3GiB ram, gnome-system-monitor now says 2.9GiB

[Amedee Van Gasse (Ubuntu)]

On Wed, April 8, 2009 14:21, Liam Proven wrote:

> I find this point of view surprising - and you may note from the email
> in my sig that I am British, so I'm a European too,

You live on the island off the coast of Europe :-p

> and I too grew up with
> decimal units - more or less from the start of their introduction in my
> country, so I've had to defend them against people as little as a few
> years older than me for my whole life.

Decimal units, binary prefixes, the euro,...
All of those changes need a lot of time to settle in the minds of people.
Usually it takes a generation. Most people of my age still make the
conversion from euro to belgian francs, but those that have entered the
job marked after 2002 always got their salary in euro, and they have very
little problems with the new currency.

I think it will be the same with binary prefixes. One big difference
between the economy (euro) and computing is that everybody is involved
with the money in their wallet (you can touch it) but very few people have
an actual need for the 2.4% error in something they cannot touch. 2.4%
error or 2.4% yearly inflation, what's the difference for most people?
They don't care.

So I'm pragmatic. In general conversation I don't talk about the
difference between binary and decimal. Who cares. The context is wrong.
But on a *technical* mailing list like this one, the context is completely
different. On this mailing list it really, *really* matters to be exact.
I read a comment on someone who documents bug reports with so much details
as if they were legal briefs. I couldn't agree more with that person. If
there is only one situation in the world where it matters, then it is here
on the list.

> But it seems to me that you are in a position like King Canute (or
> Knut), the early English king who demonstrated that monarchy is not
> absolute by sitting on the beach and ordering the tide not to come in.
>
> He got wet.

I heard the story once, but I didn't remember the name of the king. I
don't exactly understand how this relates to me, must be a
language/cultural thing. But I think I'm flattered. It seems like a smart
political thing to do for a Viking king to be accepted by the Church.

> The position is this: the whole computer industry uses KB (and kb,
> interchangeably) and MB and GB and soon TB to mean /binary/ powers. Except,
> as someone has pointed out, in datacomms.
>
> So whereas yes, we can campaign for this to be changed, for *now*, the
> real answer is education. One day they might not, but for now, when "top"
> says 4321MB, it means MiB, and when the brochure says "80GB hard disk", it
> means 80 GiB.
>
> People have to know the difference.

I agree 200% on the education argument.
Oh and by the way, the brochure is written by sales lizards, so a "80GB
hard disk" really has 80 000 000 000 bytes of storage. ;-)

> Changing the units will not happen overnight and they have to know
> which is which.

Like I wrote some lines back. It took a generation to spread computing
knowledge to the general population, it will take yet another generation
to unlearn the simplifications.
It's like atomic theory: first you learn in Dalton's theory that atoms are
solid balls of matter, then they tell you it's overly simplified and you
learn about electrons in Rutherford's planetary model, then comes Bohr
with his quantum leaps, and then comes the fun with the quantummechanic
wave functions. In the end your head almost asplodes.
I like to think that my knowledge of computing is somewhere between
Rutherford and Bohr, and the general population has just reached Dalton.
There is still a long way to go.

-- 
Amedee