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Megabytes (MB) or Mebibytes (MiB)?
An anonymous reader says: "KernelTrap has an interesting story about megabytes versus mebibytes. Though the article refers to Linux, the topic is applicable to all computers. Will there be a time when all computer users will talk about adding mibibytes of RAM, rather than a megabytes?
From the article: '[the kernel patch] changes references from the familiar MB (megabyte) and GB (gigabyte) to the NIST standard MiB (mebibyte) and GiB (gibibyte). According to these standards, technically a megabyte (MB) is a power of ten, while a mebibyte (MiB) is a power of two, appropriate for binary machines. A megabyte is then 1,000,000 bytes. A mebibyte is the actual 1,048,576 bytes that most intend.'"
"Maybe Byte"?
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
they just don't roll off of the tongue as easily...
on another note...
imagine a beowulf cluster of these! =P
No, Beowulf clusters can't imagine in Soviet Russia.
And that alone will hinder its acceptance.
And will hard drive manufacturors decide to stop lying about the size of their drives? Magic 8 ball says doubtful.
ostiguy
It would certainly help me. I'd no longer have to explain to my parents that even though they bought a 30 GB hard drive it's going to show up as 27.6 GB, and that that's normal. And no it's not false advertising, it's math.
Ad in classifieds: Pandora's Box (no box) $5
People have been trying to push this for years but there is no chance of it ever happening in my opinion for two reasons - Everyone is already used to the current names and we don't need new ones, and secondly the proposed names sound really stupid.
Sig is taking a break!
...
they've found they like mega and giga and it'll stay that way. oddly, those prefixes are SI yet the unwashed masses of the US won't adopt the metric system because they don't want to learn/use SI. odd.
We have a potential conflict here. Megabytes and gigabytes are often referred to as "megs" and "gigs", right? Problem is, gibs is taken.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
Megabytes and Gigabytes will remain the labels of choice just like xDSL "modems". Doesn't matter if they are inaccurate or not, the people(de facto) have chosen and the lemmings don't give up what they are use to.
"(MB) is a power of ten, while a mebibyte (MiB) is a power of two"
You got it backwards
Hm... on second thought, maybe not. I'm not getting much productive work done lately and I still don't care about either of the above...
-------------------------------------------------
charlton heston is more of a man than yo
Most users don't know how many bytes are in a megabyte or a kilobyte, or think (naturally) 1000 rather than 1024.
However, hard drive manufacturers already use Megabyte to specifically mean 1,000,000 bytes, Before long computer OS's and RAM manufacturers will use the same definition.
Why come up with a new 'Mebibyte' system? What does 'kilo-' and 'mega-' actually mean? Answer: 1000 and 1,000,000, not the perversion of the computer scientists.
Now that computers are becoming more popular, the meaning of the terms megabyte and kilobyte are shifting back to compatibility with normal English usage.
There is no need for new terms at all, IMHO.
From the link and posted by Benjamin LaHaise :
Face it, the only people trying to confuse things are the disk vendors.
Is it worth recasting the general public's idea about what these "standard" units are? Especially if it's for the sake of being accurate in an instance where it doesn't matter to the consumer? My dad doesn't give a damn exactly how much RAM or hard disk space he has, and neither do I. As long as he and I know the rough number, there isn't a problem.
"All mankind is at the mercy of a handful of neurotics". - Norman Douglas
Alan Cox offers support to this change, "Eric using MiB seems the right thing. Its an ugly but appropriate unit, its at least recommended as a solution by a standards body. We can either redefine SI units ("You cannot change the laws of physics") or find a better label. What better than a recommended one others use.".
That's right: ugly it just doesn't sound right, but it is a more accurate description. I don't see the computer world moving away from MB and GB anytime soon though.
chad
ERROR 404: sig not found
How come we don't use numbers like
10E9
10E12
and
2E15
2E20
and so on.... No confusion
After all our car tires can work with sizes like 175-70 R13 and son on and we do not mess them up.
The hd industry pushed the standard through and it only makes sense for hard drive makers who have been misleading customers for years. Every old school person grew up with 64kilobytes, megabytes, etc being a power of 2. The hd industry was caught using megabytes with base ten to artificially inflate their drive size. pretty messy thing that has happened
And then we'll have gibibytes (gibby-bytes), tebibytes (tabby-bytes), and pebibytes (oh, forget it)?
As if there isn't geeks are made fun of...
Why can't we all just get along and use scientific notation? (or should it be scientibic?) Like so:
1KiB = 1024 bytes = 1x2^10 bytes
1MiB = 1048576 bytes = 1x2^20 bytes
...
or maybe even:
1KiB = 1024 bytes = 1x1024^1 bytes
1MiB = 1048576 bytes = 1x1024^2 bytes
...
or we could abolish bytes too and just say everything in bits:
1KiB = 8192 bits = 1x2^13 bits
But then again, "Hey, I just got 1x2^31 bits of RAM!" just doesn't have the same ring to it...
--
Seeing is believing; You wouldn't have seen it if you didn't believe it.
It's difficult to argue with that. It remains to be seen whether this usage will catch on, though.
Let's see here;
I already have a hard time convincing other people of the distinction between hacker and cracker.
to them: hacker is a criminal, cracker is a southern, white, klansman-criminal.
I give up, and try and express that every computer hacker is not a criminal, they are all computer science researchers, doing sometimes unpopular work.
Now you want to change the terms for measuring storage? The normal aim for changing terms is to clarify the matter, but this is just obfuscation for 99% of the people in the world, who already suffer at understanding the difference between 1024 and 1000. Please, do not do this.
Flash: a sudden rash of brutal murders by IT managers has shocked the country. Already strained relations between managers and tech workers exploded into violence in late December with news the "megabytes" are actually "mibibytes."
Just a little holiday fantasy, folks. Intended to be fictional and humorous. Neither character in any way represents real people, living or dead, and I am not in high school, so I believe it is still legal for me to write violent fantasies.
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
This is one of those sad things.
It should have either happened long before now or not at all. The words "kilobyte", "megabyte", "gigabyte" and so on ALREADY HAVE EXPLICITLY DEFINED MEANINGS.
The powers-of-two magic of the binary world is reason enough to keep these terms with their established (base 2) definitions.
This is one of those things that makes absolute and perfect sense and is totally wrong.
But this is just dumb.
"Allez Cusine!"
Who gives a flying fuck? What a stupid post.
Immagine a Beowulf Cluster of those?
The thing is, people have adopted the terms megabyte and gigabyte to mean what they do now, the power of two unit insted of the proper power of ten. This is how language evolves - the improper becomes accepted.
The same thing happened with the word Judaism. It's supposed to be pronounced jew-DUH-ism, but in America we call it jew-DEE-ism. While it's not technically correct, everyone knows what you're talking about, and it's the standard, accepted way to talk about the Jewish faith.
Basically this is an effort to reverse linguistic evolution. The current terminology isn't broken for the public which understands gigabyte and megabyte, so don't fix it.
~q of course
contre.org. fighting crime since 1985.
that we all know that a megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes, and that a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes. the "mega" and "kilo" are an "estimation" if you will, of the actually number of bytes. this idea, frankly, is absurd.
I belong to the ______ generation.
Will there be a time when all computer users will talk about adding mibibytes of RAM, rather than a megabytes?
In a word, NO!
Man I hate dumb sounding words.....
Talk about picking flyshit out of pepper!
Come lets troll...troll across the board!
Who cares, all I know is that I need more of them.
If we really want to be precise in our use of language, we should use bits or octets, not bytes. A byte is not always 8-bits.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Another unpronouceable unit of measure. Crap. And I just got used the whole correct "Ghiga" / "Jiga" pronounciation of "giga"! (The latter is correct, it seems).
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
'megabyte' 'mebibyte' Doesn't matter. The whole 'controversy' (granted there is one) surrounding the naming convention is just plain out and out stupid. I'd think those in the computing field have more important things to do. Hell, perhaps there can be a huge three day conference over the issue, but I'll consider it lame unless it's held at Hedonism, and if I consider going it sure as hell won't be to argue over 'mega' vs 'mebi'.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
I don't know, I think it's kind of funny how such an important unit of measurement in a field that relies on accuracy to the nth decimal place is used so vaguely.
That is fucking nasty!
Ugh, what kind of joke is this? How come no one mentioned this before heh? Gibibyte? Gibs? quake anyone?
--- A computer without the internet is as useful as the internet without a computer!
MiB = Men in Black
KiB = Kids in Black, the Saturday morning cartoon spinoff.
Seriously, though, I would think that these terms are not meant for the consumer at all. Aren't they simply proposing SI units that reflect the actual "power of two" size, and leaving the original metric "power of ten" approximations for the unwashed masses?
MB and GB won't go away; we can still use them to comfort us when we're feeling down.
My US tax dollars paid for this?
SI must stand for silly idiot.
Since there is a long tradition of naming units
after famous people, consider
2^10 = Stufflebeams
2^20 = Rumsfelds
2^30 = Powells
2^40 = Cheneys
2^50 = Ashcrofts
2^30 = Bushes
I've always understood the difference between MB and MiB (1,048,576 bytes) however the terminology is new to me. ( : After some [minor] research found that often hard disk manufacturers published specs for their product in MiB (real space) and that very often network products were in terms of MB. Quite the transfer scam. ( :
You know, when I studied Comp Sci and got my degree, far too many moons ago... I was taught by "those who know all" that a nibble is 4 bits, a byte (B) is 8 bits, a word is two bytes, a long word (DWORD) is 8 bytes, a kilobyte (K) was 1024 Bytes, a megabyte (M) was 1024 kilobytes, and a gigabyte was 1024 megabytes. Seems to me, and this has tormented me for years, that the false equations of 1M=1000K and 1K=1000B didn't start showing up until the computer-illiterate joined the Internet community (AKA AOL users and the like). Why create a new term for something that already was estabished as correct long ago? I'm confused, but that's not too surprising since I live in a VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER!
The same goes with many things in spoken language : for example, the official translation for "email" in France is "mél", but nobody ever says or write that apart from people in the administration (i.e. look for "mél" in a letter and you know it's from the government).
Finally, there is a small argument in favor of keeping Kb, Mb and Gb around : these units are not 1000, 1M or 1G, therefore they are confusing, therefore they constitute in themselves another way for CS teachers to weed out students who have no talent for CS : I used to teach C, and within a week of being told a what a Kb was, I could tell which of my 1st year students were going to struggle and/or not going to make it if they didn't handle the 1000/1024 distinction like they were breathing.
The different between a gigabyte and a gibibyte is pretty small (7%), but once terabyte and larger arrays become more common, the distinction becomes more and more important. The different between a petabyte and a pebibyte is 13%. An exbibyte is more than 15% larger than an exabyte, which will surely lead to worse confusion than today's "80GB" hard drive specificiations...
I was thinking about this the other day... a googol is a 1 followed by 100 zeros, or 10^100. So I wondered what power of 2 I would need to exactly express a googol in binary... and came up with 2^332.19285 ... but then I thought, why does the popular search engine spell it google instead of googol? What would a binary googol be called? A giggle? Then I thought, wow I am spending waay too much time on this, who cares? If I said google, people would know what I'm talking about.
FLR
I always thought a blahbyte as the closest power of 2 to the power of 10 value. hence the 1024 magic number
The proper term is "Elvish".
Look, we'll get to the "Megabyte"/"Mebibyte" distinction just as soon as we're done with the "hacker"/"cracker" distinction. After that, we can switch everyone in the US to the metric system and call it a day.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
I've been using computers, since, the mid 80's, granted we didnt have much cause to talk about a megabyte back then ;), but we've *always* called a megabyte a megabyte and a decimal megabyte, "million bytes" [at first it seems too large, but its the same number of syllables as "megabyte"]. Its simple and self explanitory :) It works for other things two [pun intended], "thousand bytes", "billion bytes" :)
This aside, powers of 2 is the only metric that is usefull (IMHO) on computers -- and if it weren't for HD manufacturers thinking they are tricking people (I wager they're just pissing people off), we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
Mib == Men in Black?
Gib?
Gib == Girls in Black?
Hm. Sketchy.
Finding God in a Dog
Saying that it's "just" a word is horribly wrong. Language, built by words, is how we communicate information. That's a pretty important task, no matter what your personal philosophy is!
Personally I think this is a very important clarification. It'll help both CS major-type people, and consumers who ned to know what they're buying.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
When will people learn that stupid names aren't cool! Besides, its like GNU/Linux. It'll never catch on!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I don't care what some obscure standards body tries to impose. Megabytes and Gigabytes have always been to the power of two, and to programmers always will be. Benjamin LaHaise states in the thread exactly what everyone knows: the power of ten measure is only used by hard drive manufacturers to con the public into thinking their hard drives are bigger than they really are. Bit like the old console manufacturers boasting "8Mb" cartridges knowing full well most of the public would think they meant "8MB".
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Will there be a time when all computer users will talk about adding mibibytes of RAM, rather than a megabytes?
Will there be a time when all computer networks are based around OSI stacks, instead of TCP/IP?
No.
When it comes to a battle between de facto standards and de jure standards, the de facto standard always wins.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Instead of fixing the symptoms, we should address the underlying problem: our silly use of decimal numbers.
If we used base 8 like God intended (after all, He gave us 8 finger and 2 thumbs, not ten fingers!) this wouldn't be an issue.
As an extra benefit, the sudden conversion of account balances from decimal to octal numbers will be much need shot in the arm economically. Everyone will be richer! (or owe more money, but we can't all be winners unless we're competing in the Special Olympics.)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
MiBs!?! MiBs!?! Un-ac-cept-a-ble!
Seriously, this is going to be about as successful as the United States' official switchover to the metric system in 1980. The old ways are too ingrained, and the new ones, no matter how much more appropriate they are, will never catch on. The people who really need to know that 1KB=1024B and not 1000KB, already know, and without some fancy-schmancy new nomenclature to tell us.
And manufacturers won't try to force everyone to use the new naming, because the vast majority of their customers can't even be bothered to learn the current terminology-- ever hear someone in CompUSA asking a salesperson how many RAMs or Megahertzes is in the computer they're looking at? I know I sure have.
~Philly
The whole point is, when you say "a kilobyte", people don't know what you're talking about. Some people think you mean 1000 bytes, some people think you mean 1024 bytes.
nt
Traipsing through dictionary.com, we find the following definitions for "gigabyte"...
The American Heritage dictionary can't decide:
gigabyte (jg-bt, gg-) n.
1. A unit of computer memory or data storage capacity equal to 1,024 megabytes (230 bytes).
2. One billion bytes.
Princeton University's WordNet decided to decide:
gigabyte n : a unit of information equal to one billion (1,000,000,000) bytes or one thousand megabytes.
The Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing chose the power or two, but went "outside the box" when it came to a definition:
2^30 = 1,073,741,824 bytes = 1024 megabytes.
Roughly the amount of data required to encode a human gene sequence (including all the redundant codons).
Megabytes and kilobytes are not wrong, they are just differently measured.
It's a power of zero.
Mega-ma-bytes
Giga-ma-bytes
Saxa-ma-phone
etc.
Hey-ba man-ba, I need-ba 256 more Mebi-bytes in this here lap-ba-top...
I spent 3 hours explaning Mega and Kilo bytes to my mom yesterday.... Now I'll have to open that can of worms again.
Thanks alot!
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
Mega/gigabyte stand for powers of 2, not ten, because of *convention*. These terms have been in popular use as such, and attempting to change them now will only lead to confusion. It's human nature to not leave well enough alone, but hows about we pick something broken to not leave alone?
Hmm... would that mean you'd like to fit your Recycle Bin inside your Recycle Bin too?
-Justin
That's enough posting for now lads, there're trolls afoot.
Is to coin a term based on the word 'bit':
1st: 'Bitches', this refers to 8 bits.
2nd: 'MegaBitches', Obviously, in oldschool terms this would be a Megabyte.
3rd: 'GigaBitches', following the entire byte-to-bitches theme, this would previously have been a Gigabyte.
Some suggested slang based on 'bits-n-bitches':
'Slap'N'ThemBitches', this is what you do when you add any amount of space (memory or harddrive) to your computer.
'StankBitches', bad RAM or a crappy harddrive.
'BadAssMofoBitches', this is any amount of space greater than what you have.
'UglyBitches', this is typically an embarrassingly small amount of space, so much so that you don't tell anyone that's how much you have.
Thanks to our so hip words, now your everyday average IT guy can have a conversation like this with his boss:
"Yo man, yesterday I found some UglyBitches over at the office, and yo, some of them were some StankBitches, yo! So I got rid of them StankBitches and got me some BadAssMofoBitches, and yo, I slap'n'themBitches early this morning. That shit was shweet!"
-- Dan
IMO, only total geeks really care. I can see where it's important to be dead on accurate but, how many people really care about 24 bytes either way? There are not that many instances where it matters.
I think it's just another geek attempt to confuse the general population as a whole to confuse the general population by adding even more minimally worthwhile techno-jargon.
Yes, it would cause a catastrophic implosion destroying my poor gaming partition. It would be great!
Why does this remind me of AMD's GiggaHertz(TM) lark?
On a more serious note though, I can't say I've ever heard of an official name for the base2 metric, however I remember there was some confusion a while ago about hard disk capacity... marketing weenies using one base and BIOS diagnostics displaying the other.... having said that of course these units just sound a bit lame anyway, perhaps we ought to come up with something, if nothing else, a little less ambiguous...
Another step to obfuscate linux, and keep mainstream consumers from adopting it. Sad, its things like these that are really holding linux back from its full potential.
Quote: "Why not just call them "bibbity-bobbity-boo" bytes?"
Unfortunately Dragonball Z (Funimation) has already licensed the term "bibbity-bobbity-boo" from Disney for the naming of several bad guys.
.
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)
As said by Dick Johnson:
If we change anything......, we should define a new system of units, PI, instead of SI. The basic unit is measurement is the Penguin. It is abbreviated as p.
Powers of 2:
2 ^ 0 = p (1)
2 ^ 1 = dp dipenguin
2 ^ 2 = qp hepenguin
2 ^ 3 = op octpenguim
2 ^ 4 = hp hexpenguim
2 ^ 5 = ddp duodipenguin
2 ^ 6 = oop octoctpenguin
2 ^ 7 = ohp octohexpenguin
2 ^ 8 = hhp hexahexpenguin
2 ^ 9 = dhhp duohexahexpenguin
2 ^ 10 = kp kilopenguin
2 ^ 20 = mp megapenguin
2 ^ 30 = gp gigapenguin
...etc.
........ otherwise we should leave it alone!
Thomas S. Iversen
[* - Luckily, people will never learn so we can avoid this stupid shit altogether]
Continue to use "megabyte" for 10^6. Use "binary megabyte" for 2^20. If people see "mebibyte" they will think it's a typo.
Advertisers can continue to use "megabyte" in large type without fear since it has a clear-cut definition, even though it does lead to values that are somewhat inflated. The masses probably don't care about this. Geeks can either look for the binary megabyte number in the fine print, or guesstimate it themselves.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Improper usage of a word is part of the history and culture of its domain. Human are just er- humans. So what ever we are coming up with won't never be perfect. Language and words are part of it. Get along with it.
When I moved to the States from Japan, I thought that Metric was the best invention since the butterknife. I still puzzle people by asking them to convert from miles to inches for arbitrary long distances. They get the point quickly after trying to come up with some answer for 2 minutes.
However, as much as I like the metric system, there are things associated with the Imperial system in this country that are not worse changing. I understood that when I asked for a 4x8 piece of wood at the hardware store. For sure, metric is not going to change the way people are used to do things.
Same for Megabytes. Maybe when the word was used in a lab between a few tech guys, there could have been a way to replace the word, but look at it this way: if it didn't change at that time with only a few smart people to use it, why do you think it will change now?
For sure, manufacturers should print the correct measure on their tech specs when trying to push down the mass their products. But that doesn't stop them to print BS anyway.
One example: I just got a workstation for Sun. On the tech spec I read, it says: noise level 5 bels. I say wow! That's pretty quite! Wait a minute 5bels = 50 decibels. I say F@%&k! These people could have printed that in the first place. Hope you get my point.
PPA
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
I think Will Smith and Tommy lee Jones is the coolest MiB's around.
Help fight continental drift.
I think its far to late to change this now.
Its a bad idea. How are people ever going to learn computers when you keep changing the rules?!
People just now understand what a meg, gig, etc is.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
No - the standard is useless and incorrect!
A Megabyte === 2^20 or approximately 1 millon bytes, etc. That is the industry standard definition of the term. Even though they are borrowed from SI doesn't mean they need to follow SI. This is a 30 year old term at this point and NIST should have better things to do!
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Rule #1 Don't break existing terminology, supplement it.
Leave megabytes (megs, MB) = 1048576, and add some new pronunciation to mean 1000000.
Rule #2 Change enough pronunciation so people will never misunderstand the new term with an old term
"Mebibytes" is too close to "Megabytes". Over a weak phone line it will sound the same. You need to change the first vowel, not the second; perhaps "Mobibytes" would be better. Also consider the abbreviations; "Mobs" "MOB" might be acceptable. But make it as extreme a difference as you can; how about "makibytes"? "mortibytes"? Those would be better because there's more change. Abbreviations would be clearer, 16MK (16 makibytes) is visually clear. A printed invoice, faxed and re-faxed, would still be easy to visually discern MK versus MB.
It should stay easy to pronounce, but sound very different.
Make it easy to learn, and add to existing terminology (not change existing), and you have a chance of success. Even then, it's a small chance.
We just need to get Sesame Street to start using both these terms correctly, and then the next generation will get it right.
This reminds me of the AMD rating of they're processors.
Nobody cares.
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Changing how many bytes are in a megabyte makes about as much sense as trying to legislate the value of pi to three. A megabyte is one million, four hundred eighty-five thousand seventy-six bytes, and that's all there is to it. It can't change.
That's the notation I've always used. Lower case = base 10, upper case = the roughly equiv base 2.
...
It's easy because 2**10 is around 10**100, 2**20 is around 10**100,000, 2**30 is around 10**100,000,000
The argument that there are accepted standards now and that everyone understands current usages carries no weight. I say off with the old, on with the new. How ironic it is that computers are now so old that computer people are stodgy, conservative, died-in-the-wool, and unable to change their ways... Going from "Cycles" to "Hertz" was DIFFICULT and didn't clarify a thing. Going from mega- to mebi- is a piece of cake by comparison--and there's actually some BENEFIT to it.
RAM sizes, since they are relevant to hardware binary addressing logic, have always been in sized in power of two. It makes no sense to manufacturer or design for a RAM (or magnetic core array) with 1000 or 1000,000 or 1,000,000,000 bytes or words of memory.
Clock speeds and communications speeds have always been decimal. Or do you think a 1 GHz Pentium has a clock speed of 1,073,741,824 Hz?
Disks are a mess. The total amount of disk storage is continuously variable, and is rarely an exact power of two. On the other hand, the amount stored per sector is related to RAM considerations and is often 512 bytes or somesuch. Disk capacities are sometimes quoted in powers of ten, sometimes in powers of two, and I have even seen "mixed systems" in which 1 "megabyte" of disk space meant 2000 (decimal) sectors of 512 bytes each, i.e. one "disk megabyte" was 1,024,000 bytes.
Nobody has any idea what the current terminology really means. At the one gig level, the discrepancy, 7%, is starting to be annoying. When we get to terabyte disks, which can't be far off, the discrepancy will be 10%. Let's start using terms that have well-defined meanings.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Also, in telecommunications, MB is often used to mean 1 000 000, as well as in storage.
However, for a very interesting example. You know those 1.44 "MB" disks you have? How many bytes are they really?
1.44 "MB" = 1 440 000 bytes? Nope. Guess again.
1.44 "MB" = 1 509 949 (wtf) bytes? Nope.
In fact, 1.44 "MB" = 1440 KiB, so a "floppy disk megabyte" is 1 024 000 bytes. Talk about fscked up.
Also, in this day and age, it doesn't make a lot of sense to use powers of two for sizes, other than for special purposes, like RAM.
My suggestion? Don't try to impose KiB's on people, instead change to powers of 10. In most cases powers of 10 make more sense than powers of two anyway, and when they don't, use KiB etc instead.
Although I don't think a lot of people will listen to this puny slashdot post. Nobody can stem a tide by themselves.
Besides all the other problems, I won't tell someone they need to add MiBs of RAM to their system. If I wrote it down for someone who was, shall we say, less than an expert at computers, they would go to target and complain that Men in Black only had 6 copies in stock.
Then there's the wnhole crapload of Men in Black jokes. I'm not going to deal with this.
Hmm...
My computer has 320 Men in Black of RAM, how about you?
SIGFEH
> Will there be a time when all computer users will talk about adding mibibytes of RAM, rather than a megabytes?
Not likely... The average person doesn't really care much what's correct with these sort of things, they'll stick to what's common. Like calling crackers "hackers."
Mozilla's a nice operating system, but it needs a better browser.
Next thing you'll be expecting us to switch to the metric system.
I object to these terms since they are essentially a rape by physicists.
The "K" in kilobyte is NOT the same the the "k" in kilogram. We don't need physisists telling us what expressions to use for things that are not even theirs. We are NOT talking about physical entities here but essentially mathematics.
DON'T touch our kilobytes!
...I think that must be a typo.
We all know that KIBO is alive and well in our computers.
The last thing that I want to do is to try to convert between mebibyte and megabyte. I have enough numbers and voices in my head.
The whole purpose of a measureing system is for scale. We know that a kilo*kilo = mega,
mega*kilo = giga. That's good enough.
Forget that it doesn't make a pretty number in
base 10.
It would be just as easy to to get everyone to create a new unit, call it a bite.
One bite = 1.024 byte.
so a kbite = 1000 bites or 1024 bytes.
Forget quantization problems, this is to show that the idea is silly.
I think Kibo-bytes is an excellent name for a new dog food! It's like Kibbles and Bits for big dogs.
-Todd
--
- It ain't easy, being green.
This is cool. I just upgraded my laptop to 268.435456 MB.
KB (KiloByte) is base 2! Same with MB, GB, TB, etc. If you want base 10, you'd use kB. This has already been around.. I don't know why we couldn't just use this. People who care would notice the difference, and the average computer user won't be confused and ask for an explanation of the difference between MiBs and Megs. (none) .. it'd help if people didn't casually switch between upper and lower case, but most people assume base 2 for that anyhow, so this would just affect hardware ads, etc., which aren't likely to just sloppily let it go uncapitalized.
"Jif" is a peanut butter not a graphic format!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Of course, by the time we do we would probably be chased after by those guys in black suits and have our memory erased...
Error: Crosslinked neurons in brain.
Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
Download
Make
Install
OK!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Memory is usually indicated in 2^10 prefixes, but hard disk capacity is usually measured in 10^3 prefixes, and so generally is bandwidth. It's not as simple as switching wholesale over to another prefix; the problem is that when someone says "megabyte," sometimes they mean 2^20 bytes and sometimes they mean 10^6. Furthermore, given that SI already defines the prefixes to be rigidly powers of 10, there's an incompatibility with common usage and SI, in addition to the inherent ambiguity. The binary prefixes solve all that.
I've personally been using the binary prefixes for years now, they always clear things up easily. [Not sure why the Slashdot poster strips SUP and SUB HTML tags, though ...]
max
Fortunately operator overloading is a standard :)
:P
feature of the English language
When I think about the desktop, I don't need to
be bothered that my window manager doesn't actually
have any desk to corrispond to it
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
The words sound like you're saying megabyte and gigabyte with an impediment. E.G. "Jar-Jay hassa a puter with 512 mebibytes ofa RAM ansa 60 gibibytes of hard drive." Say it to yourself and see...
STOP ROCK VIDEO
I actually know a guy who thinks a kilometer is 1024 meters...
You Linux wh0res will do anything, and I mean ANYTHING to make this stupid OS that keeps crashing my machine look good...I think I'm gonna puke.
Note that with Kilobytes, a distinction has been made by using a capital 'K'. In SI units, 'kilo' is denoted by a lower-case 'k', thus 1 kB = 1000 bytes, 1 KB = 1024 bytes. Unfortunately, this doesn't work for Mega (since lower-case 'm' means 'milli'=1/1000), and neither for Giga/Tera, since those are defined to be upper-case letters in Si already. Peta/pico, Zetta/zepto, Yotta/yopto fail too. But aside from that, it's no big deal to remember that when used in conjunction with 'bytes', the prefixes K/M/G/T denote 2^10,2^20,2^30,2^40. Only hard drive manufacturers, unfortunately, make the exceptions. They should be forced to write 'million'/'billion' etc. anyway.
Be patient. The NIST is now working on a new standard for pi. Rumor has it that they will define the new standard to be 3.0
That is the industry standard definition of the term.
If it's the industry standard, why don't HD companies use it to mean 2^20 instead of 10^6 so that there would be no confusion? Then every reference to megabyte would always mean 2^20 and we'd be happy. As it is, I think your standard needs work...
How about we come up with a new term that is even harder to pronounce.
I'm not sure if how many of you know this but anyway... Some (most) of you have shown a dislike of the new names. "It doesn't sound right." I have to agree, as it's not as sweer sounding as mega or kilo; however, there is simple logic behind why these names were chosen. Contrasting megabyte with mebibyte, we find the only difference are the third and fourth characters. Extracting this, we get "bi", a common prefix/suffix meaning "two of", or "in units of two". Remember the word "binary"? At least the new names make a lot of sense logically, if not acoustically.
funny as hell
We don't need to invent new prefixes to define base-2 numbers. The only numbers we are talking about are bits, not blocks or sectors or units.
:-) - Jake
Computer users have all come to agree that when talking about grams or pascals, those are fundamentally base-10 units. Bits are fundamentally base-2 though, and they remain base-two even when we multiply them.
Storage manufacturers started using "megabytes" incorrectly so their capacity would look larger. I remember getting quite pissed that my 100-MB Zip drive did not hold that much!
Also, "Kibibits" sounds too much like dog food to catch on with the general public.
one, two, one two like a duck
But think about this: outside of geek circles, *everything* we say sounds weird, and many things have yet to reach wide acceptance. If you tried to explain to someone that
then "mebibytes" would not be the only term they would not understand. Inside geek circles, on the other hand, if you say "mebibytes," people will know exactly what you mean.
Precision in speech and writing is a virtue. In my mind, if this eliminates a little ambiguity in documentation, I think it's a suitable win.
Regarding how the words sound, I happen to like them. They're cute. "Hey there, wittlwe mebibyte... don't be shy..." Perfect for use when talking to an iMac. Hey, wait a minute...
A megabyte has *always* been 1024k, which is in turn 1024 bytes. Hence a megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes. Always has been, always will be. Giving it a new name simply validates the mistakes of the mail-in MCSEs who've never had to key anything in in hexadecimal.
That's like saying "we're gonna start measuring network bandwidth in megabytes per second cause people are too dense to realize it's actually megabits". It's still wrong.
Ok, lets just make EVERYTHING about a computer confusing as hell! Seriously, they already made a stupid move when they made a kilo 1024... i know about their damn powers explanation to it, but still you can have 1000 bytes... theres nothing wrong with just doing that... now we need to work in powers of 2??! Screw it, im becoming omish...
Why is this an issue? Everyone already knows kilo = 1000, so kilobyte = 1000 bytes. Only geeks work in base 2, so only geeks need to know kibi = 1024.
BTW, if you can't remember what the prefix is, remember: first two letters of the SI unit, then 'bi' for binary. A kilo-binary-byte = Kibibyte.
I and everone else refuse.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
For some reason, people who grew up in router land use GB to mean 10^6, while most software developers use GB to mean 2^20.
To resolve this, my group prepared a document that explains the use of the binary nomemclature and we refer readers to this base document in all of our prepared documentation. The document also explicitly states what the accepted abbreviations are (KiB, MiB, GiB, etc.). We also explicity define the capital B to mean byte, while a lower case 'b' is a bit. Therefore, Mib means mebibit.
This has reduced confusion to a great amount and now various groups looking at our performance testing results can make an accurate assesment.
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
I don't deal with FLASH or EPROM, but in networking, mega and giga are always always ALWAYS done in powers of 10. Probably because powers of 2 are so insignificant in the world of networking.
... to see hard drive sizes measured in units of 1e6 bytes ...
You need to a soldier to really fight soldiers. You need to be a hacker to really fight hackers.
In the world of hackers, there are attackers, and there are defenders. It's easy to attack. It's much more interesting and important to defend.
--Dan
in other news:
you say toh-mah-toe, i say toh-may-toe
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
... about as well as Esperanto has.
Look, I don't know where you learned programming, but if you use 2E15, you get 32768 ... are american physicians using a different math system or was it just that your teacher was a crackhead?
That's what I'd put, if I could...
well, so when quantum `puters come out, there'll be a change again?...might get a bit complicated...
I can see the motivation for this, but I would be much more impressed if they could get people to properly distinguish between bits and bytes as in Mbps (Mega bits per second) vs. MBps (Mega bytes per second). That's a FAR greater difference (800%) than the 4.8% difference between the proposed megabyte/mebibyte.
While I'm at it, I'd like to see them also straighten out those people who write mbps (which actually means millibits per second; i.e. 1/1000 bits per second!) :^)
Who the hell had the idea that a "kilobyte" means 2^{10} byte instead of 10^3 byte? For the "kilo" it's just an error of 2%, but for "mega" it's 5% and for "tera" it even grows to 10%.
This sig is a true statement, but I cannot prove it.
They should have at least made "KiboBytes", and then we would have had James Parry's comments on it.
Will people change their usage? Mebi, mebi not.
I always find it odd when people resist what is otherwise a good (if initially less comfortable) idea.
It is inevitable that as computers get more advanced, our technical terms will eventually fall out of use. For example, we don't often talk about "words" of memory anymore often even in the technical mainstream (outside of assembly language and code or storage optimization), because all the manufacturers eventually went to an eight-bit byte as a standard. (Eventually, the byte will become less meaningful to the mainstream, and will eventually shift to the "character" as we head towards the Unicode standard. Eventually, we'll be switching /.ebibytes/ for /.ebichars/, and the complaining will probably begin anew.)
Resisting inevitable changes like this just hinders Linux (and *BSD) from making steps towards the mainstream and maintains the perception that it's only suited to technogeeks.
While "mebibyte" sounds too close to "maybebyte" for my tastes, it does make sense to meld "mega" with "binary" in this way. I wish they'd gone farther; I could have dealt more easily with "mibyte" (pronounced either /mee-bite/ or /mih-bite/) rather than "mebibyte." Perhaps that will become the natural phonetic erosion as such terms get adopted, but that's hard to count on.
On a personal level, clearing up the distinction would at least make things less annoying as far as my life goes. My mother still doesn't understand this whole powers-of-two thing, or even the concept of bits versus bytes, and I don't expect she ever will ("But the modem is 56K, and I'm only transferring at 5K!"). I don't know why I bought a 75GB disk six months ago (75 GiB, to be precise), and then bought an 80GB disk from the same manufacturer last month at about the same price to find myself with exactly the same amount of storage as last time (75 GiB). That ticks me off---I could have used the extra five /Gi?B/. It's really going to tick me off if memory manufacturers start playing similar games. At least unifying this usage will reduce the confusion in the marketplace. (I'd also quit wondering whether a transfer rate of "49K per second" meant 382,812, 384,000, 392,000, 393,216 or 401,408 bits per second. Fortunately, I don't wonder that often, but still.)
I say, let's adopt /[KMGTPA]iB/ as a standard, call 'em /kib/, /mib/, /gib/, /tib/, /pib/ and, uh, /eyeb/, and be done with it. Maybe if we do that, we'll be one step closer to adopting the metric system as well.
Stephen quoted a piece from the diff, showing how Eric Raymond had changed the Configure.help. You'll notice this in incomplete, as I've highlighted below:
"No, CowboyNeal.. We won't."
*flash*
(Insert crappy rap attempt.)
Though at first I thought these would sound weird, I actually kind of like the way they sound now that I've given it a few seconds to soak in. For some reason, though, I keep associating it with some type of children's cereal.
Ignoring the pronounciation though, I'm definitely all for doing this, and ending that confusion with hard drives. Ideally they'd start printing the equivilant number of GiB's to clear things up (like monitors now do with viewable image size).
The first ever Ultimate Frisbee video game: here (now
The whole notion of mebibytes is an ugly, illconsidered, and overly specific hack designed to fix a real, but by no means debilitating, problem. I made a similar post, anonymously, to debianplanet this morning, where I first saw this subject discussed, and only just now got around to checking out slashdot. I should warn you up front the the following is fairly opinionated rant, and probably represents a rather unpopular opinion to boot. You have been warned. :-)
The thing that really annoys me about the whole Megabyte/Mebibyte thing is that the entire standard nomenclature is an ill-considered, quick, dirty, and above all ugly hack addressing an admittedly legitimate problem (Mega meaning 1^06 or 2^20).
Their hack addresses only powers of 10 and powers of 2, which are a subset of a larger question: nomenclature for abitrary (integer) bases. Worse, it mixes the two together in a misguided effort to get one base's representation to approximate the others, despite the fact that the two bases are in fact quite different!
Why is this so stupid? Well, aside from the internal lack of logic (and, I have to say, profound lack of elegance), let's suppose, for example, that in ten years we begin finding more widespread use of balanced trinary systems , or some other hitherto unforseen base. Where's our nomencalture now? Of completely no use, and requiring us to invent a new wheel, yet again.
A far more reasonable approach would have been a subscript denoting the base, with the default being base ten if no subscript is present (i.e. defaulting to standard metric nomeclature). E.g. M(sub)2Byte would be 2^6 Bytes while M(sub)10Byte = MByte = 10^6 bytes. A M(sub)3trit would be 3^6 trits, and so on.
One will immediately notice that what we consider a (base-2) Megabyte is not 2^6, but rather 2^20 Bytes, or 64 vs 1048576 bytes. Well, they want us to learn a different nomenclature anyway, so why not at least make it logical. If Mega always means to the power of six, regardless of base, then we have a rational basis for our nomenclature. Yes, it would take some getting used to, but I would argue it would be far less painful getting used to something this logical than to adopt the use of "mebibyte" in our daily language. YMMV of course.
This ugly hybridization of base-10 nomenclature with base two numerology they are intending to replace (admittedly equally bad) common usage with is both illogical and unnecessarilly specific to one problem set. If we're going to be making up new (and apparently stupid) terms like mebibyte, then lets at least define mebi to represent a power of 20, or better yet 21 as it would then follow exa by an additional power of three, as every other prefix above kilo (and below milli) does. Or better yet, pick a name that doesn't start with the already (overused) 'M'.
Does anyone else see the advantage of this? We have just extended our available nonemclature for all measures, in any base, in a rational, extensible, and fairly scalable approach. Yes, to our base-10 minds we may feel uncomfortable with the small size a Megabyte really is, but I would submit that that is no greater a psychological barrior to overcome than the use of really stupid, childish, and annoying terms such as "mebi," and a heck of a lot more rational to boot.
Of course, this idea came from one person, spontaneously, on a Sunday morning, who (at the time) hadn't even had his coffee yet. Give a self-appointed committee time enough to dumb it down and who knows what hideous form it would then take...
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
With computers moving further and further into the daily lives of common (that is, non-CS) people, I suspect we're fighting against a horde of people who already believe that a megabyte is 10^6 bytes.
I agree with some of the others here that "mebibyte" is a very clumsy word.
But I'm wondering, what's with the attachment to the whole base-2 system anyway? I mean, I'm a CSist, and *I* don't know how many bytes are in a gibibyte. I have to run to my calculator.
I'm probably speaking too late to be heard, anyway, but I say ditch the whole base-2 thing and start saying 42.9 gigabytes instead of 40 gigabytes. If you want the exact amount, read the documentation, where (one hopes) the size will be expressed precisely in bytes.
I would like to think that of all the groups of people in the world, computer scientists would have the cool rationality to be able to let go of a misguided standard.
But I guess that, so long as there are those who feel that it measures their penis size, they won't be able to let it go.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
According to these standards, technically a megabyte (MB) is a power of ten, while a mebibyte (MiB) is a power of two, appropriate for binary machines...
I've never understood why otherwise intelligent people waste their time on this kind of silliness. Does anybody know?
Look at cars: power of cars should be expressed in kW, but nobody does this. They say, "my car has 255HP" instead of "my car has 166kW". I tried to use "kW" for some time, but nobody understood what I was talking about. :-)
It happens all the time, in all segments of engineering and science. Physicists still do use Amgstrom (sp?) from time to time, even tough the term is obsoleted. And then I don't even start about the imperial system
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
surprised that no-one has mentioned knuth's suggestion yet
i've mirrored knuth's discussion and suggestion for a solution below - link can be found here, on his news for 1999 page.
~~~~~~~mirrored text of donald knuth~~~~~~~~
What is a kilobyte?Many people (and many online dictionaries) claim that a kilobyte (kB or KB) is 2^10 bytes, and that a megabyte (MB) is 2^10 kilobytes, etc.
I'm a big fan of binary numbers, but I have to admit that this convention flouts the widely accepted international standards for scientific prefixes.
Therefore I propose a simple way to resolve the dilemma and the ambiguity: Let us agree to say that
and so on up the line: Large giga-, tera-, peta-, exa-, zetta-, and yottabytes are GGB, TTB, PPB, EEB, ZZB, and YYB, taking us up to 2^80. (Notice that doubling the letter connotes both binary-ness and large-ness.)
These proposals were motivated by the suggestions in 1995 of IUPAC-IDCNS (the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry's Interdivisional Committee on Nomenclature and Symbols), which were extended by IEC TC 25 (Technical Committee 25 of the International Electrotechnical Commission), chaired by Anders J. Thor. According to those committees, 2^20 bytes should be called a "mebibyte" and abbreviated MiB; 2^40 bytes should be called a "tebibyte" and abbreviated TiB; etc. The members of those committees deserve credit for raising an important issue, but when I heard their proposal it seemed dead on arrival --- who would voluntarily want to use MiB for a maybe-byte?! So I came up with the suggestion above, and mentioned it on page 94 of my Introduction to MMIX. Now to my astonishment, I learn that the committee proposals have actually become an international standard. Still, I am extremely reluctant to adopt such funny-sounding terms; Jeffrey Harrow says "we're going to have to learn to love (and pronounce)" the new coinages, but he seems to assume that standards are automatically adopted just because they are there. Surely a huge number of standards for other computer things, like networking protocols, have been replaced by better ideas when they came along. Thus I hope it still isn't too late to propose what I believe is a significantly better alternative, and I still think it unlikely that people will automatically warm to "mebibytes". Indeed, the last time I looked (June 28), names like "mebibyte.com" were being offered for sale but with no takers! I might, however, want to buy into a name like mmegabyte.com... And even in the unlikely event that mebibytes do catch on, MMB surely wins over MiB as their abbreviation. [See also the discussion by Kevin Walsh.]
Unix printf(1) command:
The C programming language:
The Perl programming language:
And no, this is not an Americanism. It is standard engineering notation, used worldwide.
Cylinders * heads * Sector * allocations
= 80 * 2 * 18 * 512
= 1474560 = 1.44 * 1024
Seems the actual style is to use k indifferently for 1000 and 1024, as the end suits the need.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
I can't speak for physicians as I'm rarely sick and thus only visit my doctor less than once a year. But most physicists and engineers like myself use xEy to mean x*10^y. Actually I rarely use E notation anyway except punching something into my calculator and always write out x * 10^y.
Amen, brother. Bad enough we had to put up with the perversions of the physicists and chemists, trying to foist those unnatural kilo- this and centi- that instead of God's own inches and feet. We can hold the line again, if we all stick together. Just say no to powers of two.
If we lose this one, who knows what could be next? IPv6? Math literacy in your neighborhood?
Maybe the Accessibility folk should look into this -- pronouncing "Mebibytes" is going to be hell for stammerers. And people who says "Mebs" a lot will sound like Mork.
Of course you're right...
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
Let me predict the outcome based upon past events: with the exception of the USA, the entire world will make the switch to the official standard. Half of the US scientific community will switch and half won't. The 2014 first manned mission to Mars will fail because the the navigation computer design team specified 100gibs of RAM, but the implementation team only installed 100gigs of RAM and it is unable to perform course corrections---the crew and ship are lost in space.
Confused? Then see SEPTEMBER 30, 1999 Likely Cause Of Orbiter Loss Found The peer review preliminary findings indicate that one team used English units (e.g., inches, feet and pounds) while the other used metric units for a key spacecraft operation.
People use the prefixes TWO different ways. Ethernet speed - 10 Mbps -- it's not 10,485,760 bps, its 10,000,000 bps. Look around, you'll find as many examples as you want. Or maybe you did?
And as for Judaism, you're comparing apples (pronunciation) and oranges (meaning).
And furthermore, every American I know pronounces it as you say it SHOULD be pronounced but ISN'T.
3 strikes -- you're out. Go home and sleep it off.
Infuriate left and right
You all sound like the well-intentioned folk who insist on pronouncing GigaBytes as [JigaBytes] since that is supposed to be the standard way of doing it (reference: Emmett Brown in Back to The Future talking about 'Jigawatts').
I'm a geek and I'm not even going to change. Don't expect the manufacturers to...
IOW, a "marketing" GB vs. an "engineering" GB.
I can't be the only VAR guy reading this who's had to explain that to a customer regarding hard drives.
What I'm wondering now is: How many bits are in those bytes? Is that standard likely to change? Would GigaBits be a better measure?
Actually, 1Kbps is 1000bps. Bits per second with regards to data transmission is *always* done in base 10.
10Mbps ethernet can move *exactly* 10 million bits per second.
A 1.544 Mbps T1 has exactly 1544000 bits/second on the wire.
k=1024 is a term normally only used with regards to computer memory, or storage (as storage may be viewed as a kind of memory). Yes, hard drive manufacturers have twisted the term for marketing, and countless software packages calculate 'speeds' using whatever method they thought was right...
But it remains.
When you talk bits per second, it's *always* k=1000.
It will only be a matter of time before we are all talking MiB and GiB... around the same time the U.S. will be converting to the metric sysem!
The times they aren't-a-changin'.
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
Mebi I will, and mebi I won't. Especially not if they're going to call it something that sounds like a preschooler's mispronunciation.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Look, explorer still will shows a 65000byte file as 63.8kb.
Does that mean that new 512MB DIMM will really be advertized as a 536MB module?
Its worst than a y2k change, no one will bother.
Leave HD as it is, 1000 based. Leave ram/files as they are 1024 based, leave bandwidth as it is 1000 based.
Just change one thing, HD sizes of 80GB, to "78.4GB formated"
What next? redefining 1 gallon to 4 liters? 4000CCs ?
Dude, 8 fingers, what about the other 8 toes??? (ignore bigtoe , or footthumb)
There we have 16, with 4 spare as flags
Humans are 16bit dude.
Consumers aren't going to care about the 2.4% space difference, they certainly as hell don't care about what's "techincally correct", and there's no ambiguity for programmers (since they're all writing amounts of memory in hex anyways).
That's the term.
How many characters can you store in 64k of memory?
Answer. You can store somewhat over 65k characters in 64k (binary kilobytes) of memory.
The convincer (for me;)
How do you express 640k in Megs. 0.640M doesn't really work.
than this proposal is the tired, predictable response of Slashdotters to it.
Just look at this "discussion" - hundreds of kB of hot air, making about 3 rather obvious points.
- MFN
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Lay off the calculator stories, poindexter!
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
the ONLY people that care about this are the ones that were so damn annoying around Y2K. You know, those anal-retentives that got wood out of always insisting that the new millenium began in January 2001?
-Styopa
1. A megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes. Always has been, always will be. It is a unit of measurement specific to its science, like the Mole is to Chemistry, and like the Newton is to Physics. It is not meant to be a general metric measurement, in other words, a megabyte isn't 1,000,000 anymore than a "dozen" is 10. Ever since the term was coined, it has meant that value, specifically. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something, namely marketing idiots who are responsible for great advancements in human culture like MTV and the Home Shopping Network.
2. By accepting this "mebibytes" crap, you're allowing marketing people to revise history. The number 1,048,576 is an important value in Computer Science, similar to 8, 256, 1024, and other commonly-used powers of 2. An understanding of the powers of 2 is integral to having an understanding of the underlying principles that form the foundation of this discipline. If you cant think in anything but base 10, you should consider a different line of work, as most computer scientists have no problem thinking in terms of binary, octal, hexidecimal and otherwise. A failure to understand the basic nature of the device you intend on working with for the rest of your career is tantamount to unprofessionalism and neglect. After all, you can't be expected to code competently by using incorrect measurements any more than a carpenter can be expected to build a house competently if his tape measure is made out of elastic rubber.
3. Its just plain stupid. A megabyte is a megabyte. Its not less than a megabyte, or more than a megabyte. If you for some reason feel the need to apply a term to "1,000,000" an essentially meaningless number in terms of the machine, we already have a word for it. Its called "million", as in "a million bytes." Call a spade a spade. A megabyte is 1,048,576. A million bytes is 1,000,000 bytes. They are not equal, and never will be.
Bowie J. Poag
Kind of surprised no one did a MiB=Men in Black joke. yeesh.
-----
Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
Am I the only that thinks that K = 1000, k = 1024, etc? I always had the understanding that a capital K = 1000 and a lowercase k = 1024, thus I've never had much problem with this. Except when Internet Explorer Inaccurately reports download speeds using the wrong convention!
What?
Other than that, I like it that they got to fixing this stupid mess.
Sure it'll catch on.
and it's GNU/Linux.
(see, that's a joke, there.)
Big K is defined as 1024
MB can be either 1,000,000 = 1,000 x 1,000
or as 1,048,576 = 1024 x 1024
You can't use little m cause its defined as milli or 1/1000
In the show "Who wants to be a millionaire?", one of the questions was "Which symbol represents 1000?", the "correct" answer on the show was K which is wrong. No of the answers were correct. Just some trivia...
Actually the math is even worse than that. The percentage adds up for each unit.
1GB = 1024*1024*1024 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes
That's 7.3% difference from the base 10 math, so your advertised 100 Gig drive is really only 93 Gigs.
Reading through nearly all of the ranting and raving about this new standard simply proves the need for it, IMHO. Of course, standards don't mean anything unless people follow them.
If they really want to redefine it then they should invent a new base unit that would use base ten. How about kilochar? MegaBee? Gigatwits?
All new words sound stupid. Because they're new. I remember when the word "email" sounded stupid, and now it's the only method I use to communicate with people!
It's an old chestnut
...having ever taken prefixes designed only, repeat ONLY, for describing powers of 10^3 and applied them to powers of 2^10. A "kilobyte" is 2^10, megabyte 2^20, etc., so mebi (with its 10^6 connotations) and gibi, etc., are only repeating the error under a different name. We're not measuring in base 10 so let's not use base 10 names.
As for people's ability to adapt to new units, go and ask nearly four hundred * 2^20 Europeans what coins they will be spending from 1/1/2002 onwards.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Ok you have to be pretty stupid. Your comment at the end of the article made no since, cause if you have had any computer use you would alreadyt know that all computer terms are all ready figured in binary, which includeds the Megabytes and the Gigibyte. Just to let you know; 4 bits in a byte, 1024 bytes in a Kb(2^10), 1048576 bytes in a Mb(2^20), and 1073741824 bytes in a Gb(2^30). So I would just keep your mouth shut from now on unless you know exactly what you are talking about.
Well I live in the UK.
:(
I was taught in metric,
grew up in metric,
did my undergradute Physics degree in metric,
did my postgradute Physics degree in metric.
I don't understand the illogical mess that is imperial (somewhat like NASA Mars Missions). And thank god I did science in metric - thermodynamics is hard enough without having to work in something arcane like the British Thermal Unit.
So thats nearly 30 years where everything in my life has been metric, unless I want to buy groceries or a beer! (yes I know the roads are marked in miles, but I also know how much it would cost to replace the signs so let that slide)
So if most people under 30 in the UK are happy with metric, and don't understand imperial, can it really be said that metric is being forced on us?
In my experience of talking to Joe Public the biggest current confusion is between RAM and HDD - as they use the same measurement! Surely the solution to the original problem is to sell stuff marked in bits - as much transport based kit like SCSI and Ethernet already is? This is then independant of whatever the byte size is, and can be base 10 or 2 as appropriate - this would limit confusion as it would be a new standard measurement, rather than trying to fit a new word to an abused measurement.
And yes I am aware that people are exploiting the confusion between MB - Mb to flog things like digital cameras in megabits so that Joe Public thinks they are getting 8 times the memory they are, its just that I have the niave belief that not even the HDD manufactors would have the gall to try that scam.
In my experience the biggest confusion for Joe Public is between RAM and HDD - as they use the same units - so I have no hope the situation will improve
and it isn't April first so why post this garbage?
This is fucking stupid. Beyond stupid, yet it hits the main page? This site is about this ([__]) far away from StileProject at this point.
Christ, I've resorted to posting as an AC, it's that bad.
I know, how about munchybytes! Or masturbytes! Some stupid group says "we want mini-ini-mojo-mofo-bytes" and we give it to them why?!
I think we should rename all storage values after my bowel movements. At least it would prevent corporate sellouts... except for Metamusil!
is kilobyte to be replaced with keli or kilibyte?
at least we could still call it '640K' of ram...hehe
just thought of something: isn't it the KB that wasted the base 10 vs base 2 scheme? could someone provide a mathematical look at all of this rubbish?
I'd got into it myself, but coffee hasn't finished with my veins yet, and I don't have both eyes open...
Stupid brainless jerk. Being nerd is much better than having no brains at all.
So fuck up with your dumb American words, 'cause the population of Europe+Asia+Africa+South America+Austria is much higher than the American population.
This solves a lot of confusion, the naming convention for kilometre, kilogram ... already exists more than a century, so we should use something other than kilobyte for 1.024 bytes, but I have 2 problems : 1) we have been using the current system (kilo,mega,giga) too long to switch. 2) Mebibyte doesn't sound right.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
In the 70's there was an attempt to switch - it flopped.
Good luck.
I'm a 2000 man.
While we're talking about changing unit definitions..
In France we're using the word octet which means eight bits.
I think that octet is interesting because
- it is always 8 bits. A byte is usually 8 bits but not always.
- as it abreviates to KO, MO (or now KiO and MiO) you have less risks of confusion between kilobytes and kilobits..
The reason Explorer does that is because the file in question (63k) doesn't take up the the full extent of the hard drive sectors that contain it (65k).
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The average person has a hard enough time understanding what a megabyte is, let alone a kilobyte. Let them continue to think it is one million bytes. The rest of us easily understand that one kilobyte = 1024 bytes, and so on. It's close enough for practical purposes, don't you think? The amount of memory in the computer isn't going to change if no matter what you rename it.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
Jokes aside, the reason why no one will convert to metric bytes is because there is no reason.
This is a solution to a nonproblem. I did not go to work last friday and say "boy I wish 1K was 1000 bytes". And anyway 1MiB=2^19.93156857 (Yuk!)
The problem is that having too many measurement standards may introduce problems. Remember the mars probe mission? 1MB=2^20 'nuff said. Go solve problems that need to be solved, and don't waste my time.