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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.'"
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
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!
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...
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charlton heston is more of a man than yo
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.
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.
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.
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...
We just need to get Sesame Street to start using both these terms correctly, and then the next generation will get it right.
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!
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.
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...
And no it's not false advertising
Yes it is. 1GB = 2^30 bytes, not 1e9. Drive manufacturers use the smaller unit so you'll think that their drives are bigger than they are. That's deceptive
Reboot macht Frei.
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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
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.
Computers are inherently not metric so why should the metric
defintions of words affect a non-metric context? Have the SI
board trademarked the metric prefixes?
The metric system works in the real world because the
measurements are completely arbitrary - ie. they don't relate to
anything in the real world. A kilobyte in the context of
computing is not arbitrary.
Redefining a kilobyte in the computing context is a bit like
redefining what an inch, a rod or a biblical cubit is -
non-aribitrary measurements that mean something concrete in the
physical world.
and it isn't April first so why post this garbage?