Mike Hommey wrote: > On Sat, Nov 03, 2007 at 04:50:54PM -0400, Nicolas Pitre wrote: >> [ heh, I knew someone would say something ] >> >> Yes, to me, 1MB is 1024 KB. Always been, until those idiotic hard disk >> manufacturers decided to redefine the common interpretation of what >> everyone else used to consider what a MB is just to boost their >> marketing claims. > > How many grams in a kilogram ? How many meters in a kilometer ? How many > joule in a kilojoule ? ... How many bytes in a kilobyte ? Oh wait... > > And you know what ? It's not only a matter of hard disk manufacturers. > > How fast is gigabit ethernet ? Yep, 1000000000 bits/s > How big would people say a 44000000 bytes file is ? 44MB or 42MB ? > And my favourite: How many bytes in a 1.44MB floppy disk ? 1474560, that > is, 1.44 * 1024000. > > Those who made this big mess are the ones who decided a KB was 1024 > bytes, not the others. No, the problem is that in _computer science_ kB (or KB) was 1024 bytes, and MB was 1024 kilobytes, because 1024 is a power of 2, and for example naturally the memory which can be adressed comes as a power of 2. Now in other parts of science k means 1000, and M means 1000000. To make the computer sciences meaning of kB explicit SI introduced ki and Mi prefix. And manufacturers claiming HDD size x GB in the SI meaning took part... -- Jakub Narebski Warsaw, Poland ShadeHawk on #git - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
