On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 09:55:33PM -0400, Kevin McKinley wrote: > On Tue, 3 Jun 2003 02:59:23 +0200 (CEST) > Roberto Sanchez <rcsanchez97@yahoo.es> wrote: > > > That is true only in the technical sense. I.e., the spec sheet for my > > laptop says it has a 20GB harddrive (and in 2 pt. font, at the bottom, > > they define a GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes). So, in the technical sense, my > > drive is only 18.6 GB (20e9/1024^3). Leave it up to the marketing types > > to cloud the issue. > > Actually the term for 1024^3 bytes is mebibyte, and 1024 of them is a > gibibyte: Gibidigibidibigigidigibigidibigidibibigibi!!!! Human language isn't amenable to standardisation. In common usage, kilo, mega etc. in the computer context refer to the power of 2 which is closest to the power of 10 to which they refer in decimal contexts. So a megabyte *is* 1048576 bytes, etc, and I don't think this usage is particularly likely to change. Of course, a megabyte is also 1024000 bytes, eg. when some program gives you an output of a figure quoted in kilobytes and you mentally shift it three places to the right to get the megabytes. If only Ug in his cave had counted on his fingers in binary, we'd never have had the problem... It is interesting that SCSI hard drive specs do not attempt to mislead you by exploiting this confusion. A gigabyte on a SCSI drive is a real, honest, binary-context, 2^30 bytes gigabyte. If the same drive mechanism is available with both SCSI and IDE interfaces, the IDE one will be sold as (say) a 20GB drive and the SCSI version as 18.6GB. -- Pigeon Be kind to pigeons Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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