Not too sure if they outright lied, but I suppose we can say that they used the change to make their drives seem larger!

That’s why I wished computer people had used a prefix system distinct from the SI ones. If we’re measuring our storage devices in yeetibytes rather than gigabytes, for example, then I suppose there’s less chance that we’ve ended up in this situation.

I realized why I didn’t think of base 2 in my previous reply. For one, hexadecimal (base 16) often used in really low-level programming, as a shorthand for working in base 2 because base 2 is unwieldy. Octal (base 8) was also used, but not so much nowadays. Furthermore, even when working in base 2, they’re often grouped into four bits: a nibble. A nibble corresponds to one hexadecimal digit.

Now, I suppose that we’re just going to use powers of two, not base-2, so maybe it’d help if we do a comparison. Below is a table that compares some powers of two, the binary prefixes, and the system I described earlier:

Each row of the table (except for the rows for 2¹⁰ and 2⁵⁰) would be requiring a new prefix if we’re to be working with powers of 2 (four apart, and more if it’d be three apart instead). Meanwhile, using powers of 16 would require less prefixes, but would require larger numerals before changing over to the next prefix (a maximum of 16⁴ - 1 = 2¹⁶ - 1 = 65 535)

One thing that works to your argument’s favor is the fact that 1024 = 2¹⁰. But I think that’s what caused this entire MiB vs. MB confusion in the first place.

However, having said all that, I would have been happy with just using an entirely different set of prefixes, and kept the values based on 2¹⁰.

I guess? I just pulled that example out of my ass earlier, thinking well, hexadecimal is used heavily in computing, so maybe something with powers of 16 would do just fine.

At any rate, my point is that using a prefix system that is different and easily distinguishable from the metric SI prefixes would have been way better.

I think the biggest mistake there is using SI prefixes (such as kilo, mega, giga, tera) with bytes (or bits) to refer to the power of two near a power of ten in the first place. Had computer people had used other names for 1024 bytes and the like, this confusion between kibibytes and kilobytes could have been avoided. Computer people back then could have come up with a set of base·16 prefixes and used that for measuring data.

Maybe something like 65,536 bytes = 1,0000 (base 16) = 1 myri·byte; ‭4,294,967,296 bytes = 1,0000,0000 (base 16) = dyri·byte; and so on in groups of four hex digits instead of three decimal digits (16¹² = tryri·byte, 16¹⁶ = tesri·byte, etc). That’s just one system I pulled out of my ass (based on the myriad, and using Greek numbers to count groups of digits), and surely one can come up with a better system.

Anyways, while it’d take me a while to recognize one kilobyte as 1000 bytes and not as 1024 bytes, I think it’s better that ‘kilo’ always means 1000 times something in as many situations as possible.

This might be a stupid question, but I‌ wonder why they (datacenters) can’t recover the water they use especially if it’s in the order of magnitude that it significantly impacts water resources in their area.

I might be missing something big here, but I am imagining water-cooled systems that transfers heat to the water, but the water is otherwise unused. This water might not be able to be fed back (to the water sources in the area) as is, but it can be cleaned up and cooled down, and then be used for other purposes, right?

I actually have some plans (no timeline though, it’s basically just a wishlist item as of now) of making my own NAS, so there’s that opportunity. And of course, yeah, getting an old machine is also an option. Who knows, maybe I’d get my hands on another old laptop that could very well be my way to testing Linux distros.

That sounds amazing, to be honest. One major concern I’ve got is the initial setting up. That same friend of mine (the one who exorcised my system) already has a NixOS system for their NAS, and seeing the config files kinda scared me. However, as far as I’ve understood their explanation, it’s basically a “set-up once and forget about it” affair. It’s still quite a departure from the way I’ve learned to do things though, so it’s still intimidating.

To be honest, maybe I’m just waiting for that friend to be somewhat of an expert in NixOS, so that they can push me into using it, lol!

Initially, I chose Linux for it being gratis, but as I’ve used it more and more, I started to appreciate its freedom. It’s really kinda moot though since I first gotten exposed to Linux because I had to. Our uni adopted Linux (some faculties used Linux Mint, others used Ubuntu) for their school computer laboratories after they couldn’t pay for their Windows licenses. In a way, I indeed got into Linux because it is gratis.

I started daily-driving Linux when my Win7 desktop broke, and had to use an ancient, hand-me-down, laptop. It can barely run Win7, and so I tried installing Ubuntu on it (funny in hindsight though, I should have used a lightweight Linux distro). Then a friend of mine introduced me to Manjaro. It worked well for quite a while, until the HDD finally croaked (it’s had a long life of nearly a decade). I stuck with Manjaro when I got my present desktop, but that same friend of mine who introduced me to Manjaro pushed me to using Arch despite my protests. I would have wanted to switch to Endeavour instead since I was intimidated by pure Arch. But since they offered to do the “installation and set-up process” with me, I relented. (The scare quotes are there because it was not an ordinary installation process: my friend basically exorcised the Manjaro out of my system.)

I have a few distros I would like to try, off the top of my head: EndeavourOS, Fedora Silverblue, and NixOS. However, I don’t think I’m a distro hopper. I would prefer that I stay with a distro unless I get pushed off it for one reason or another. Perhaps, if I’ve got an extra computer to test things out, I might be a bit more adventurous and go distro-hopping using that extra machine.

To date, I’ve only had a bit of experience with Linux Mint and Ubuntu, and a bit more experience with Manjaro and Arch Linux. I don’t think fairly limited experience with those allows me to pick a favorite, but I suppose despite its reputation for being hard to use, I quite like Arch Linux. Its package manager as well its repositories really does it for me. It’s changed the way I think about installing programs, as well as updating them.

Currently, I use Arch and Win10 in a dual-boot system. After I’ve gotten myself an AMD graphics card, I spend my time on my Arch system almost exclusively.

My first computer was a hand-me-down Toshiba T3100. I was around ten years old at the time, in the late 90’s. The portable computer, was way far different from any computer I’ve seen thus far. It also came with a printer, but I don’t think I managed to make it work. The portable computer only had a 20MiB hard drive, and memory that can be measured in kibibytes. Its hard drive has already been reformatted, and had MS-DOS 6.21, Windows 3.11, as well as some DOS‌ games installed in it.

I didn’t really bother with the DOS‌ games, but I’ve had a lot of fun playing Chips Challenge on Windows. However, a huge chunk of time went into me just messing around with QBasic. Later on, when I had programming classes, I installed Turbo Basic, Turbo Pascal, and Turbo C in there for homework and projects.

It could have lasted far longer but I couldn’t resist myself opening it up. I didn’t have a lot of trouble opening it up, but had a bit of trouble putting it back together. It didn’t survive my prying though, and it got shoved into the storage.

Just recently, a few years ago, I found out that it’s a bit of a collector’s item, and was even expensive back when it was new. I couldn’t have known it at that time, nor would I have cared, but I still regret not taking care of it a bit more.