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

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).

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.