on Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 01:41:14PM -0800, Jeffrey W. Baker (jwbaker@acm.org) wrote:
> On Fri, 2001-12-07 at 12:44, Paul 'Baloo' Johnson wrote:
> > On Thu, 6 Dec 2001, Alan Shutko wrote:
> >
> > > > uhm, what are "MiB"'s?
> > >
> > > One of the more stupid sounding standards to be foisted on the public.
> >
> > That's great. How bout a helpful answer?
>
> A MiB is a mibibyte, and a KiB is a kibibyte. 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.
Digging a bit deeper: advertisers and marketers stole the traditional
measures of storage: kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, by imposing the
interpretation of these as powers of ten, rather than powers of two.
This provides ever-increasing bonuses of "apparent" storage at various
levels of measurement:
1 KB: 2^10 / 10^3: 2.4%
1 MB: 2^20 / 10^6: 4.9%
1 GB: 2^30 / 10^9: 7.4%
1 TB: 2^40 / 10^12: 10.0%
The "solution" (and it's now part of ISO standards) is to rename the
binary standard. Which will be nothing but confusion for most people.
Frankly, I'd prefer to see some well-placed lawsuits for deceitful
advertising.
Peace.
--
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