On January 23, 2016 12:29:26 PM PST, One Thousand Gnomes <gno...@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote: >All a bit revisionist. Everyone else on the planet was upset about it >because it broke things like calculating bit density because the >prefixes >for the bit capacity are not in metric form. BIPM (keeper of the SI >units) never approved powers of two as an interpretation. IEC came into >line in 1999, ISO followed. > >Disk sizes have been decimal since at least the 1970s. The original IBM >10MB hard disc for example was 10MB not 10MiB. > >Powers of two are only validly referred to as KiB, MiB, GiB as of all >current standard body positions. Powers of 10 based units are kB, MB, >GB) > >(The best one is CD and DVD: DVD uses the proper definition, CD uses >MiB, >although given the multiple sector sizes and encodings on CD it's all >manure anyway) > >Alan
Then there are oddball definitions like 1 MB = 1,024,000, which IBM used for disk for a long time. At least IEC tried to come up with a unambiguous way to denote these prefixes. It was less of an issue for kilo- since the binary prefix was always capitalized. -- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse brevity and formatting.
