Forwarded without comment ...

From: Buck Savage <hhacker_at_home.com>
Date: Wed Mar 17 02:17:29 1999

"Thus, the Commission will use kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi, pebi and exbi ..."

Sam: Commission members should be "beaten" with a crowbar!

Jim: If it ISN'T a joke, GOD save us all!

Geoff: It seems more like the joke which the late Frank Zappa
            played upon his childred, by naming them Dwezel, Moon,
            and Ahmet.

Given the propensity of "commissions" to fowl all things up, I would
not be surprised to find that this is for real, as in some kind of
suggestion, to be hashed-out by means of the common Request
For Comments (or RFC). We are all certain to agree that the real
problem with using kilo, etc. is the ignorance of the public,
especially those in the US. For instance, only the physics and
chemistry communities in the US understand the SI (the metric
system), and so, only they can intelligently translate from base
ten to base two arithmetic. This is not to suggest that all such
persons actually do such translations: only that they alone in the
US are so capable. Second is the tendency for manufacturers
to do such translations for the purposes of marketing. That is
why so many hard disk drives are touted as having 10.8GB of
available storage, instead of 10.0GB. That is, 10.8GB base ten
as opposed to 10.0GB base two. It makes the disk drive look
larger than it really is, at least to the purchasing public. You see,
this was not always the case. In the past, all such references
were base two. However, if you translate to base ten, while your
competition remained base two, then your products appeared
to provide a bigger store for the buck.

Clearly, it should be possible for the "commission" to find better,
more distictive, and easier to pronounce alternatives.

Chuck: Is it possible for you to provide more information as to
             the identities of the "commission" members?

William R. Buckley
Received on Wed Mar 17 1999 - 02:17:29 GMT