On Tue 25 Jul, 2000, Jay Orr orrjl@stl.nexen.com wrote:
I had brought up the question a few months back of if 1GB is 1000KB or 1024KB.
Yes. Both, as the de jure and de facto standards are different.
Now as everyone knows, historically 1024 Bytes is 1KB. Seems marketing has won the battle in terms of calling a "kilo" 1000 and not 2^10, at least with the government. I have been involved in a thread on comp.sys.sun.hardware about this topic and thought I'd share a posting about this. I'm hoping I'm not the only one unaware of this "new" standardization...
Yeah, I've also heard the case presented by the faction that proposes Mibibyte, Mibibit, Kibibyte, Kibibit, etc. (sp for all those) to denote the 2^10^3n quantities. Seems quite reasonable to me.. except in the face of enormous socio-linguistic inertia I'm not sure I'd fight that hard.
It's very nearly always been denary powers in raw disk sizes. I still think the binary powers are firmly ensconced in RAM, file sizes and bandwidth (MHz -> Mb and MB seems to pose less problem for people headers and preambles notwithstanding) in the mind of both the novice and the old-hand. More same-old same-old I think.
I'll continue using whatever units my listeners/readers will understand most readily - anything else is poor communication.
The issue that causes _me_ the most irritation is when people insist on using lowercase 'b' in Kb, Mb, etc. when they really mean 'byte' which, for me, and I suspect for many of us, would suggest 'bit'. Or when they're inconsistent. Sometimes it's not always possible to deduce from the context what they really mean, and, worse yet, they often don't see the issue as a problem!
Camiel Vanderhoeven wrote:
Yes, the Ki, Mi, Gi etc. prefixes are a nice initiative to avoid
confusion.
However, I have never seen anyone who seriously uses it. Old habits
don't
vanish that easily. I think the simbol "KB" and the word "kilobyte" have
been
used for 1024 bytes since the early days of computing. You can't expect everyone to change this into "KiB" and "kibibyte" because the SI
committe
decides so in 1998. Not seriously.
Camiel.
hac hchristeller@home.com wrote:
Jay Orr wrote:
I got into a discussion about a similar matter on another discussion group. Some vendors think 1 GB is 1000 MB, while others will say 1
GB is
1024 MB. Varies by OS too. No one could is quite sure who uses
which.
So, it could also be a 650MB CDROM would hold 0.634 GB....
1 GB is 1000 MB, 1 GiB is 1024 MiB. Any other use is sloppiness.
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
--
Jay Orr Systems Administrator Fujitsu Nexion Inc. St. Louis, MO
-- End of excerpt from Jay Orr
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