this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Oh, I totally forgot about the chaos surrounding bits and bytes. Personally, I don’t really care which one we use, as long as its unified. Mixing and matching Mb/s for transfer and MiB for storage is truly infuriating. Yes, even the prefixes need to be unified.
I don’t make programs in low level languages, such as assembly, so I don’t really see the benefit of using base 1024 prefixes. If anyone here can convince me why non-binary prefixes are great, I’m listening. As far as I’m concerned, prefixes should be based on 1000, just like in SI.
Having 8 bits in a byte is just another historical relic, and I see no reason to keep it. Systems have changed many times since the adoption of that term, and back in the early days a single character of text took exactly 8 bits. I guess that was important at the time, but why would it be today? Programmers out there can tell us why we need to have two units for data.