alt Hacker NewsI had a computer architecture prof (a reasonably accomplished one, too) who thought that all CS units should be binary, e.g. Gigabit Ethernet should be 931Mbit/s, not 1000MBit/s.
I disagreed strongly - I think X-per-second should be decimal, to correspond to Hertz. But for quantity, binary seems better. (modern CS papers tend to use MiB, GiB etc. as abbreviations for the binary units)
Fun fact - for a long time consumer SSDs had roughly 7.37% over-provisioning, because that's what you get when you put X GB (binary) of raw flash into a box, and advertise it as X GB (decimal) of usable storage. (probably a bit less, as a few blocks of the X binary GB of flash would probably be DOA) With TLC, QLC, and SLC-mode caching in modern drives the numbers aren't as simple anymore, though.
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There's a good reason that gigabit ethernet is 1000MBit/s and that's because it was defined in decimal from the start. We had 1MBit/s, then 10MBit/s, then 100MBit/s then 1000MBit/s and now 10Gbit/s.
Interestingly, from 10GBit/s, we now also have binary divisions, so 5GBit/s and 2.5GBit/s.
Even at slower speeds, these were traditionally always decimal based - we call it 50bps, 100bps, 150bps, 300bps, 1200bps, 2400bps, 9600bps, 19200bps and then we had the odd one out - 56k (actually 57600bps) where the k means 1024 (approximately), and the first and last common speed to use base 2 kilo. Once you get into MBps it's back to decimal.
Wirespeeds and bitrate and baud and all that stuff is vastly confusing when you start looking into it - because it's hard to even define what a "bit on the wire" is when everything has to be encoded in such a way that it can be decoded (specialized protocols can go FASTER than normal ones on the same wire and the same mechanism if they can guarantee certain things - like never having four zero bits in a row).
I can see a precision argument for binary represented frequencies. A systems programmer would value this. A musician would not.
An even bigger problem is that networks are measured in bits while RAM and storage are in bytes. I'm sure this leads to plenty of confusion when people see a 120 meg download on their 1 gig network.
(The old excuse was that networks are serial but they haven't been serial for decades.)
This is the bit (sic) that drives me nuts.
RAM had binary sizing for perfectly practical reasons. Nothing else did (until SSDs inherited RAM's architecture).
We apply it to all the wrong things mostly because the first home computers had nothing but RAM, so binary sizing was the only explanation that was ever needed. And 50 years later we're sticking to that story.