Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
Standards should never be followed blindly, and standards should be
broken when one thinks one has good reasons.
SI also "conflicts" with POSIX in this case. Not to mention that SI
does not define prefixes for all possible units, only SI units, and a
byte is not a SI unit. So SI-wise, there is nothing wrong about using
k or K as a prefix symbol for `kilo'.
From (coreutils)Block size:
`k'
`K'
`KiB'
kibibyte: 2^10 = 1024. `K' is special: the SI prefix is `k' and
the IEC 60027-2 prefix is `Ki', but tradition and POSIX use `k' to
mean `KiB'.
Well put. Personally I can't stand the fact that someone decided to
make up such a silly sounding word as "kibi" because they don't like the
fact that the contextualized definition of Kilo-Byte was slightly at
odds with the SI use of the Kilo prefix. It was well established that a
Kilo-Byte was 1024 bytes and was abbreviated as KB well before this
silly 'kibi' nonsense started.
SI does not define what a kilo-byte is, computer scientists do, and they
defined it as 1024.
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