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

Mike Jagdis
2001-12-21T11:02:31Z

Mike Eldridge wrote:

> i have seen kB instead of KB in many places. and the only place i've
> ever seen kilo abbreviated as K has been with respect to binary.
>
>>[however I've never seen 'Kg' instead of 'kg', but 'mB' or 'mb' are ugly
>>when compared with 'Mb' and 'MB', not counting that 'b' is bit and 'B' is
>>byte ... well ... it's confusing sometimes ...]
>>
>
> i was going to comment about simply using lowercase equivalents, but
> then milli already has 'm', although the concept of a millibyte (or even
> millibit) is absurd.

Why? For instance a millibyte/s might be a hearbeat across a LAN every
hour or so or it might be a control traffic requirement for a deep space
probe. You might not have an immediate use for the term but it has a
specific meaning - and certainly isn't "absurd" (see definition on
http://www.dict.org).

Engineers not (yet) being familiar with the relatively new SI (and IEEE)
binary prefixes is just about acceptable. "Engineers" that misuse k/K
and (worse!) m/M should be in a different field entirely. The SI system
is generally taught as basic science to pre-teenagers. There is no
excuse!

Mike

P.S. Merry Christmas / Mid winter festival / whatever you choose
to celebrate :-)