On Thu, Oct 08, 2020 at 06:49:56PM -0500, Leslie Rhorer wrote:
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.
And yet correcting people in contexts where there's no real ambiguity
simply derails the conversation and distracts from the real point.
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.
Context is important. Are you confusing this mailing list with a two
hundred million dollar science program?
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.
You dodged the question of how that actually matters, in context. I'm
just going to stop here, enjoy pedantry.
