From: Dave Hooper <dave_at_beermex.com>
Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 22:13:06 -0000

You know that 1 megabyte is "technically" 1 million bytes; and that the
'correct' name for 1048576 bytes is "mebibyte"? Honestly. So to quote a
hard drive capacity as 20 Gigabytes meaning 20 x 10^9 bytes is actually
completely correct; whereas 2^30 bytes is a "gibibyte".

See this wikipedia article for more info, if you don't believe me!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiB


----- Original Message -----
From: "Jürgen Hestermann" <juergen.hestermann_at_gmx.de>
To: "Rockbox" <rockbox_at_cool.haxx.se>
Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2006 7:26 PM
Subject: Re: Archos HD Upgrade


> 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.

Yes, this all started when some ignorant computer people thought that 1024
is 'nearly' 1000 (kilo) and therefore began to call 1024
byte a kilo byte. Not only that these both notations are meanwhile departing
more and more (starting with 2,4% deviation for kilo,
then 4,8% for Mega, 7,3% for Giga and already 10% for Tera byte) there where
even mixed notations (floppy size)!

What also confuses is that when the same number of bytes is indicated with
different prefixes in base 2 notation the numbers can
look very different. For example, 1012 Mega byte would not be 1.012 Giga
byte but only 0,988! That's ridiculous!

> 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.

Yes, I fully agree.

Jürgen Hestermann.
Received on 2006-03-07