When I see MiB, I think million bytes. Is this wrong? One of the disk manufacturers was taken to court over advertising a device with n gigabytes of storage, meaning n*1,000,000,000 bytes. The buyer assumed that a Gb was 1K*1K*1K bytes, where 1K was 1024. The court agreed with the plaintiff. Now on all disks, AFAIAA, the size of a Gb is spelled out. -- Peter West p...@pbw.id.au “My soul magnifies the Lord…”
> On 15 Aug 2017, at 2:30 am, Michael <keybou...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> On Mon, 14 Aug 2017, Rainer Müller wrote: >> >>> Finder on macOS uses base 10, so "GB" stands for 1000*1000*1000 Bytes. >>> du(1) uses base 2, so "G" means 1024*1024*1024 Bytes. >> >> It's for this reason that I've always referred to the base-10 usage as >> "marketing MB", because the numbers are bigger. There is a trend to use >> e.g. "MiB" and "GiB" for the real number (amongst us computer freaks who use >> base-2). > > It's not marketing. It's very much a real issue. > > Is one computer MB 1000 * 1024? Before you think you know, have you checked > floppies? > When you are dealing with network speeds, and communications, how many bits > are in a kilobit? That is something that dates back to telephone signaling, > not a recent hard drive marketing thing. > > Yes, it's much easier for computer hardware to use 2^10 instead of 10^3. But > as soon as you move away from "I have N wires that I'm pulsing twice for a > row and column select", or away from "There are this many bits in a > register", and ask yourself "Why do we use these oddities and call them > standard prefixes?", can you come up with any answer other than "Because > other people who came before me and did not understand the problem used those > terms"? > > We now understand the confusion and problem of having two different meanings > for the same prefix. So, the newer, inaccurate one got renamed with an "i".
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