On Jan 11, 2009, at 5:26 PM, Benjamin Dobson wrote:
On 11 Jan 2009, at 22:04:09, Kenneth Bruno II wrote:
In actuality a gibibyte (GiB) is 2^20 bytes but it's not used in
all the places it should be used.
It's rarely used at all, for several reasons. One is that it makes
little sense to your average consumer, but the more amusing reason
that standard isn't used is because "kibibyte" sounds like a
children's breakfast cereal.
In general, it depends on the level of technical discussion going
on. In this area it should always mean 2^30, in my opinion. In
context of discussing hard drive sizes with your neighbour, it
rarely matters. Remember: context. For example, a discussion on
Wikipedia is leaning to wards constant use of giga- anyway to
prevent confusion. In general, the discussions which occur on these
lists would not generate such confusion when gibi- is used, but use
of giga- to mean 10^9 would be far less useful than the "real" value
of 2^30.
Yes, I'd assume in this context that GB means 2^30 instead of 10^9 but
it still stands to reason that you should be careful to find out
exactly which meaning is relevant.
One important thing to note is that if you assume GB means 10^9 bytes
and you plan your resource usage accordingly then even if really
represents 2^30 bytes you won't over-allocate resources since 2^30 is
larger than 10^9. If you assume that GB means 2^30 bytes and it is
really the smaller amount of 10^9 bytes then you could run out of
resources.
- Ken
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