From: Dominik Riebeling <dominik.riebeling_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 11:46:51 +0100

On 3/7/06, Bluechip <csbluechip_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Computers work in base 2, 1's and 0's
> ...a Kilo in the world of computers is 2^10==1024, not 10^3==1000

... because when all this started the difference wasn't that great.
And only people who worked with that stuff had to know the difference.
Now, as nearly everybody needs to use computers, why not clarify this
confusion by introducing a clean definition? The "computer-kilo" was
*never* defined anywhere, whereas the kilo prefix was defined years
ago.

> Mega is still a Kilo Kilo
> Giga is still a Kilo Kilo Kilo

correct. This doesn't change at all. Even with the binary prefixes!

> Hard drive manufacturers are just plain WRONG!

If you want to call on standards (which the open souce community does
pretty often!) you should consider there *is* a definition what kilo
is. And according to that (official) standard hard drive manufacturers
are correct. Even if I also don't like they're calculating with a base
of 10 and not 2.

> In fact, they have been criticised for it so much that they hit a dilemma.
> Do we change to fit the standard and confuse people, or stay put and

There has never been an official standard about the binary prefixes.

> Just last week I built a machine for a friend and laughed (quite
> literally) when I read "a Megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes" on the sticker

For the SI-Definitions Mega equals to 10^6. Mega is only a prefix and
is completely independent from the unit its used with. In that sense
this is perfectly correct.

Also you should notice: science and computer stuff is getting closer
all time. It's getting more dangerous to confuse the binary and
non-binary prefixes even for skilled people. So its really useful and
needed to have a clean definition.
Computer-only people may find this useless, but there is a world
outside of computers. And there are a lot of people who *need* to work
with that machines even if they're not programmers.

- Dominik
Received on 2006-03-07