I'm starting to understand why it's so hard to introduce the metric system in countries using the imperial system. I've always thought it as rather silly, the metric system is a international standard and generally superior in our base 10 world, so why should it be so hard to switch over? Now I think I see why.

Emotionally I'm against the idea of starting to use kB, MB, GB, etc, in their SI meaning for computers. We have always used the base 2 definition for computers, why would we need to change, base 2 is native to computers so it makes sense, I know that a kB is 1024 bytes, I know why my 1 TB drive "lose" 61 GB. A small and elitist part of me even likes the fact that most don't know this, so I can "educate" them.

Thinking logically I can see why it is a good idea to switch over to SI even for computers, as others have already pointed out it is already used for a lot of things in computers, frequency, transfer rates, etc. Having different systems are just confusing and, as HD manufacturers have shown us, there's no need to in modern computers. Oh sure, a few percentage of us needs to know about the base 2:ness of computers, so that we can ensure that things line up correctly, but the wast majority never needs to know and is only confused when we insist that kilo is 1024, or perhaps even worse that 1024 is kibi (they'd just laugh at that).

In the end 1 TB and 931 GiB is the same number of bytes (well, close enough), just two different ways of writing the same thing, one that makes much more sense to the waste majority of people.

So logically I can see why this would be a good idea, emotionally, I don't think so. So yea, I understand now why introducing the metric system is such a hard thing to do.

First perhaps I should mention that RoboCup isn't only about football (soccer), although it's a majority, but also has leagues in rescue and a fairly new one called @home. I'm a participant on the rescue league (part of the Swedish team from Uppsala) and so far I can say that none of us is very impressed with Georgia Tech's handling of the cup. To start with there is no internet at the competition and development area which causes a lot of inconveniency whenever you need something of it (which is quite often). You'll either have to use the paid services one floor down, which I clocked to an amazing 700 byte per second when I tried to download the Linux headers I needed for driver installation, or walk at least five minutes to the dorms where the net is ok but you can't really do that every time you want to look something up. Secondly they don't seem to be able to keep the power up for more than a few hours at a time, it can go down quite unexpectedly without warnings. While this isn't much of a problem for my team seeing as we use only laptops and battery powered devices it is a real bother for many of the teams which uses normal stationary computers and other such devices. Being a student I never been to another RoboCup world cup (although I was at the German Open) but my teachers assures us that they never seen anything like this before. It is quite a bit of bad publicity for Georgia Tech.