On Sat, 2006-01-14 at 07:41 -0600, Jeff Vian wrote: > As has already been said by Peter, this is a marketing speak. No, not really. It all stems from the ABSOLUTe MISUSE of kilo by the computer fraternity. Kilo means, and ONLY means, "one times ten to the third power", i.e. "one thousand". Likewise, Mega means, and ONLY means, "one times ten to the sixth power", i.e. "one million". Even if you change base units (so you're not using powers of ten) to express the worth of Kilo and Mega, etc., they've still got to mean one thousand or one million, etc., not some *slightly* different value. For an incredibly stupid reason, the computer fraternity took SI units with fixed meanings and abused them for their own purposes instead of using them as they're supposed to be used and/or creating their own abreviation for 1024 bits. That has finally been rectified with KiB and MiB, but the adoption of it is far from widespread. But the damage caused by this stupidity is widespread, and probably never going to be completely overcome. People still won't use KiB and MiB, and they still keep abusing KB to mean 1024, and some others will still use it properly as 1000 (decimal). There's only one mob to blame for the confusion of what KB and MB, etc., mean: The computer programmers. And it doesn't stop there, either. Is one MB 1024 KB, or something else? People have different opinions about that, so it makes MB even more vague than KB. What about Giga and Terra, are they each 1024 times their inferior? Opinions about thing that need to be facts should have been properly sorted out many years ago. Opinions are useless in computer programming where one thing has to work with another. I've already seen this thing screw up drive handling on another personal computer OS, where drives could get filled to 101% capacity (and error, of course), because different programmers working on it had different idea about what Kilo and Mega meant. There's only three ways to be understood: Use properly defined terms (KiB, MiB, etc.). Use bytes with no multipliers. Use bits with no multipliers. But don't EVER use KB, MB, GB, TB, etc., if you want precision. -- Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
