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Enjoy your 17.179869184 gigabytes of RAM.

The hardware is using sizes in powers of 2 because it's the only sensible thing to do, and numbers would be very annoying for users if the units didn't account for it.



I will enjoy 16 GiB of RAM, this is an already solved problem.


Do you want SI units or not?

Changing to gibibytes does very little - the users confused by 1024 do not know about the alternate prefixes.

Furthermore, if you just add the "i" to all measurements, then you have accomplished nothing with regards to SI prefix proliferation. Everything but one dialog in a single OS will still use 1024, and HDD manufacturers will still use 1000.


https://xkcd.com/927/

I say this because most regular folks don’t even know what a gigabyte is so asking them to understand what a gibibyte is does not really “solve the problem” of consumer understanding.


The xkcd isn't really relevant here, there are only 2 competing standards here and the proposal is to pick the other one.


There were two standards (different prefix definitions) - the kibi/mibi/... line of prefixes was made as a solution.

So now there are three standards.




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