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.'"

Comments

It would help

[Sawbones]

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.

This is bound to fail

[J.D. Hogg]

Okay, so I admit, it's a really good idea : since Mb and Gb aren't powers of ten, let's invent new units to alleviate the confusion. But it'll never work, because people aren't used to it. One might argue that people just have to get used to it, or that people will naturally use the better system, but that doesn't actually matter : metric is a better system than imperial or standard, yet people in the UK or the US still haven't adopted metric. Actually that's not true, the UK is adopting metric because the authorities are forcing it down people throats, wish reinforces my point that is that people don't change if they don't have to.

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.

Re:And here's the mainstream news version...

[A_Non_Moose]

No kidding...more effing BS terms.

Mibi? Why not just call them "bibbity-bobbity-boo" bytes?

When I think measurement of data (Meg, Gig) I think powers of 1024.

When I think of measurements of physical objects (water, distance) I think powers of 10.

Now some physicists are saying "no, no, use powers of 2"...STFU.

What really gets me is that the same thing is going on with former @home-ers (charter/att or whatever you got switched to) where the phone monkeys here in Ga are saying kbits and the techs are saying Kbytes. Ok, which is it?

Granted all this is freaking meaningless (check your cable modem settings by pointing your browser to 192.168.100.1) mine at the moment is set to 700000bits when during the switchover it was 128000bits--up and down, btw.

The thing I got on to the tech about: if you are telling me bytes/s then why is my modem set to 128000...you are missing a zero, dude.
(heh, scary that I knew more about DOCIS (sp?) compliance than the tech I was talking to, just a little more than he...but at least he saw my point of view.

Anywho, don't wanna deal with it on vacation, so letting it drop for now...at least disconnections are getting fewer and further between.

At least the are using a decent news server..but that download *speed* cap is annoying, and only 2 connects at once...they need to cache the downloads localy {if possible, mind you} to speed things up and decrease traffic outbound, IMO.

Just my mild rant + $.02.

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A quandary for dictionary makers...

[Krokus]

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).

Re:Non issue

[Antibozo]

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.

Brilliant. Now SI includes inherently ambiguous prefixes: what will "debi" mean? Will it be "deci-binary" or "deka-binary"?

MiB and GiB prevents miscommunication

[nedron]

My group switched to the "binary" nomenclature about two years ago in order to prevent miscommunication with other parts of the company. Each group interpreted MB, GB, etc., differently depending on that their background was.

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.

Re:something of a linguistic perspective..

[hackerzrus]

But we don't use Kb, MB, Gb (etc.) always as powers of 2. Data transfer rates are by powers of 10. (A 28.8 Kbps modem is not 29491 bps). Disk space is done both ways, so it _is_ confusing. Gibibytes and Tebibytes may never be mainstream (or properly understood) but I believe the IEC, IEEE, NIST and ISO have already accepted the "new" prefixes, so we may as well get used to them.