I call shenanigans. If you want to claim that 10-based kMG prefixes ought to be universal for all things without exception, that's one thing. But the author says:
Unlike everything else in the world of computing, RAM is addressed in hardware. When you're designing a piece of silicon, you want to have N address lines and have every combination of zeroes and ones map to a memory location — to do otherwise would make the logic far more complicated. Nothing else is addressed this way.
So it's ok to used 2-based kMG for RAM, but not for hard drives? But hard drives get mapped to memory, and memory gets mapped to hard drives. I have pages of memory written out to disk, and I have inodes of files cached into memory. So my hard drive will be subdivided into pieces that are 2-based, and my partitions will normally have a whole number of such pieces, right? Addressing, of whatever sort, is often more convenient if different levels of subdivisions are 2-based (because the arithmetic can be bitwise or mostly bitwise, rather than addition and subtraction everywhere).
...so the idea that hard drives might want to report their entire size in a 2-based unit isn't even remotely as far-fetched as the author claims. It's 2s all the way down.
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I call shenanigans. If you want to claim that 10-based kMG prefixes ought to be universal for all things without exception, that's one thing. But the author says:
So it's ok to used 2-based kMG for RAM, but not for hard drives? But hard drives get mapped to memory, and memory gets mapped to hard drives. I have pages of memory written out to disk, and I have inodes of files cached into memory. So my hard drive will be subdivided into pieces that are 2-based, and my partitions will normally have a whole number of such pieces, right? Addressing, of whatever sort, is often more convenient if different levels of subdivisions are 2-based (because the arithmetic can be bitwise or mostly bitwise, rather than addition and subtraction everywhere).
...so the idea that hard drives might want to report their entire size in a 2-based unit isn't even remotely as far-fetched as the author claims. It's 2s all the way down.