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

Gábor Lénárt
2001-12-20T20:32:53Z

On Thu, Dec 20, 2001 at 01:52:13PM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Steven Cole <scole@lanl.gov>:
> > I see that in the very latest Configure.help version, 2.76,
> > available at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/cml2/ Eric has decided to
> > follow the following standard: IEC 60027-2, Second edition, 2000-11,
> > Letter symbols to be used in electrical technology - Part 2:
> > Telecommunications and electronics. and has changed all the
> > abbreviations for Kilobyte (KB) to KiB, Megabyte (MB) to MiB, etc,
> > etc.

What? AFAIK 'K' means 1000 in SI. However since computers use binary
numbers, the number (2^n) which was the most closer to 1000 was selected to
be used as 'K' for indicating information amount, where n=10. [for decimal
numbers 10^n (n=3) is used for 'K']. And so on with 'M', 'G' ... Sorry if
I was wrong about this ...

- Gabor