Comment 7 for bug 240073

I vote for using standards consistently and logically. Doing otherwise leads to ongoing confusion. Haven't we learned, and championed, this message over and over in the past?

Marketing materials and even usage in standards will vary by country, culture, time and market niche. Basing technical specs on such ephemeral things will ensure confusion, since our users will run into different combinations of the above than whatever the developers use to make a decision.

Reporting quantities using different units, labelled the same, for different media for for size vs bandwidth is terribly confusing and broken, since it means normal arithmetic doesn't work. How . This will get worse over time as Moore's law widens the gap between decimal multiples and binary multiples for systems of a given cost.

Users will encounter a discrepancy between a quoted size on a box vs a number that shows up via ifconfig only once, but if we use "Giga" inconsistently, they will have to deal with figuring out how to correct for those internal inconsistencies every time they use their system.

If we choose to report in binary multiples because that is what people will see on boxex, I support simply using international standard SI prefixes for binary multiples, as documented at

  http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

Who really cares that it isn't usually interesting to divide a byte by 10? It doesn't usually make much sense to divide a bit by 10 either....

Please move towards increasing consistency in units.