Re: [PATCH] git-fetch: more terse fetch output

[Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>]

Mike Hommey wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 03, 2007 at 04:50:54PM -0400, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
>> [ heh, I knew someone would say something ]
>> 
>> Yes, to me, 1MB is 1024 KB.  Always been, until those idiotic hard disk 
>> manufacturers decided to redefine the common interpretation of what 
>> everyone else used to consider what a MB is just to boost their 
>> marketing claims.
> 
> How many grams in a kilogram ? How many meters in a kilometer ? How many
> joule in a kilojoule ? ... How many bytes in a kilobyte ? Oh wait...
> 
> And you know what ? It's not only a matter of hard disk manufacturers.
> 
> How fast is gigabit ethernet ? Yep, 1000000000 bits/s
> How big would people say a 44000000 bytes file is ? 44MB or 42MB ?
> And my favourite: How many bytes in a 1.44MB floppy disk ? 1474560, that
> is, 1.44 * 1024000.
> 
> Those who made this big mess are the ones who decided a KB was 1024
> bytes, not the others.

No, the problem is that in _computer science_ kB (or KB) was 1024 bytes,
and MB was 1024 kilobytes, because 1024 is a power of 2, and for example
naturally the memory which can be adressed comes as a power of 2.

Now in other parts of science k means 1000, and M means 1000000. To make
the computer sciences meaning of kB explicit SI introduced ki and Mi prefix.
And manufacturers claiming HDD size x GB in the SI meaning took part...

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Warsaw, Poland
ShadeHawk on #git