Their take: they couldn’t convince Trump voters, so trying is pointless: maybe we shouldn’t even have a debate.

My take: Bad debaters. They’ve been getting worse over time. What’s the best move for a bad debater? Don’t debate.

It’s easy to look at the data and think that people can’t be convinced. Yet, its also easy to look at the Trump debates and see they weren’t really trying to convince anyone of much.

You can’t convince people if you don’t really have a message to convince them of aside from “I’m not Trump” and “Trump is bad.” They already believed that: Both candidates were bad, and both candidates are bad at delivering the promises. After three elections with Trump, it’s really like a broken record at this point.

I would have imagined the advanced stealth F-35s would’ve stayed out of sight.

The fighter is only that close to help stroke egos.

Vote. Seriously. (If practical: get involved, too). The U.S. is currently in the middle of a large shift of generational power.

Many of these changes are fairly recent:

• 2020 was the first federal election where the Baby Boomers didn’t make up the largest voting generation.
• It was only in 2016 that the number Gen X and younger voting numbers grew larger than the boomer and older numbers.
• Those numbers had been possible since 2010. Despite having more eligible voters (135M vs 93M), the “GenXers and younger” only had ~36M actual voters, compared to ~57M older ones.

Looking forward, the numbers only get better for younger voters. There hasn’t been a demographic shift like this in the U.S. in a long time (ever?). The current power structures can not be maintained for much longer. It is still possible for that shift to be peaceful. Please encourage the peaceful transfer: vote. Vote in the primaries. Maybe even vote for better voting systems. This time is unique, but change takes time. Don’t let them fool you otherwise: that’s just them trying to hold on to their power.

To me, your attempt at defending it or calling it a retcon is an awkward characterization. Even in your last reply: now you’re calling it an approximation. Dividing by 1024 is an approximation? Did computers have trouble dividing by 1000? Did it lead to a benefit of the 640KB/320KB memory split in the conventional memory model? Does it lead to a benefit today?

Somehow, every other computer measurement avoids this binary prefix problem. Some, like you, seem to try to defend it as the more practical choice compared to the “standard” choice every other unit uses (e.g: 1.536 Mbps T1 or “54” Mbps 802.11g).

The confusion this continues to cause does waste quite a bit of time and money today. Vendors continue to show both units on the same specs sheets (open up a page to buy a computer/server). News still reports differences as bloat. Customers still complain to customer support, which goes up to management, and down to project management and development. It’d be one thing if this didn’t waste time or cause confusion, but we’re still doing it today. It’s long past time to move on.

The standard for “kilo” was 1000 centuries before computer science existed. Things that need binary units have an option to use, but its probably not needed: even in computer science. Trying to call kilo/kibi a retcon just seems to be trying to defend the use of the 1024 usage today: despite the fact that nearly nothing else (even in computers) uses the binary prefixes.

209GB? That probably doesn’t include all of the RAM: like in the SSD, GPU, NIC, and similar. Ironically, I’d probably approximate it to 200GB if that was the standard, but it isn’t. It wouldn’t be that much of a downgrade to go to 200GB from 192GiB. Is 192 and 209 that different? It’s not much different from remembering the numbers for a 1.44MiB floppy, 1.5436Mbps T1 lines, or ~3.14159 pi approximation. Numbers generally end up getting weird: trying to keep it in binary prefixes doesn’t really change that.

The definition of kilo being “1000” was standard before computer science existed. If they used it in a non-standard way: it may have been common or a decent approximation at the time, but not standard. Does that justify the situation today, where many vendors show both definitions on the same page, like buying a computer or a server? Does that justify the development time/confusion from people still not understanding the difference? Was it worth the PR reaction from Samsung, to: yet again, point out the difference?

It’d be one thing if this confusion had stopped years ago, and everyone understood the difference today, but we’re not: and we’re probably not going to get there. We have binary prefixes, it’s long past time to use them when appropriate-- but even appropriate uses are far fewer than they appear: it’s not like you have a practical 640KiB/2GiB limit per program anymore. Even in the cases you do: is it worth confusing millions/billions on consumer spec sheets?

This is all explained in the post we’re commenting on. The standard “kilo” prefix, from the metric system, predates modern computing and even the definition of a byte: 1700s vs 1900s. It seems very odd to argue that the older definition is the one trying to retcon.

The binary usage in software was/is common, but it’s definitely more recent, and causes a lot of confusion because it doesn’t match the older and bigger standard. Computers are very good at numbers, they never should have tried the hijack the existing prefix, especially when it was already defined by existing International standards. One might be able to argue that the US hadn’t really adopted the metric system at the point of development, but the usage of 1000 to define the kilo is clearly older than the usage of 1024 to define the kilobyte. The main new (last 100 years) thing here is 1024 bytes is a kibibyte.

Kibi is the recon. Not kilo.

How do you define a recon? Were kilograms 1024 grams, too? When did that change? It seems it’s meant 1000 since metric was created in the 1700s, along with a binary prefix.

From the looks of it, software vendors were trying to recon the definition of “kilo” to be 1024.

Only recent in some computers: which used a non-standard definition. The kilo prefix has meant 1000 since at least 1795-- which predates just about any kilobyte.