It's important to note that the reason for this peculiarity is that in
computer science we use powers of 2 extensively. As an electrical
engineer, I find the use of kilo, mega, giga, etc. prefixes irritating
as these are defined by the SI system to be 10^3, 10^6 and 10^9,
respectively. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_prefix.
It is highly unfortunate that consumers are subjected to this
confusion and that we are accustomed to our "500GB" drives only
holding around 460GB in "real" terms.
While "kibibyte" and "gibibyte" will never catch on, we need to
realise that although the terminology is somewhat nonsensical, the
quantity they represent is the power of 2 value reported by our
operating systems: the "real" value.
All of this aside, anyone who is sufficiently computer literate or has
experience programming (read: anyone on this list) should be able to
understand gigabyte in all contexts and be able to recognise the
different values it can hold in each of those contexts.
Kind regards,
Jamie Toolin.
PS: Sorry Scott for the slightly off-topic nature of this post.
On 11 Jan 2009, at 22:26, Benjamin Dobson wrote:
On 11 Jan 2009, at 22:04:09, Kenneth Bruno II wrote:
In actuality a gibibyte (GiB) is 2^20 bytes but it's not used in
all the places it should be used.
It's rarely used at all, for several reasons. One is that it makes
little sense to your average consumer, but the more amusing reason
that standard isn't used is because "kibibyte" sounds like a
children's breakfast cereal.
In general, it depends on the level of technical discussion going
on. In this area it should always mean 2^30, in my opinion. In
context of discussing hard drive sizes with your neighbour, it
rarely matters. Remember: context. For example, a discussion on
Wikipedia is leaning to wards constant use of giga- anyway to
prevent confusion. In general, the discussions which occur on these
lists would not generate such confusion when gibi- is used, but use
of giga- to mean 10^9 would be far less useful than the "real" value
of 2^30.
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