On 8 Feb 2002 at 4:26, Fred Holmes wrote: > At 02:54 AM 2/8/2002, Hrvoje Niksic wrote: > >Wget currently uses "KB" as abbreviation for "kilobyte". In a Debian > >bug report someone suggested that "kB" should be used because it is > >"more correct". The reporter however failed to cite the reference for > >this, and a search of the web has proven inconclusive. > > Well, certainly among physicists, the "k" for kilo = x1000 is lower > case. Consult any style manual for writing articles in scholarly physics > journals. Of course, computer folks do as they please. <g>
Not just amongst physicists, "k" is the standard prefix for kilo, at least when "kilo" means 10^3 (=1000). Think "km" = "kilometer" (or "kilometre"), "kg" = "kilogram" (or "kilogramme"), etc. This does not really apply to computer usage where typically "kilo" has been overloaded to mean 2^10 (=1024) because it happens to be close enough to its more correct meaning. That's why "K" is often used to mean 2^10 to avoid confusion with "k". (But as has been pointed out, this confusion persists for "M", "G", "T", etc.) I'd suggest either leaving them alone or adopting the IEC standards that Henrik referred to, i.e. "KiB" = "kibibyte" = 2^10 bytes, "MiB" = "mebibyte" = 2^20 bytes, etc. Of course, that would likely produce asserts in progress.c ;-)
