Pokun wrote: ↑Thu Apr 22, 2021 2:05 pmAnd I don't see why media makers suddenly had to start using the conventional use of kilo (which isn't what will be displayed on the screen with most programs reading the disk), and on top of that even failing to write the correct value for the actual unformatted space the media has, every time. Talk about confusing the customers to no end. I guess factory bad blocks in things like FLASH are part of it though which might be unavoidable.
I don't think it's sudden. They did it since the beginning and just never stopped. Software and binary-addressed memory really are the only places that 1024 is the standard.
Software file systems have always worked with power of 2 sectors, as far as I've seen. There's good reasons for that, and a lot of good reasons that 1024 makes good unit there. I'm not prepared to to call anyone "lazy" for making that choice. Reusing kilo, yes maybe that was confusing. It was less confusing when they got started and things didn't commonly even have megabytes of storage yet.
As for hard drives today... yeah I do think it's hella confusing to customers. They know their customers OS will use 1024, and they know most will not expect it, but I don't think they'll ever stop doing it. If they started using 1024 now then their numbers would look smaller than their competitors.
I don't think bad blocks in flash are even part of this problem. They're not using 1000 to cover that stuff up, they're already accounting for that before they tell you the 1000-based size of things.
Though... I guess flash actually is internally power-of-two based in a lot of ways, but again they're competing with hard drives, so good luck convincing them to change anything.
FWIW I think casually using the term "kibi" is as confusing as the casual assumption that "kilo" is 1024 in software contexts. As are assertions that what case you use for "k" or for "b" should be able to unambiguously tell someone what kind of units you're really using. Some people are familiar with these conventions, most aren't.
In most cases I would prefer to use the most familiar term, despite the ambiguity, and either the context comes across that it's 1024, or it's a context where the difference between 1024 and 1000 is mostly unimportant. There are rarer cases where I really do want to use kibi. I would almost never expect to use kB or Kb or KB or kb and have someone understand how they are supposed to be different.