Re: ifconfig curiosity

[Craig Dickson <crdic@yahoo.com>]

Jeffrey W. Baker wrote:

> A MiB is a mibibyte, and a KiB is a kibibyte.

Almost, except for spelling. It's "mebibyte", not "mibibyte". But
"kibibyte" is correct.

> MiB == 2^20 bytes, KiB == 2^10 bytes.  By contrast, a MB, or
> megabyte, == 10^6 bytes and a KB, or kilobyte, == 10^3 bytes.
> This means that megabyte is now consistent with mega-anything-else,
> 10^6.

Which is a good thing, I think.

> The mibi and kibi prefixes recently became international standards.

See, for example, http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

Craig