Tim wrote:
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.
[ ... ]
There's only one mob to blame for the confusion of what KB and MB, etc.,
mean: The computer programmers.
Yes, in a way you are right. But I *very much doubt* the marketing
people would have adopted a different standard from the computer
programmers, if it wasn't for the fact that it would give them a higher
number to use in their advertising.
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.
Not really. People who say 1kb is 1024 bytes will also say that 1Mb is
1024kb. They don't change their minds about the factors in the middle of
it all.
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.
Actually, what it means should not matter one bit in that context. The
only sensible thing to do in capacity calculations of the kind you
mention, is to work in bytes, or possibly (if the device works that way)
in the "blocks" that form the allocation unit of the drive. Converting
to kilobytes or whatever first would be completely meaningless, even if
there was no confusion about what it meant.
- T
