GiB vs. GB

[Jerome Yuzyk]

On Friday 02 November 2007 16:03, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Friday 02 November 2007, Luciano Montanaro wrote:
> > Once you give the size in Megabytes, there is an implied loss of
> > precision.
>
> which, of course, nobdy except for the OCD[1] sufferers amongst us cares
> about. i really do wish we'd just use Gb, Mb, etc and not worry about it
> further. people know "Gb", "Mb" due to those being used all over the place
> on all sorts of products, but very few know what "GiB" is.
>
> the people who find that annoying can go switch some hidden config option
> on and feel confident in their own personally precise world. that we've
> catered to the fetishize-the-precision faction this long just shows how so
> often we care less about the user base in general and simply cave to the
> loud (and often outright obnoxious) people.
>
> [1] obsessive compulsive disorder

Well, in the kilobyte and megabyte days I would have agreed, but now that 
we're into giga and now tera, doesn't the difference increase (1000^n vs 
1024^n)? 

I'm not OCD by any measure, but when I want to put a bunch of multi-megabyte 
files on a multi-gigabyte disk (like for backups or my portable music disk) 
I'd like my UI-based numbers to be correct.