Slashdot Mirror
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 --
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!
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 --
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've got agree here. Why are they trying to change something that has come into being within the industry and has an already established understanding?
;-) which were already WELL past ;-)
Hmm - sounds just like double-speak from 1984
We'll adopt these here in the US just like we've adopted the metric system.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
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.
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.
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.....
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
Not so. Mega and giga arn't metric terms when
used on bytes or collections of them.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
we should pronounce them "mibs"
MIBs are already taken, too.. by SNMP. Unless you pronounce them "emm eye bees".
Intelligent Life on Earth
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.
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...
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!
emm eye bees?
Quick, call Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones!
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
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
1 megabyte (8,338,608 bits) != 8 megabit (8,000,000 bits)
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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
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).
Mega-ma-bytes
Giga-ma-bytes
Saxa-ma-phone
etc.
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
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.
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)
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"?
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??
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 think that must be a typo.
We all know that KIBO is alive and well in our computers.
1 kilometre = 1000 metres
1 kilogram = 1000 grams
1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes
1 kilotonne = 1000 tonnes
1 kilopasical = 1000 pascals
Spot the odd one out?
Have you ever bought a harddrive labelled "40Gb" and gotten home to find it's only 37Gb ?
No, I've never seen anyone selling 40 gigabit hard drives.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
The SI prefix Mega has always meant 10e6, which is why HD manufacturers use its true definition to sell their wares.
Oh puh-lease.
HD manufacturers use 10e6 because it makes their capacities sound bigger, just like monitor manufacturers use the tube size instead of the viewable area because it makes their wares sound bigger. Correctness has absolutely nothing to do with it.
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
1 megabyte (8,338,608 bits) != 8 megabit (8,000,000 bits)
Uhh, where I come from a megabit is 1048576 bits. i.e. a 1 megabit FLASH or EPROM actually contains 1048576 cells, usually arranged into an 8 x 131072 array, giving you 128 kilobytes.
Hmm, but now that I think of it, the raw throughput of a DS1 is 1.544megabits per second but that is 1544000 bits per second...
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...
A word isn't a fixed value, it's a description of the with of the bus on the processor. At the moment on intel a word is 32 bits (4 bytes), but give it a couple of years and we'll all be using 64 bit words.
It isn't helped by MS hardcoding the definition of WORD and DWORD to two bytes and four bytes back in the windows 3.1 days (when a 16 bit word made sense).
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
... about as well as Esperanto has.
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!) :^)
No, I've never seen anyone selling 40 gigabit hard drives.
.... "NEW! 40Gb DRIVES! For the SAME PRICE as your crappy old 5GB drive!"
Oh, how quickly we forget....
Bytes = bits/8 (not accounting for ecc etc)
Equals 5 GigaBytes (in the proper sense of Giga)
5 gig drives were all the rage back in '95
Good thing the marketing droids didn't pick up on the confusion with B and b
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
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.
It's ok though, because W. will hold them off using the power of bacon and shrimp chips.
When I was able to do my own spam-armoring, you got a chance to email me. Now you can only hope I see your reply.
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:
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.
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.
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
Partly agree. About the only place MB = power of 10 is used is in hard drive advertisements. The usage of hard drives is, as far as I know, always measured in MB = power of 2. Having them switch over would be similar to the business with measuring monitor widths a few years back. There'd be no real change in how anything is done outside of the marketing department at Western Digital and such.
Dyolf Knip
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.
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
Indeed, "MiB" is most likely trademarked by Amblin/Columbia.
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.
It's an old chestnut
and it isn't April first so why post this garbage?
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..
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.
Why? When do you ever feel the need to convert from miles to inches? It never comes up. When does one ever feel the need to convert from millimeters to gigameters? It never comes up. The AU and parsec are not attractive SI units, but they sure do make sense with their problem domains. Ditto for the inch and the mile.
Metricists are silly. They optimise for the unlikely case (conversion on paper between units) and not for the common case (division and multiplication of concrete measures). It's very easy to cut a foot into inches (half, half, thirds); it's very easy to cut a gallon into cups (half, half, half, half); it's hell itself to cut a metre into a centimetre (half, half, fifths, fifths--shoot me now!).
These are the same people who tried to cut France into equal-sized, equally populated regions. Never mind that population is not distributed equally. The Enlightenment fallacy is that the world is neatly measurable. The truth is that it's not, and that One True System cannot work. Adaptation and flexibility are needed: true elegance, not elegance-on-paper.
Kilobyte and megabyte make sense within the problem domain--for hard drives as well as for RAM. A kilobyte is 1,024 bytes. A megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes. The lunatic raving of infantile minds cannot change this fact.