On Saturday 16 June 2007 04:43:53 Josselin Mouette wrote: > Le vendredi 15 juin 2007 à 17:36 -0400, Ivan Jager a écrit : > > Yes. Any time the unit is bytes. There is even a standard for it. > > I must have missed that one. Could you point us to this standard? I too would love to see that standard. Well, there is IEEE 1541, and it does mention bits and bytes. But ... oh wait! It also says to use binary prefixes appropriately, and that SI prefixes *must not* be used to indicate binary multiples. Then there is IEC 60027-2 ... oh, yeah, binary multiples. There are a few others, like ASTM SI-10. They all say the same thing. SI prefixes always have their normal, powers of 10, meaning. All these standards are from almost 10 years ago. Okay, let's look at a really *old* standard, ISO 31: ah, it ALSO says SI prefixes *always* mean powers of ten. If you want to do powers of two, you are supposed to use the prefix with a subscript 2. Note that this standard is being revised and combined with IEC 60027 to be ISO/IEC 80000, and will then agree with the others cited above. So basically, IEEE, IEC, ISO, ASTM, have all standardized things, the same way, that SI prefixes always have their SI meaning, even in the context of bits and bytes. This has actually been done, in practice, by standards-aware scientists and engineers for more than 15 years, who have used ad-hoc binary prefixes when necessary. Standardized binary prefixes only make things more clear and less ambiguous, and have now been around for almost 10 years. -- Wesley J. Landaker <wjl@icecavern.net> <xmpp:wjl@icecavern.net> OpenPGP FP: 4135 2A3B 4726 ACC5 9094 0097 F0A9 8A4C 4CD6 E3D2
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