Re: Changing KB, MB, and GB to KiB, MiB, and GiB in Configure.help.

Rob Landley
2001-12-22T07:07:27Z

On Thursday 20 December 2001 04:41 pm, Jamie Lokier wrote:
> RaúlNúñez de Arenas Coronado wrote:
> > >You are close - he uses "MiB" as short for "mebi" - Mega-binary.
> >
> > Personally I don't like very much the abbreviations, but I must
> > recognize that they remove all possible ambiguity for the
> > Configure.help. With MiB, GiB, etc... you're completely sure that you
> > are talking about 2^20, 2^30 and not 10^6, 10^9, etc...
>
> Hah! Everytime I have seen "MiB" before this thread I'd though it meant
> "Million Bytes", because everyone knows that MB in computers is a
> megabyte (<ahem>).

Me, I've got the "men in black" song running through my head now. And I
don't particularly like it, either.

This reminds me of people going after metric speed limit signs with shotguns
back in the late 70's. I never understood this impulse before now.

Trust the ISO to change the BINARY nomenclature on something that has, until
now, DEFAULTED to binary. I get the feeling nobody at the ISO actually uses
computers much. Is it too late to sober them up?

Rob