[ale] SI Prefixes Was: A petabyte here, a petabyte there ...

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Sat, 2007-07-28 at 09:32 -0400, Chuck Huber wrote:

> In the history, Bruce Barrow points out that this has caused quite a
> bit
> of confusion.  The manufactures of storage devices us the term
> megabyte
> to mean 1,000,000 bytes while manufactures of memory use the term to
> mean 2^20 = 1,048,576 bytes. 


Indeed.

One of my textbooks still uses the old names and definitions, and this
brought up a discussion in class about some issues regarding the entire
thing.  I managed to dig up some of the links that explain it and posted
tables to them so that they could see what they're supposed to say.
Nonetheless, it will continue to be very confusing until such a time as
one or the other definition is entirely agreed upon.

It's just easier to say how many bytes something is, and then compute
the "human readable" size oneself so that they know what the true size
is.

    --- Mike

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Michael B. Trausch
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