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.
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.
Hello Tim,
Just wanted to chime in on this amusing thread. I've been a
physicist and a software developer/consultant.
Your position is absolutely correct. I agree with you 100%.
The perversion of the SI prefixes causes needless confusion.
I've grown accustomed to always calculating every possible
interpretation when I need to get exact byte counts and it
wastes my time.
The kibi, mebi, etc. units were expressly created to try to
alleviate the confusion of which you speak so well.
Here are the offical SI prefixes:
http://www.bipm.fr/en/si/prefixes.html
(the blue box on the right makes it clear)
Thanks,
Kenny
