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Re: Question: SSD speed

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On 10/8/2020 2:17 PM, Michael Stone wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 08, 2020 at 01:27:15PM -0500, Leslie Rhorer wrote:
>>     Well, what, really, is wrong with pedantry?
> 
> It makes conversation with humans harder

	Can you provide any data to back that up?  I find it often to be quite 
the opposite.  Sloppy use of language very frequently leads to 
miscommunication, sometimes of a very serious nature.

 > with no corresponding benefit.

	There are many benefits to accuracy in communication, and many risks to 
poor accuracy in communication.  Just ask NASA.  Their $328 Million Mars 
Climate Orbiter was lost due to miscommunication between engineering teams.

>>     Not only that, but the discrepancy grows exponentially with the 
>> order of magnitude.  The difference between 1 KB and 1 KiB is only 24 
>> bytes, or 2.4%.  The difference between 1 TB and 1 TiB is 9.9%, which 
>> is getting to be pretty significant.  That, not to mention the fact 93 
>> GiB is a pretty good chunk of storage.
> 
> And how, exactly, does that matter?

	If you don't understand how 1,000,000,000,000 bytes is different from 
1,099,511,627,776 bytes, then I don't know what to tell you.  They are 
not the same.  They are different.  Whether that difference is 
significant or not depends upon the situation.

> If you're on your own system and 
> looking at output from the same set of programs the units don't actually 
> matter at all--you could look and see that you need one foosbit of space 
> and have two foosbits and be fine. Units only really matter if you're 
> talking to someone else or otherwise taking information out of its 
> original context.

	Is there some reason you feel the need to point out the obvious?

> But I can't even think of a situation where I needed 
> to tell someone on a mailing list that I had n TsomethingBsomething of 
> space.

	That is not a reasonable excuse for being sloppy.

> Context is important. Within the context we're discussing, rough 
> order of magnitude is more than precise enough. For humans a 5.4TB drive 
> and a 4.9TiB drive both round to 5T. Relative values are generally much 
> more important in this context: what percentage of the drive is used? 

	Again, that depends upon the situation.  I am certainly not going to 
have a cow if someone accidentally says, "MB", when they mean "MiB", but 
that does not mean it is unimportant everyone should have a solid 
understanding of the difference.

> At any rate here's the cold hard truth: even if you are exchanging 
> information and it needs to be precise, humans being what they are it 
> won't help you one bit if you're personally pedantic about MiB vs Mb 
> because *you can't assume the other side means the same thing*.

	Again, you state the obvious.  The point is, attending to one's 
precision will never hurt.  Failure to do so can.  If one is precise in 
one's speech, then one needn't worry about the situations when 
imprecision can cause an issue.

> You'll 
> have to establish a baseline in every situation where it matters.

	Again you seem to be compelled to point out the obvious.  No 
communication can ever take place without at least implicitly agreed 
upon definitions.

> But in 
> a situation where it doesn't matter, doing so is just a waste of 
> time

	How is it a waste of time?  Imprecision takes no less time than 
precision.  Sometimes it takes more.

> --it won't change the world or human nature.

	Now that is just silly.  Nothing any of us do has more than a minuscule 
chance of changing the world, and less than that of changing human 
nature.  If we were to wait for an opportunity to do something of the 
sort, then none of use would ever do anything.

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Question: SSD speed Hans <hans.ullrich@loop.de> - 2020-10-07 10:50 +0200
  Re: Question: SSD speed Georgi Naplatanov <gosho@oles.biz> - 2020-10-07 11:40 +0200
  Re: Question: SSD speed Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> - 2020-10-07 12:00 +0200
  Re: Question: SSD speed "Jeremy Nicoll" <jn.ml.dbn.25@letterboxes.org> - 2020-10-07 12:00 +0200
    Re: Question: SSD speed Sven Hartge <sven@svenhartge.de> - 2020-10-07 12:50 +0200
      Re: Question: SSD speed Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> - 2020-10-07 15:10 +0200
        Re: Question: SSD speed Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> - 2020-10-08 11:00 +0200
          Re: Question: SSD speed "Thomas Schmitt" <scdbackup@gmx.net> - 2020-10-08 12:00 +0200
            [SOLVED] Re: Question: SSD speed Hans <hans.ullrich@loop.de> - 2020-10-08 12:20 +0200
            Re: Question: SSD speed Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> - 2020-10-08 15:20 +0200
              Re: Question: SSD speed "Thomas Schmitt" <scdbackup@gmx.net> - 2020-10-08 16:00 +0200
                Re: Question: SSD speed Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> - 2020-10-08 16:20 +0200
                Re: Question: SSD speed Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2020-10-08 17:40 +0200
                Re: Question: SSD speed Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> - 2020-10-08 17:50 +0200
                Re: Question: SSD speed Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2020-10-08 18:00 +0200
              Re: Question: SSD speed Leslie Rhorer <lesrhorer@att.net> - 2020-10-08 20:30 +0200
                Re: Question: SSD speed Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> - 2020-10-08 20:40 +0200
                Re: Question: SSD speed Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> - 2020-10-08 21:20 +0200
                Re: Question: SSD speed Leslie Rhorer <lesrhorer@att.net> - 2020-10-09 02:00 +0200
                Re: Question: SSD speed Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> - 2020-10-09 02:20 +0200
                Re: Question: SSD speed Leslie Rhorer <lesrhorer@att.net> - 2020-10-09 02:40 +0200
                Re: Question: SSD speed Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2020-10-09 00:20 +0200
                Re: Question: SSD speed Leslie Rhorer <lesrhorer@att.net> - 2020-10-09 02:20 +0200
                Re: Question: SSD speed Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2020-10-09 15:50 +0200
    Re: Question: SSD speed Alberto Sentieri <22t@tripolho.com> - 2020-10-07 13:30 +0200
      Re: Question: SSD speed "Jeremy Nicoll" <jn.ml.dbn.25@letterboxes.org> - 2020-10-07 14:50 +0200
        Re: Question: SSD speed Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> - 2020-10-08 10:50 +0200
    Re: Question: SSD speed Hans <hans.ullrich@loop.de> - 2020-10-07 18:50 +0200
      Re: Question: SSD speed "Jeremy Nicoll" <jn.ml.dbn.25@letterboxes.org> - 2020-10-07 18:50 +0200
      Re: Question: SSD speed Andy Smith <andy@strugglers.net> - 2020-10-07 19:50 +0200
        [SOLVED] Re: Question: SSD speed Hans <hans.ullrich@loop.de> - 2020-10-07 20:00 +0200
        [SOLVED] Re: Question: SSD speed Hans <hans.ullrich@loop.de> - 2020-10-08 09:10 +0200
  Re: Question: SSD speed Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> - 2020-10-08 11:00 +0200

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