Re: ifconfig curiosity

[Brian May <bam@debian.org>]

>>>>> "Karsten" == Karsten M Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> writes:

    Karsten> Digging a bit deeper: advertisers and marketers stole the
    Karsten> traditional measures of storage: kilobyte, megabyte,
    Karsten> gigabyte, by imposing the interpretation of these as
    Karsten> powers of ten, rather than powers of two.  This provides
    Karsten> ever-increasing bonuses of "apparent" storage at various
    Karsten> levels of measurement:

I don't think marketing was the original idea, just the traditional
quirk that using powers of two is what you get if you round the
numbers out.

So, instead of saying 1024 bytes, for instance, or 1.024 kb, people
say 1kb.

Then, in order to justify this scheme, the defacto standard was
created that kilo means 1024 if and only if combined with byte. Books
even have published this as the standard[1].

However, this defacto standard is stupid, because is directly
conflicts with the metric standard that says kilo is always 1000.

So, they have attempted to rectify the situation with MiB and KiB.

Then there are other twists, such as some people consider
kilobyte=1024, but megabyte=1000*1024, while others consider
megabyte=1024*1024 or 1000*1000.

Don't you just love standards <grin>.


Note:

[1] For instance, from
<URL:http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=prefix>

"The standard metric prefixes used in the SI (Syst`eme International)
conventions for scientific measurement. With units of time or things
that come in powers of 10, such as money, they retain their usual
meanings of multiplication by powers of 1000 = 10^3. When used with
bytes or other things that naturally come in powers of 2, they usually
denote multiplication by powers of 1024 = 2^(10)."
-- 
Brian May <bam@debian.org>