this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Let's make a shitty unit trade. We'll change all watt hour units to joules in exchange for completely banning bits per second as a unit of bandwidth speed. Converting megabit per second to the actually usable unit of megabytes per second in my head is far more infuriating than any amount of joule shenanigans. Any takers?
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.