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New Power-of-Two Prefixes?
EngrBohn writes "The August issue of IEEE Spectrum mentions a proposal by the International Electrotechnical Commission to introduce new prefixes for words that indicate powers-of-two (page 18 of the print issue). This would replace kilobytes (kB) with kibibytes (KiB), megabytes (MB) with mebibytes (MiB), gigabytes (gB) with gibibytes (GiB), and so on. The rationale is two-fold. First is to restore the integrity of the SI prefixes to meaning powers-of-ten. Second is to eliminate ambiguity over whether, for example, a megabyte is 10**6 bytes or 2**20 bytes. Think this is a non-issue? I noticed this morning that Iomega's 100MB Zip disks have a 10**8 byte capacity, and Maxtor also considers a megabyte to be 10**6 bytes. "
The real thing to do is just to use If this displays properly in your browser, congratulations. :)
Agh. I mean
I do networking research, and the 2^x/10^z question comes up all the time--this is because bandwidth is usually expressed in powers of 10, and file size is usually expressed in powers of 2. This would be fine if people said "100 10^6 b Ethernet", but they don't, they say "100 Mb Ethernet".
As a result, we get a lot of headaches. A good paper or talk distinguishes between 2s and 10s, or better yet normalizes everything to the same base. A bad presentation doesn't distinguish anything, leaving you to figure out which units they're using where.
The proposed names are unpleasant, but we could just consider them placeholders until we come up with something better. We definitely need some sort of word here.
(Not really an A.C. -- the system just doesn't want to e-mail me a password.)
This is something we old-timers understand. Back in the 50's and early 60's, many computers used decimal arithmetic. They all had underlying binary circuitry, of course, but they either used the actual decimal digits of their various character codes (ASCII hadn't been invented yet) or used decimal digits as their basic units and coded other printable characters as two decimal digits. Everything on these machines, even address arithmetic, was in decimal, and RAM came in units of 1,000. Such machines were usually not used for number-crunching, which was typically done in binary, but they were used for most commercial applications. When disks came out, their usefulness was obvious to the business set, but scientists weren't very interested. At the most, they might get one drive with a few megabytes of capacity to host their operating system on. As a result, disks were generally designed with 100-byte sectors, five, ten, or 50 platters, and one or two hundred cylinders. The popular IBM 1311 disk drive, for example, had a capacity of exactly 2,000,000 6-bit bytes. Its followup, the 2311, was exactly 7,250,000 8-bit bytes.
For this reason, it has been traditional for 40 years or so to measure disk capacity in correct decimal units, rather than the sloppy I.T. practice of approximate binary units.
The average customer won't be comfused any more because he/she probably doesn't know what he/she's talking about in the first place - the only important thing to most consumers is that the numbers are high so you can boast with them.
Secondly, the concept of correctness has nothing to do with consumer confusion. Urban legend has it that at some time in the US, pi was defined to be equal to four. I agree that many consumers might be confused by transcendental numbers, but nevertheless I think 4 is wrong.
The units are:
1024 Flatheadbytes to 1 Zorkybyte;
1024 Zorkybytes to 1 Frobozzbyte;
1024 Frobozzbyte to 1 Infocombyte
These are understood by every grue under the sun!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
So the new names will only really make sense to anyone whose taken courses in low level computer stuff.
Or anyone whose taken a bike ride.
To a Filipino speaker (Tagalog, anyway), this term would describe a unique form of oral sex.
Babies are cute because they have to be.
Does this mean that Y2K really is the year 2000? I've been telling everyone it's coming in 2048.
Man.. I've got some serious catching up to do now.
Hard drive manufaturers have been using the right notion. They actually only provide you with a drive that if marked as 6 GB has only about 6 billion (US billion, mind you) bytes. This new standard would not change that. They would still only sell a 6GB drive and somewhere on the box it might have a translation into Gibibytes for those who care. The point of this notation change is for people who work with this stuff everyday on the job. If I have to refer to memory segements on byte boundries but refer to them in metric, base ten units I am refering to them incorrectly. This notation finally allows geeks to be precise about nitpicky, but important things. People who deal with this sort of thing everyday will be able to use this but the general populous won't care and probably will be confused when one of us correct them.
Long Live the Gibibyte!
(2C)||(!2C), That is the question.
It's far more nefarious than that!
The MiB wanted to make sure people didn't freak out if they see MiB on confidential documents, and they decided the Kids in Black and the Girls in Black needed the same protection!
Refusing to hand over the hard drives will be considered compliance with the terms of the agreement. If they -do- hand over the drives, nobody on slashdot is likely to care what convention they use.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I want my Kibis and Bits!
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
Yes, telecom bandwidth is always given in base 10. They consider it a straight pipe and measure in bits where 1 kb means 1,000 bits/sec. Throughput or information rate refers to the usable bandwidth, i.e. minus headers or other overhead. Compression adds further confustion to the issue. Telecom does not factor in the compression. If you have a 2:1 compression rate over a 56k line, then the telcom refers to it as a 56k line while the user will see a higher transfer rate.
I feel like picking a fight with everyone who thinks they are right. - Rainmakers
I was in a bookstore recently, and they had a display of some "Introduction to Computing" type book, so I picked it up for amusement... Toward the beginning of it there was a table proclaiming: 1 kilobyte = 1000 bytes 1 megabyte = 1000000 kilobytes 1 gigabyte = 1000000000 megabytes [sic] Ugh.
I agree! MMB and KKB it is! Kibibytes???!@!??(*&(*%&% WTF!
Give me a break already. Do you really think that anybody in the computer industry doesn't understand the meaning of megabyte, gigabyte, etc. and how the disk manufacturers define it? Do you really think this change would result in LESS confusion for the consumer?
Stop using != in normal English conversation you stupid programmers. Can't you people string together a whole sentence without juxtaposing some stupid programming symbols?
/* Oops, I suppose I sould have ended that last sentence with a ;
*/
This is a much bigger problem than the petty dispute about cracker/hacker terminology. (flames>/dev/null)
The problem is that science requires specific meanings for measurement units. Mega means 10**6, not 2**20. No one may use the new units in popular press, but it'd be great for publication. There would be no doubt that 25 Kibibytes is 25 * 2**10 bytes.
It's a shame that they didn't do this 20 years ago.
Yes, but this is in a country that
can't decide wheter pounds means a
unit of money to Force.
Although, I suppose they don't use
pounds as a unit of force anymore,
because they are all metric'ed out.
-- The Funk, The Whole Funk, And Nothing But The Funk
Now go have your coffee . . . :-)
>Memory is "32MB" while a Zip disk could be 100mB
32MB = 32 Megabel = a factor of 1:32000000 relative to some unspecified reference.
100mB = 100 Millibel = a factor of approximately 1.26.
A byte again is a rather unspecified quantity. Only in recent years it has been generally considered as being equivalent to 8 bits. If I'm not mistaken, the RFCs use the term "octets" of bits - there's a reason behind it.
Computer industry and geeks traditionally have been extremely sloppy in this respect. This tradition doesn't mean they're right, however. If the IEC is trying to get out of this mess, they should be applauded. Until then, people should restrict themselves to correct usage of existing units.
I've used 'marketing gigabytes' and 'real gigabytes' for a long time.
I'm not sure which of the big disk drive manufacturers deliberately created this confusion, but they did this back somewhere around the 40MB drive time frame. Suddenly, simply by redefining their terms a little, they could have '42 megabyte' hard drives instead of '40 megabyte'. Anyone who actually knew anything despised the practice, but the manufacturers that did NOT accept the term quickly found themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
I think it took less than six months for 'marketing gigabytes' to take over for the correct usage of the term. It has been causing problems ever since.
Castlewood is the only new manufacturer I know of that seems to be using 'real gigabytes'. I have one of their ORB drives and you really do get 2.2GB (at least as far as Windows is concerned).
These new words just aren't going to work. You must really understand them to use them properly, and how many people do YOU know in your daily life that understand base-10 versus base-2 notation?
Anyone will understand 'marketing gigabytes' versus 'real gigabytes'. This usage makes the original lie obvious, and will help to correct the problem by gently reclaiming the correct word, instead of forcing a new one down people's throats.
The second means nothing to a computer, the byte does.
-- The Funk, The Whole Funk, And Nothing But The Funk
The second means nothing to a computer, the byte does mean something..
-- The Funk, The Whole Funk, And Nothing But The Funk
The metric system is a tool of the devil! My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and thats the way I like it.
I definately like the idea - especially after the arguement I had with my husband on whether to partition 2000 MB for a 2GB partition, or 2048MB. But 'kibibytes'? 'mebibytes'? 'gibibytes'? Could they have chosen *anything* that would have been more confusing? I suppose I can understand the desire to keep things similar, but for the first few years, lay people are going to think you an idiot - or at least in possession of an odd stutter - if you use these terms to them. It would have been far better to simply use something that had a totally different sound/first letter. Like... I don't know. Snazzybyte. Fluptybyte. Zurzabyte. *Anything*.
This has been punted around the industry for a few years now. Read some back issues of the IEEE mags, especially the Technically Speaking column.
:-)
This is a great idea, because it separates the two systems of ^10 and ^2. The only ones who will suffer in the long run are the marketing assholes who like to cheat in their specifications.
Without a doubt, even if this system is adopted (and it will be, the debate has gone on for years, and is now tilting towards acceptance), it will be another decade or two until it reaches widespread use. But for a while, it will hilight the differences between leading edge geeks who like change, and unimaginative nerds who like things to stay the same (640 Kbytes is enough memory for anyone for ever).
The only thing I would also like to see is some larger and smaller values, into the ranges of 2^-100 and 2^100 or even further. How much space will there be if the other story on 3D holographic storage turns out to be the next great thing? I would love to have a credit card sized 2^100 bytes of information, could keep all the world's pr0n and MP3s on it
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
...The US Government was bored. Sounds kewl though. I just hope that when they make the change that enough people hear about it so I am not the only one who sounds like I have speech problems.
I think for the binary version (preserve the Metric System for powers of 10!), we could use pig latin.
2^10 bytes = 1 Ilokay Bytes (1 iB) = 1024 B = 1.024 kB
2^20 bytes = 1 Egamay Bytes (1 eB)
2^30 bytes = 1 Igagay Bytes (1 IB)
2^40 bytes = 1 Erratay Bytes (1 EB)
I for one am fully receptive to this change! To bad it doesn't clear up the confusion where 1GB = 1000MB = 1000000kB but 1GiB = 1024MiB = 1048576kB i.e. the problem that you still can't divide/multiply by 1000 to go from unit to unit.
w00t. :D
-- www.bteg.com | bleh.n3.net | hac47.dhs.org
I'm just getting used to MegaHertz instead of
Megacycles
What is Old English metric for memory size? I mean many people still prefer miles to kilometers.
Actually, there are good reasons why a base 60 system makes sense. For one thing, b60 can be divided in more ways than b10, and even in more ways than 10^2.
integer factors of 10: 1, 2, 4, 5, 10 integer factors of 100: 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 50 integer factor of 60: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30
This makes it perfect for time. Saying I'll meet you in 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 45 minutes are all natural in b60, but 20 and 40 wouldn't be in b10. We tend to think b10 is the natural way to do things, but the only thing magical about it is that we have 10 fingers and toes. The sumerians were pretty brilliant, after all. Its the b10 system that doen't make sense. We can't even easily express 1/3 in it!
Besides, working in different base systems promotes flexibility of mind, grasshopper.
I have a better idea.
Instead of kilobytes, call them kibobytes. Think James Parry will object?
Gawwwwwd... Looks like these people have too much free time on their hands. Why don't they just spend their free time trying to invent warp drive, or something? Leave this kind of stuff to Jay Leno, or David Letterman.
--
Sorry, but computers are grounded in base-2 math and there are a lot of good reasons to stick with it. The definition of kilobyte is clear, it is 2^10 bytes. Megabyte is 2^10 bytes, or 2^10 kilobytes, etc. IMHO, the problem isn't with the definitions, it is with the moronic disk manufacturers who don't follow the definitions.
I think the clueless consumers who already have trouble understanding the current definitions would have even more trouble trying to sort out two sets of terms that sound and look (GB vs. GiB) almost the same.
I still don't know if 20 kib/s is kibibits or kibibytes. Ditto for kiB/s, KiB/s, and all other possible capitalizations.
The English system of measurements was binary to begin with not decimal like the metric system. Two units of anything was the next unit up. 2 cups = 1 pint. 2 pints = 1 quart. etc... I've not been able to find that old dictionary that had all the units listed so, so I can't rattle them all off here.
why is it so obvious the binary measures need new names? they are far more universal measures than the decimal ones, so why not come up with new names for them instead! MB = 1024*1024, like it should be.
Languages change and evolve on their own, and making changes to technical terms that have already made it into common household usage is ridiculous and implausible. Just another waste of time, money and effort. They probably been working on this plan since we had 32 "kibibytes" of RAM.
TheGeek
http://www.geekrights.org
TheGeek
http://www.geekrights.org
Kill the monkey
Don Knuth's ideas for a "large Kilobyte", etc. are just more proof that he is in some way more brilliant than the rest of us. Kibibyte? No way!! That's almost as hard to pronounce as "Knuth"!
Indeed. It's way to late to change the terminology. BUT, It's not too late for manufacturers to have to come clean about them ripping us off.
If [insert drive vendor here] were to start slapping a label on their 21474836480 byte disks that said "20 TRUE Gigabytes of capacity!" with a little inforgraphic on how the others are ripping you off, we could be very sure that the rest of the vendors would soon follow suit. This doesn't address the fact that we're talking about powers of 2 not powers of ten but it will at least be a start.
-Rich
Non-topic, I know.. just want to know because I can't get to it at the moment.. :(
In a flash I got 134.217728 megabytes of RAM in my PC instead of 128! Isn't it cool?
when I had that old M6502-based Kim-1 with 1 KB of RAM...
---
"Go Metallica. Die RIAA." -- Linus Torvalds
Kind of makes you feel old, doesn't it? Next thing you know they won't know what a paper tape reader looks like.
me and my friends have been calling them "metric megs" and "binary megs" for a while. although with frequent use, one has became commonly called "metric megs bleegh" :)
I can't wait till i start seeing the disk drives saying gibibytes and confusing people. We shall finally know who exactly is ripping us off. I know i hate it when i get only 60 megs of memory.
Lycestra
octet 2^0*8 bite
kibioctet 2^10*8 bits
mebioctet 2^20*8 bits
tebioctet 2^30*8 bits
We can't get the general public to stop saying "hacker" when they mean "cracker". How can we expect them to get this?
Pretend there is some witty statement here.
Mesa called Jar Jar Binks. Mesa measure memories inna mebibytes, and da gibibytes, and da kibibytes!
l .com
How rude!!! Yousa says Iomegasa tinks a MB essa a 1,000,000 bytesa??!?! Ex-squeeeeeeze me!!!!
-------------
Mike Kramlich
ramadeus@humans_can_remove_this_part.dimensiona
I'm all in favor of the changes.
When you buy a hard drive that is 20GB, how big is it?
20,000,000,000 bytes? (20*10**9)
21,474,836,480 bytes? (20*2**30)
Note that the difference is over 1.4 billion bytes. (Over a Gigabyte, by any definition).
To me, this is a significant difference, and a flaw in the terminology. As sizes grow, the difference between the standard metric prefix definitions (where mega=1 million and giga=1 billion) will grow exponentially from the actual terms we are using.
I'd also like to see people become more aware of these things and more conscious of using them. There is a lot of terminology confusion in the market.
Modems, historically, have been labelled in 'bit' transmission rates, rather than bytes. It is important to know the difference between 10MB/sec and 10Mb/sec; 10MB/sec = 80Mb/sec
Also, capital M, please. You have 128MB, not 128mb. Small m means 'milli', or one thousandth. Capital M means 'mega'. The metric system is well defined, but these small abuses diminish its worth.
I have always understood kilobyte to be 1024 bites, megabyte to be 1024^2 bytes, etc; and when I realized that diskmakers were misusing the words I actively considered trying to sue the diskmakers for false advertizing (still think they should be sued, I just don't have the money to do it)
Kilobyte, etc should be strictly defined as NOT powers of 10! That would make the problem go away (poof)
-------------------------------------Another interesting thing that some group should do is come up with a system for speaking in hexideciaml. If we could speak in hex, then we could think in hex, and one of the biggest kludges of all time (actively using the decimal system) would go away.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Actually, the visual difference is in the spacing between the number and the unit abbreviation. Meaning that
1MB and
1 MB
is not the same thing. This is ALREADY an IEEE standard. However it is kind of a dumb standard because it is not very obvious and most people do not expect the difference to be in the spacing.
_________________________
Words of Wisdom:
Never pet a burning dog.
When people talk about bandwidth, they often refer to Gigabits of information. Everyone's chins drop to the floor because they just heard the word Giga and they picture their 4 Gigabyte drive squeezing through a network line in seconds...
Gibi/kibi/mibi bits??? It's bad enough already. Plus those words do suck to pronounce.
The truth is more important than the facts.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
You can pick us programmers when we start speaking in code, but things like "!=" aren't especially more interesting than things like ":-)".
It's part of the net culture, so deal with it =P
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
No.
Bad Idea(tm).
Bits are one thing that you can't have fractions of.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
!= is not a C-ism : it's just looks rathar a lot like 'does not equal' sign, which the C operator happens to make use of as well.
Then again, we're talking about one of the only places of the world that was incapable of incorporating the metric system into their society...
Yes, we should incorporate it! I can just see Stephen King retitling his series of books about John Coffey, The Green Kilometer.
Or Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, being rewritten to say, "The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, / but I have promises to keep, / and kilometers to go before I sleep, / and kilometers to go before I sleep."
There is nothing wrong with having two, or even more, distinct systems of measurement, provided you can tell them apart! That is, of course, the point of changing these abbreviations.
-- An Ayn-onymous Coward
christ i feel dumb now.
maybe i should refrain from posting before my coffee...
#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}
F(#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}%cF(%s))
I was telling people, myself, to differentiate between "long megabytes" and "short megabytes," sort of like long tons (2240 pounds) and short tons (2000 pounds), before I even read Knuth. He recommends the use of "large megabytes" and "large gigabytes," but that implies "small megabytes" and "small gigabytes," and that begins to sound like an oxymoron once you start getting up there in size. ("small" yoctobytes?) I like "short" better.
I do like Knuth's idea of doubling the prefixes (MMB, GGB, etc.) to connote both binaryness and largeness. I hadn't thought of prefixes. Way to go, Knuth!
I think I'll adopt Knuth's standards, but with "long" and "short." And then we will finally do away with the kind of "false advertising" disk drive manufacturers have been doing for years. (I remember how disappointed I was the first time I found out they were doing this. I felt ripped off!)
-- an Ayn-onymous Coward (not everything is politics!)
I've been using these terms for over a decade and I'll be damned if I'm going to change now. they can just blow me (In an industry approved ISO9600 Fashion.)
With binary units might it be best to stick with binary?
Certain base numbersystems are best for certain tasks, base 10 isn't especialy good for anything.
As soon as I come up with a convincing way to speak in hexidecimal or octal I'll no longer use base 10 as my primary number system.
I may even have to do a writeup and attempt to get it posted as a news story here.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
none of those sites actually specify just what, or who, Kibo _is_. I wondered the same thing myself once, and ended up concluding that "Kibo" is some sort of metaquestion, the answer to which does not exist.
Geeks already have enough stuttering problems. We don't need any more hard-to-say terms mucking with our ability to avoid sounding like a 2-year-old. "I'd like 512 Mebb-mebibibib-eeebibytes of RAM, and a 21 Giga, er, googa, I mean, giBIBBIbyte hard drive. I'm building a Lihnooks, um, Lig NUX, uh, LeeNix baux." Yeah.
:)
On the other hand, I once heard someone stutter in the coolest possible way, while saying "check it", or rather "ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-check it" (with lightning speed!). But I'm way off-topic now.
But aren't giga, tera, etc. derived from words meaning giant, monster, and not any power of 10?
-----------
-----------
100% pure freak
How 'bout this: we already say "hey, I've got 128 megs of RAM" or "that's a 2 gig drive." So instead of changing decimal prefixes to something silly sounding, why don't we just "officialize" the current jargon like so:
1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes
1 meg = 1024 * 1024 bytes
1 gig = 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bytes
Ok, so we may need to revisit kilo and tera, but I like this better....
Wrong. 10 megabit Ethernet is 10*10^6 bits/s. In communication engineering, kilo is 10^3, mega is 10^6, giga is 10^9. Rates are specified as bits/s or symbols/s.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
English? To cite from "My fair Lady": In America, they haven't spoen it for years.
Of course, by my suggestion, you *can* do both. Memory is "32MB" while a Zip disk could be 100 mB, to distinguish a "true" binary-based "mega" from a decimal-based one. The key here is to use whatever system makes the most sense. In specifying memory size, maybe binary makes sense. In displaying a file size while showing only the most significant digits, decimal makes more sense.
Uh... of course, people actually used to SI/Metric might read mB as milliBytes as lowercase "m" is the prefix abbreviation for milli (1/1000). Not that a millibyte makes any sense, but it adds another level of possible confusion. At least KiB et al are different enough to survive capitalisation mangling.
--
--
The Internet is the Suppository of All Knowledge. You get it in the end.
Sorry to disappoint you, but fractional bits make a lot of sense. Think a bit about information theory.
several people have correctly pointed out that "m" and "M" already have different meanings in SI units...silly me, I totally forgot that (if I still did any EE stuff I probably wouldn't have :-) )
So, maybe Knuth does have the answer (no real surprise there). Use "K" for 1000, "KK" for 1024. And so forth.
Dunno. S'long as I don't get confused when reading stuff on the screen, I'd be happy.
They'd say you lose 1.475GB :)
It's just too late to change things now. KB=*1024 and MB=*1024^2 etc. are just too entrenched and aren't going away.
If they really want to fix measurements, fix the calendar. Months of 30 days, 31 days, 28 or 29 days? Leap years every fourth year, but not every 100th, but again every 400th? Not THIS is a messed up system in need of repair. May I suggest 13 months of 28 days each, plus one or two "year end days" to take up slack. And what's with this ANCIENT sexagesimal base 60 system we have for measuring hours, minutes, and seconds (used for time and angular measurements). Where was the great metric base 10 revolution when it comes to time? Why not 10 hours in a day of 100 minutes of 100 seconds each?
Uhm, it isn't the term "kibibytes" that is coined -- it is "kibi". It can be applied to all units, e.g. "there's 1 kibimeter to the city from here".
People who don't know binary shouldn't be allowed near computers.
I'm all for engineering notation here (scientific notation with the exponent forced to multiples of 3 - makes real world transformations much less error-prone, which, after all is why it was developed.)
The *correct* meaning of "Giga" is completely unambiguous: it's 1 x 10^9. Why is it that the traditional CS "computer twit" types insist on the sorts of ridiculous abbreviations and approximations that the rest of us know will sooner or later land them in trouble? 2^10 != 10^3, and it never has. This is just plain lazy usage - the terms "kilo", "mega", etc. should NEVER have been twisted in this way. Let's just toss base-2 nomenclature for good NOW while we can.
e.g.: Why is Y2K an abbreviation? Isn't that the tinking that got us into this mess in the first place? (I'm all for at least five digit year fields, or maybe ints, or maybe even long ints... [grin])
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
As was brought up a long time ago, this system brings rise to "Gibs" being the spoken short form of Gibibytes... Let ut not forget
...
Kibs, Mibs, Tibs,
I think this brings new meaning to "Kibble and bits and bits and bits".
More Caffeine. NOW
This makes things easier, and clearer. Now those hard drive companies can't try to trick the not so bright...
Hm, maybe =/= will do? :)
Glytch sez:
Never mind that...would Macintoshes label Chibi-bytes as Sammy-bytes? Would TurboLinux start describing things in terms of Kerbybytes (making it REALLY confusing if you happened to be running Kerberos)? Would we have sama-bytes and sensei-bytes and chan-bytes? :)
OK, so it's blatantly obvious that I watch more anime than is generally regarded as healthy. :) I'll also note that, as a rule, I genreally can't watch more than about five minutes of Sailor Moon without bleeding eardrums and/or tooth decay setting in, and I prefer shows that take the piss of magical princess shows (like Magical Girl Pretty Sammy--actually a Tenchi Muyo spinoff--or Card Captor Sakura (yeah, it's magical princess, but not tooth-decay inducing)...).
ObSlashdot: Yes, there are computer puns/references above. Kerberos (aka Kerby-chan) in Card Captor Sakura appears as a winged stuffed lion thingie (a very kawaii stuffed lion thingie) whilst Pretty Sammy is in general a pretty savage satire of Sailor Moon in general and (in episode 2) has an extremely wicked funny parody of Microsoft :) (Which is even funnier when you realise the two best-supported OS's for Kanji are MacOS and TurboLinux, and the Japanese version of Win95/98 blows goats even worse than the American version--to the point many Japanese consider it literally unusable...:)
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
Usage, not standards or flamewars, will decide which words survive. Use the best word for the job. Is your goal to communicate or to obfuscate? Are you talking to nerds or avrage joes?
The prefix Giga is really supposed to be pronounced 'Jiga', like Doc and Marty in 'Back to the Future' ( 1 POINT 21 GIGAWATTS?!?! WHAT THE HELL IS A GIGAWATT! ), and people don't pronounce _that_ correctly -- I mean, who wants a 10 'Jig' Hard Drive.. :) Compared to this, the new prefixes look like they WANT us to mis-pronounce them...
A computer without Microsoft is like ice cream without ketchup.
Your comment is correct for bits. But, all during my career in the computer field (22 years and counting), BYTES -- not bits -- has ALWAYS been defined in terms of base-2 values, e.g.:
...and so on...
1 * 2^10 = 1 Kilobyte
1 * 2^20 = 1 Megabyte
1 * 2^30 = 1 Gigabyte
1 * 2^40 = 1 Terabyte
1 * 2^50 = 1 Petabyte
1 * 2^60 = 1 Exabyte
It's only the hard drive makers, starting with the IBM PC/XT, that screwed with the definition to inflate their X-byte capacity claims.
I think the confusion here is whether one is talking about bits or bytes. The engineers are talking bits; the programmers bytes.
Very simple, very logical, and very consistant with the spirit of the original meanings.
The hard disk industry has been around for decades longer than the PC industry. The metric system has been around since the French revolution. The prefixes are from a language that's millenia old. Now, tell me again how hard disk manufacturers are being inconsistent with the original meanings?
The reason why we use bytes is plain and simple. A byte is the smallest unit of data which you can store. Until computers change so that you can store 2 bits of information instead of those 2 bits using a byte we will still use bytes. Some people may point out that modems are rated in bits. That is because the same logic holds, you can just transmit 2 bits without sending the extra 6 to make up the byte.
I'd like to point out that companies like Maxtor and other harddisk manufacturers are part of the computer industry. The entire problem with using powers of 2 vs powers of 10 is the inconsistency. If powers of 2 were used always in a computer context, there would not have been a proposal for kibi and friends.
--- Abigail
How many vibrations/sec is a MHz?
00mB, according to convention, would represent 100 milliBytes...
...or about 1/10 byte. Since 1024 is about 1000, and 1/8 is about 1/10, I declare that 100mB = 1b.
Early hard disks did not use powers of 2 for allocation. For example the IBM 2311 had 3625 bytes per track (or fewer, depending upon how *the application* chose to format the track).
Umm... great idea!
Seriously, is anyone here gonna buy a HD measured in gibibytes? Sounds like something a kid would talk about.
"Yeah, I got a 50 gibi HD yesterday"
Or maybe you'd say 50 gib. Are these people BeeGees fans or something?
Glad to know that we use the same clock when Zuul was hot stuff. Not. It is astounding that the world agrees on time units for the second, minute, hour, and day. What other divisions for the day were there in other socities? Or was it never really quantified beyone morning afternoon evening night?
(nester is too lazy to log in) here's a crazy idea: make megabytes 1024 kilobytes, kilobytes 1024bytes, etc. why come up with new prefixes? they should just declare standards for the existing ones.
Hard drive makers.
Ever since the invention of the term "byte," it's been understood that it's powers of two, at least by the technical community.
By using a word construct like [prefix]byte, you know it's power of two. Of course, since the general population is full of clueless lusers, the hard drive companies started using the terms such as megabyte and using the terms under their SI meanings... powers of ten. Why? Because the numbers are smaller, and the public will assume it's "computer" numbers, and not "metric" numbers. Of course, when people complain the hard drive manufacturers can say "but 'mega' means million, not one million, forty-eight thousand, five hundred seventy-six."
I counterpropose that we make hard drive manufacturers adhere to the 2^10 kilo system.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Here is my favorite solution, feel free to start using: use bit as the basic unit of information. kb, Mb, Gb are already in wide use in datacom. The prefixes are as they should be. I have understood that it is widely used in information theory, giving it a solid background, like physics does to other SI-units.
Please somebody tell me that the Teletubbies havn't invaded computer jargon...
More to the point, which inspiring person came up with theses names... kibibytes... OK computer jargon doesn't sound good at the best of times but even so... kibibytes... kiddybites, the new, tasty snack from Haribo...
Why not invent a new word from bytes ? I'm not known for my imagination, but woulnd't something like kilobets or kilobats (going along the lines of B-i-T-s B-y-T-e-s...
The names proposed sound like they were dreamed up by someone who was a bit tipsy at the time. Unless we all enter a state of perpetual drunkenness (which has its moments), I wager that this will fade away. Like the U.S. attempt to convert to metrics. I use metrics just a little more frequently than I do ergs and slugs.
As an Electrical/Computer, I readily admit that IEEE has made some REALLY stupid standardizations in the past. Look up what they use for and and or gates in terms of notation...it sucks...
JoeLinux
All the quake fans can stand up and cheer ... now I can have a 10 Gib hard drive!
I agree! AFAIK a byte is not an SI unit. So adding kilo to doesn't change that fact. So we have accepted that 1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes and 1 megabyte = 1024 kilobytes. It is the hard drive companies that are in the wrong. If they want thier "industry standard" to be something other than what is accepted usage then they should change thier nomenclature. some other folks here have suggested some possible words. Mine are maybebytes(mbB), mightbebytes(MbB) and bugbites(oucH).
does this mean it'll seem like i have more p0rn and mp3's? why doesn't anyone take me seriously?
This reminds me of when the Police (the band, not the blueshirts) put out a song called "Ah Doo Doo Doo, Ah Da Da Da" specifically because they thought it would be funny to hear a bunch of the boss jocks try to say it and still sound cool. It will take a lot longer to get popular simply because a lot of alpha geeks out there wouldn't be caught dead talking about their code in terms of kibis & bits.
Another problem I have with this system is that it is still tied to the base10 numbering system, setting the markers around every three tens place. Admittedly, this is the way we think about them currently, but let's apply a little Sapir Whorf, eh?
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
trying repeating the newly proposed terms to yourself. They don't exactly roll off the tongue, do they? I'm not suggesting the currently accepted terms are smoothly enunciated, but they're much easier than "MEH-BIH-BTYE". What would the shortened form be anyway, Meb? c'mon. Perhaps it's just that I (as well as the rest of us) am used to the current terms and their shortenings (meg, gig)...I am of the opinion vendors should standardize upon the classic definition of 2^x bytes instead of 10^x.
"World domination...and scantily clad females, of course. Who cares if it's below zero outside?" -Linus Torvalds
after more than 15 years of common usage,
the vocabulary is certainly not going to change...
Just always assume that the capacity is
expressed in billions of bytes when buying
a hard drive. And don't worry that some
company might be at a disadvantage compared
to others because it uses the correct definition
of 'Gb': none of them do.
This is bad. The sales people at CompUSA and Best Buy are going to need at two weeks of training to learn this new system. I can just hear it know. Oh, you don't want to buy that computer. It uses the old GB HD and MB memory. They don't make those anymore. You want to buy this newer system.
Take a look at http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~knuth/news.html to see what Don Knuth has to say about this.
Nice try, but I imagine /. is out of his jurisdiction. I doubt kibo will reply.
-Chris
(hey, if you get a response from him, i want one too)
Instead of changing the recognized power-of-two nomenclature, simply introduce a couple new units *for use with hard drives*
1 Kilobyte would still be 1024 bytes, etc.
The new units:
Weaselbyte (WB) - 1,000,000,000 bytes (The HD industry Gig)
Slimybyte (SB) - 1,000,000,000,000 bytes (When drives get that big)
Who knows - the HD manufacturers might get sick enough of having to say "The new standard in storage - the RonCo Flame Muffin 7200 RPM Hard Drive - Features Capacity up to 100 Weaselbytes!" that they would start reporting sizes like normal people.
Not that it really affects the discussion much, but this is news that has been floating around for a long while.
K ibibytes_A_New_HighTech
9 03.htm#Information Technology
the Rapidly Changing Face of Computing did an article on this
http://www.digital.com/info/rcfoc/19990329.htm#
Which has a link to the original source
http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/techbeat/tb9
Not that I really mind too much, but this dates back to March of this year!
Apart from that, I think the names sound pretty odd - don't you? I agree with Jeff Harrow from RCFOC who says that a Kibibyte sounds like a type of dogfood.
Oh well, like most things of this nature, I guess nobody will really ever use them except to show off their knowledge. (That'll be me then!)
A little planning goes a long way...
Yeah, I noticed this at a funeral service. Having minimal experience with listening to Finnish, I was rather confused when I heard "poika" as "boiga."
Or, in a table: (bad formatting courtesy of slashdot.org)
Old New My system
--- --- ---------
1kB 1kiB 1kB
1MB 1MiB 1MB
1GB 1GiB 1GB
1TB 1TiB 1TB
1PB 1PiB 1PB
1EX 1EiB 1EB
I think the advantages are obvious.
--- Abigail
Knuth's idea for MMB and GGB, along with this guys idea for "long" and "short" is great. We, the slashdot community, need to start using them EVERY DAY. That is how things change, and we can make it happen
blach
The current standard is not a 'perfectly good, working standard. The current standard leaves a lot of room for miscommunication and misunderstanding.
Computers use zero-based counting are usually binary - which means byte-boundaries occur in powers of two.
This is fine as long as you are only looking at it from a 'computer' centric viewpoint. However, there is a lot of confusion when the 'computer' viewpoint interfaces with other viewpoints, e.g. the telecommunications industry.
How long does a 56M file take to transfer over a 56K link, assuming no overhead? The first confusing factor is that computers tend to use bytes while telecomm always uses bits. The second confusing factor is that telecomm always uses the base 10 definition of k, M, G while the computers use the base 2 definition.
If the average idi^H^H^Hperson can't understand this simple fact, Steve Jobs would love to sell them their next computer.
The inet-access mailing list, a mailling list for ISPs has many flame wars that boil down to a misunderstanding of the k, M, G definitions. These people are not your average idi^H^H^Hperson. Very few on the list are Mac/Window users.
I feel like picking a fight with everyone who thinks they are right. - Rainmakers
The prefixes isn't really anything new. This was talked about almost a year ago, even though I don't know if it reached Slashdot and the slashdot community.
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
1 bit = bit
:-P
8 bits = byte
1024 bytes= 'K' (kay?)
1024 K = Meg
1024 Meg= Gig
And let SI terminology stay the way it's always been. Of course, I don't know what abreviation we'll use for terrabyte. ter? I vote 'T'.
M'KAY?
lsmvcprm.com, Tools for geek power
10**6 is almost 50k(47.someodd) less than 2**20... So on a 1 gig drive they save themselves 47,437k, or almost 50 meg. Doesn't sound like alot these days, but that means we're losing 1 gig on every 20 gig drive we buy...
Why not use ~Gb, ~Mb, ~Kb for the common "nearest
binary multiple" usages? ~ means "about", and it
could be pronounced like the ! in !Kung, as a nice
little click. That should stop the abuse of the
giga-, mega- and kilo- prefixes except by those masochists who enjoy frequent trips to the throat
doctor. Think of the technological advantage it
would give certain indigenous African tribesmen!
On a slightly more serious tack, memory could be
specified as log8(Bytes), more or less the same
as pH (but different)
Kb -> 10 p8B
Mb -> 20 p8B
Gb -> 30 p8B
Tb -> 40 p8B
128 Mb -> 27 p8B
96 Mb gets messy though, as it's 26.something,
maybe better to represent it as (26,25) p8B, which
besides being slightly ugly, is an exact representation of the amount of memory involved.
One last suggestion, which is almost the same,
is prefix + number of zeroes in the binary.
Don't know what to call that method (maybe a Giggle, as it's sort of like a Google). Write
it as a ZB for now (zeroes, binary).
1 40ZB is a "Terabyte."
At least 96 mb isn't a problem, its just 11 25ZB.
Amazingly, none of these offend me more than the actual proposal.
Still, if you think you're grandmother is lost trying to figure out how many Megabytes are in
her computer, wait until she has to base 8 logs
are count the trailing zeroes in binary numbers.
Why do we need to conform to SI when Kilobyte and Megabyte doesn't have prefixes anyway.
These are just single words with the following definitions: Kilobyte = 1024 bytes; Megabytes = 1024 Kilobytes.
We don't try to disassemble "re-ally" (to go into the ally again?), so why should we assume Giga-bytes.
//yeah, whatever
Yes, in Catalan is the same way. And the US way is not used in Spain either, as fas as I know.
Marc Ordinas i Llopis
This whole thing is a plot perpetrated by the "MiB" led by an attractive Will Smith look-alike. The plot is to "gib" people they think are too smart.
hmmm...noisy cricket as a Quake III weapon. Interesting.
--
(sourceCode == freeSpeech)
My ls, "ls (GNU fileutils) 3.16", doesn't have that option. I tried before I posted of course. Strange that fileutils-3.16 would have it for df but not ls. Guess it's time to upgrade to 4.0.
Why on earth would anyone consider this? This is a function of the engineering community being driven by corporate interests. Why would anyone need some new definition? Not to mention ones with ridiculous names. A megabyte is already defined, it's just that certain companies purposely misinterpret it to their advantage.
Mega = 10^6
Byte=8 bits
MegaByte= 8E6 Bits
wow! that was difficult............
The names were so dumb, I reread the posting carefully with my joke detectors on high alert. I finally concluded it was serious. Reminds me of the "tongue troops" in France and Quebec, protecting the purity of their mother tongue by discouraging certain words (e.g. "weekend") that invaded from another language.
It is milliard in English, as you say, but I've never ever heard this word used.
--
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
the fact that such a file does not exist, does not mean that a millibyte can never be used. theoretically, a (very slow) connection can be
20 millibyte/second. On the other hand, redefining kilobyte to mean 1024 bytes by definition would be quite possible. same happened to the basic unit of mass, the kilogram (NOT gram), although the change for kilobyte would be slightly larger. not a problem though.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
These prefixes are part of the universally accepted SI standard. Ever heard of kilometer or kilogram?
They actually have their roots in the ancient greek language, e.g. the prefix 'kilo' has been derived from the greek word 'chilioi' denoting the number 1000 (I'm not sure if the transliteration is correct though).
There's not a snowball's chance in hell that these prefixes will change anytime soon.
Firstly, Knuth has recently proposed a solution to this problem, where 'kilobyte' = 10 ** 3 bytes, and 'large kilobyte' = 2**10 bytes: see 'What is a kilobyte?' at his news page.
Secondly, the main reason hard disk manufacturers prefer the smaller decimal units is that it makes their disks sound bigger.
Thirdly, I believe that there is a difference in captialization for 'kilobyte' depending on which kind you mean. 1 kB = 1000 bytes, but 1 KB = 1024 bytes. (Don't forget also that the abbreviation for 'byte' is 'B'; lowercase 'b' is for 'bit'.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Where does base eight come in? Those are all powers of two. For 8^x = 1024, x = 10/3.
From what I understand - frequencies, being measured in powers of 10, will still be Kilo-cycles, Mega, Giga, etc. Only the powers of 2 will get new monikers. Just so's nobody will think 1 Kilocycle = 1024 cps. But I may be hallucinating again.
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Maybe its just me, but I saw KiB, MiB and GiB and thought 'Kids in Black', 'Men in Black' and 'Geeks in Black' .. a nice analogy for us .. getting smarter (storage capacity?) increased your status ..
Maybe.
I definately like the idea - especially after the arguement I had with my husband on whether to partition 2000 MB for a 2GB partition, or 2048MB. But 'kibibytes'? 'mebibytes'? 'gibibytes'? Could they have chosen *anything* that would have been more confusing?
;)
I assure you, there is not a single Finn in existence who could pronounce "gibi" so clearly that no-one would confuse it with "kibi"... keeping k & g (and b & p) distinct is hard enough for us as it is, we sure as hell don't need this! ]:-O
kibi gipi kipi gibi kipi kibi gibi gipi kipi kibi -- NYAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGHHHHH!!!
(This is actually my first post to Slashdot ever - couldn't have gone to better use.
it mebi bytes or it might be somthing else :)
On how many firkins of gasoline? (See also the Jargon file.)
Are there any pictures of the cluster available?
--
Everything I know in life I learnt from
"Moron" is certainly a more common word than "milliard" (which I have *never* heard in actual use, only read in a few discussions of the meaning of billion). If you're going to flame people for exhibiting the same sort of ignorance you demonstrably suffer from, it's probably best not to expect anyone to take you seriously. As far as "cowboy" colonists, you're off by a century or three (depending on who qualifies).
I hate the new names. They are so hard to pronounce. Given that we all know the difference between the SI meaning of the Greek prefixes and the computer memory meaning, I think the old names should stay.
All we need is legislation to force the HD manufacturers to stick to the powers-of-two convention universally used with computers.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
The problem isn't the words, it's how the numbers change drastically when you apply the suffix.
Yesterday I was copying images from a Linux box to NT for a CD, and was concerned that the files hadn't copied. "ls" showed something like "613,123,456" bytes, while the detail list in Explorer said "598 MB" and the status-bar said "584,720 KB". So, if I look at the most significant digits (the first check to see if the file's copied), I see either 613, 598, or 584, depending on where I look. Now tell me that any "normal" user is going to understand that distinction!
In a base-10 system, however, 613,123,456 B ~= 613,124 kB ~= 613 mB, so the numbers at least *look* similar.
Is there any reason we really need to do things in binary for this? I mean, you and I don't really give a damn that a disk contains exactly N multiples of a 10-bit word of bytes, we care how many bytes total are on it. And, in a decimal society, we use powers of 10 to see that.
Maybe we could stick with capital K for base-10, and lowercase k for base-2 (or reverse, I don't remember the "official" case for base-10 units). Kind of like how 'b' means bits or bytes, depending. Let's just make it clear, eh?
The monitor manufacturers are finally getting with the program for visible area measurements, maybe the same thing could happen here ("A 2.5gB drive (2.5 billion bytes)" or "2.6 GB (2.684 billion bytes)").
Anyone else read that as "Kibobyte"? We really ;-)
want a computer term that closely related to
Kibo??
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Unfortunately, I think that these new terms will have as much success in gaining widespread success as the term "cracker" versus "hacker" Magabyte and gigabyte are just far too entrenched.
This isn't to say that this isn't a good idea. But good luck in transforming the mutilating power of the English language. :^)
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
The bit *IS* the basic unit of information.. Look up planks constant.
My Buick gets 4 cords per the furlong and that's the way I like it - Abraham Simpson
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Apparently the new specification was outlined by Mushmouth from the Fat Albert cartoon. No thanks.. I'll pass on this one.
Bowie
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
I hadn't thought of that before. This de-escalates the matter to some extend. But... how do you pronounce the difference?
It's only the hard disk makers (and other permanent storage types like Iomega) that consider a megabyte to be 10^6 bytes. Everything else is with respect to base 2. 10 megabit Ethernet refers to 2^20 bits (not bytes), 128 MB of RAM would be 128 * 2^20 bytes, etc., etc. It's only the hard disk makers who hit on this years ago as a marketing gag to make their disks look a little bit bigger. it's really inane of them considering the rest of the computer world uses base 2 for everything.
--sam
--sam
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
This will never work. The USA couldn't even successfully adopt the metric system! (Carter tried in the 70s. It failed miserably.)
Manufacturers always use the measuring system that sounds best. Because of this, hard disks have been measured in "metric gigas" since a lot of years now.
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
-H, --si == likewise, but use powers of 1000 not 1024
GNU fileutils 4.0, November 1998
Well, in Linux anyhow, I notice FreeBSD uses 4th Berkeley Distribution, May 8, 1995, and my IRIX boxes are totally out of date, I can't tell what OSF1 is using, but it doesn't support -h or -H either.
I don't really care what other people call the space on my hard drive, as long as I get what I paid for. I bought a 2.1 gig drive with my computer, and two OS's say it's 1.8. I'm sorry, I don't have that much swap space. :)
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
Imagine calling the new OS "Windows 2kibi" :)
(Could be more accurate, as may not be fully released till 2048
and..
0,1024,0 is a Star Wars Character (Oh-b- one-ki- no-b)
--
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
Interesting suggestion, however, totally crappy choice of prefixes. Disgusting. You'll never catch me saying that crap (I hope.....).
A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling by Mark Twain For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
No, no, no! It's:
"My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!" -- Abraham Simpson
Look it up.
For more information, click here.
Yes we all agree that the current system is not perfect, and I'm sure most of us get confused when we see our drive size listed in kilobytes. (I know I just estimate by powers of 10). However, although we may live in a decimal society, the computer does not.
If we change the meaning of kB on a disk, then why not do the same for memory? Is 1 MB of memory 1000 kB, or is 1GB = 1000MB? Of course not. The numbers are usually small enough that we can figure that out, but with your system, we'd have to change everything to avoid confusion. Now, how big is an int or a char? Well heck, I just don't remember.
While I agree that they could have picked better names, I agree that the change needs to be made. Things in computers are measured in powers of 2 not powers of 10. Get over it.
Everybody Sing Along....
:-)
Here comes the mibibyte...
Too much to remember..
Na-na-na-na
The good guys dress in black, remember that
In case we ever face-to-face in a deathmatch
The prefix MiB means 10 ** (2*#)
Etc, etc...fill in the blanks yourself.
For the uninitiated, a European billion is a million million (10^12), a European trillion is 10^18, and so on. The mere fact that I don't have to explain the US system shows how pervasive it is.
This is one reason why the SI units and prefixes are important - they are well-defined, where as words like 'billion' can mean anything. I think I would probably agree with what this group is trying to do if wasn't so stupidly late.
Personally, I'd be quite happy with billions, pints and gallons if they actually meant the same thing everywhere, but they don't.
--
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
In the Boy Scouts, KYBO means "keep your bowels open". So what do "Kibobytes" mean?
I think I buy that brand of food for my cat! However, she's starting to get a little chubby, so I think I'm going to switch to kibibytes...they're lower in fat I hear.
Cmon, really... I certianly hope these guys aren't being PAYED to sit around and come up with goofy ideas like this.
Just try to say kibobyte or mebibyte aloud.
Do we really need people whose function is to sit around coming up with pseuso-profound but completely useless ideas?
How hard is it to grasp the fact that 1K == 1024 bytes?
Hell, I understood this when I was six and it was a big deal to have 48K in my dad's Apple ][, and a whole megabyte (1024 kilobytes, also a no-brainer) would have bankrupted my family!!!
Imagine all the people...
> If we change the meaning of kB on a disk,
:-) )
> then why not do the same for memory?
why not? what does it harm? All we're changing is how things are displayed to the user, to make it actually *make sense*. However, I do agree that memory chip boundaries actually are on binary breaks, so it might make more sense there.
Of course, by my suggestion, you *can* do both. Memory is "32MB" while a Zip disk could be 100 mB, to distinguish a "true" binary-based "mega" from a decimal-based one. The key here is to use whatever system makes the most sense. In specifying memory size, maybe binary makes sense. In displaying a file size while showing only the most significant digits, decimal makes more sense.
> Things in computers are measured in powers
> of 2 not powers of 10. Get over it.
Are they? Where do you actually "measure" anything on a computer, other than in an end-user display? If I declare an array to have 1k of elements, I don't say "int foo(1k)" I say "int foo(1024)" (or something, been a while for me.
mebibyte pronounces like maybe byte
hahahahahaha,
But seriously, why increase the number of obscure acronyms. I mean computers are already confusing enough normal people.
Jilles
> I'm just getting used to MegaHertz instead of
;)
> Megacycles
Dont you mean Megacycles per second };)
This new software was tested really thoroughly wasn`t it
goo goo gaa gaa mebibyte
Hey! I submitted this four months ago. I suppose you have to be one of the Illumanati to get posted on /. Anonymous Kevin -------------------------------------------------- From my outbox: In the April 1999 issue of InTech magazine (for the Factory Automation crowd), the following article caught my eye. I've included the complete blurb below. I don't know about you, but it sounds pretty stupid to me. ================================================== ======= Goodbye kilo, mega, and giga; hello kibi, mebi, and gibi The International Electrotechnical Commission, which writes international standards for electronic technologies, will adopt new prefixes to accurately express the values of quantities used in information technology. Gone are kilo mega, and giga bytes. In (with input from the National Institute of Standards and Technology), are kibi (Ki), mebi (Mi), gibi (Gi), tebi (Ti), pebi (Pi), and exbi (Ei) to represent exponentially increasing binary multiples. A kibibyte, therefore, equals 2 to the 10th power, ro 1,024 bytes. Likewise, a mebibyte equals 2 to the 20th power, or 1,048,576 bytes. The new prefixes will increase precision in expressing electronic information. The discrepancy stems from the need to write electronic information in binary code, using only two digits, ones and zeros, while the metric system is based on 10 digits. To describe large numbers of bytes, programmers used the closest approximate metric prefixes available at the time. ------------------------------------------------
I'm going to have to disagree. First of all, we're talking about technical terminology, not ordinary language. Technical terminology exists because, by definition, technical terms require unambiguous meaning. This is what distinguishes them from ordinary language, and which is why jargon is, unfortunately, essential in areas like science. Physics, for example, requires very precise definitions of energy, momentum, etc. These terms aren't permitted to "evolve" like ordinary language does, they can only be changed by an explicit consensus of the community.
Second of all, the terminology isn't being re-defined in this case, it's simply being restricted to one of two possible interpretations, the one which is consistent with the rest of the metric system. I don't think it's going to blow away the whole computer industry if we force KB and MB to refer strictly to powers of 10.
Then again, we're talking about one of the only places of the world that was incapable of incoporating the metric system into their society, so maybe this humble Canadian is hoping for too much of the U.S.
----
-- Will quantum computers run imaginary-time operating systems?
8E6 Bits == 8 * 10^6 Bits == 8000000 Bits != 262144 Bits
Though you're right in the rest, Megabyte SHOULD mean 1000000 bytes
Definitions of other words may change, but prefixes used to indicate multipliers for standardized units should not, the computer industry is an extreme minority in this case.
Well, no matter which model we choose, 10^x or 2^x
there is this little problem with computers being binary machines -- do you think, it's less confusing to tell the user: "Well, you can upgrade your machine to a whopping 4-dot-294 Gigabytes!"?
I'd like to see the puzzled faces during that moment, thinking "Which nutter ever came up with this screwy figure?" There will be a sort of exception at one level, either we have the "screwy" number of bytes in one kb, the "strange" figure of 1024 kb in one mb, but we'll have a useful figure for address space "4GB flat"; or - we'll have the "cool" 1000 MiBs in 1 GiB, but on the other hand, system address spaces have 'weird' limits like 4.294GB of main memory.
Personally, I'd vote for the SI honouring the computer science business and officially declaring, that with regards to computing the prefixes are based on powers of 2, thereby forcing companies like Maxtor and the like to change to this way.
Unless the basic architecture of CPUs doesn't change to something base-10, we're "screwed" anyway.
Kiwibytes = K from NZ Merrybytes = Happy MB Lunabytes = Moonie TB All In Dew Time http://mountaindew.com
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
Personally, I don't think there's anything confusing about megabyte, gigabyte, etc. It's 2^0, 2^10, 2^20, 2^30, etc. Very simple, very logical, and very consistant with the spirit of the original meanings.
Kikibyte sounds like some Polynesian parrot.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
okay this has been an unwritten standard for years. storage companies want to make their crap seem like it holds more right? so we/they use MB which is 10^6 bytes rather than MBytes or MegaBytes which is 2^20 or 1024*1024 bytes... same thing goes with KB and KBytes... the former being pronounced kay-bees this is also the norm in announcing throughput rates, at least in storage... this is the first question people ask during computer architecture and other comp eng. tests: "how many bytes in a KiloByte?" and usually the prof didn't even think about it. so they say "just tell us your assumptions." Usually they had used 10^3 bytes in a KiloByte and their numbers come out round that way... even though it is technically incorrect...depending on if you spell it "KB" or "Kbyte"
Ahem. In Russian (and probably other slavic languages) 'ebi' would mean 'f@ck' (sorry).
;-)
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Why don't people use hexadecimal in daily life
Possible poll question: is megabyte 10**6 or 2**20?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
It seems more likely that Sailor Moon has invaded the jargon...
Chibi-bytes, anyone?
(hehehe... okay, no one's going to get that, but sometimes you gotta do the jokes just for yourself... forgive me, I watched 15 episodes of Sailor Moon last night!)
Now THAT is a lot of power!
Yeah, well my car will do 35,000 furlongs/fortnight. Deal with that.
geach
I'm curious, why don't we all ask the opinion of experts on how to name the units. Anyone asked Al Gore yet?
> Of course, by my suggestion, you *can* do both.
> Memory is "32MB" while a Zip disk could be 100
> mB, to distinguish a "true" binary-based "mega"
> from a decimal-based one.
What you are proposing is essentially reasonable, to have a different nomenclature for decimal vs. binary numbers. However, mB would be "millibytes", not decimal megabytes. Both M and m are legitimate prefixes (one standing for 10^6 and the other for 10^-3). More preferable to me, and more flexible for future innovations (trinary or whatever other godawful system comes into use for whatever reason) would be a subscript between the prefix and the unit of measure to denote base numbering system, something like:
k2B (where the two is subscripted like in H2O) meaning 2^10 Bytes, while kB would refer to 10^3 bytes. Whether or not you pronounce k2B "kilobytes", "keebiebytes", or whatever doesn't really matter.
Unfortunately we have a legacy that isn't very elegant in any form. Ideally the prefix k would mean power of three, so k2B really ought to mean 2^3 bytes, k3m would mean 3^3 meters, and so on. But (aside from usability issues) there is no way in hell anyone would go for that kind of interpretation, even though the whole schema would be much more flexible and consistent. k was never intended to be x^10, but rather y^3, where y happened to be 10 in our decimal system. "kilo" was used for 2^10 because AFAIK it yielded a value "close" to 10^3. *shrug* The whole nomenclature needs cleaning up, but if the IEEE people are serious, the least they could do would be to pick terminology that doesn't sound so damned silly.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
That means excuse me for the stupid error :))
in my little list
Jilles
I waited for someone to point this out, but no one has, so:
People - there is nothing magical about the definitions of kilobyte and megabyte. the values of kilobytes (1024 bytes), megabytes (1024 * 1024) and so forth were not chosen because they were optimal for computer design! If they were, we'd be using units based on 2**8, 2**16, and 2**32! (DooD! My new harddrive has 2 longs of space! k3wl!!)
1024 and 1024*1024 were chosen as a compromise - as close approximations of 10**3 and 10**6!
The only time the precise difference matters is when you're actually laying out the hardware. At any other time, everyone should just relax!
--
Clear, Dark Skies
I suggest that, since the base is fixed anyway, it would make more sense to strictly use the EXPONENTS. Thus, 2E20 Bytes (formerly 1 MegaByte) would be referred to by its exponent, which is 20. If we stick with the greek language for the time being, the prefixes could look something like this:
valueold denom.new denom.
2E10KiloByte DekaByte
2E20MegaByteIkosaByte
2E30GigaByteTriakontaByte
2E40TeraByteTettarakontaByte
etc.
I agree that the greek version is a bit too long to be practical, though. Of course, we could use any other language to denote the exponents.
Sounds like that the guys who were thinking about this must have been watching the Care Bears or something:
Kibibyte - Kidie Byte?
One thing they are better off doing is creating an IEEE standard to what the current units mean in the computer industry and then let everyone know about it. Though I do understand where they are coming from.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
...that when it came to capacity, 1 Kb was 1024 bytes, but 1Mb was 1024 x 1000 bytes, so 1M = 1000K...
;8]
Perhaps a more worthy poll question would be "do you count off the sizes in `ls -l` in 3s or 2s?"
~Tim
--
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
In the UK, a billion is a million million. In the good old US of A, a billion is only a thousand million.
Now you know why America has so many billionaires...they cheat.
This sig left unintentionally blank.
New measurement: the Megabork. Measures stupidity in committees by the sum of their IQs.
Why must committees break perfectly good, working standards? Computers use zero-based counting are usually binary - which means byte-boundaries occur in powers of two. If the average idi^H^H^Hperson can't understand this simple fact, Steve Jobs would love to sell them their next computer.
I think God's way of seeking vengance is to put everybody on a committee...
--
I am relieved to finally hear that people have noticed this. It came out years ago but as with all paradigm shifts in notation, it takes quite a while to accept it. I, for one, will be much happier when all of these hard drive companies can't exploit this logical loophole when selling drives.
Long Live the Gibibyte!
(2C)||(!2C), That is the question.
Maybebytes: It could be a byte. Then again, it might not.
Gibytes: How many bodies are on the floor after you get done playing Quake.
Kilibytes: What you call somebody who has contributed to the Gibytes of another player.
--
I like the irony. How 'bout kipple-bytes? Apologies to Philip K. Dick... Chipk
What the FBI, SS, NSA, etc. keep telling us:
Keep our bytes open (to their prying eyes).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Uhm, this wouldn't work very well. The SI prefixes are as follows: (pardon the formatting)
prefix ____ abbreviation
kilo ______ k
mega _____ M
giga ______ G
Since kilo is abbreviated 'k', you'd have to either break the SI standard, or make 'K', 'm', and 'g' be in one system, while 'k', 'M', and 'G' are in another system. What a pain.
Besides, personally, I would always parse 'mB' as 'millibytes'.
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
The fact that different manufacturers can't decide on how to describe their disk capacity indicates the need for the IEEE proposal.
I used to laugh when a certain company used to have ads listing their disk drives capacities as ``NNN mB''. (I guess only an engineer would see the humor... Guess it comes from turning to the old ``Technically Speaking'' column in IEEE Spectrum and reading it before any other articles.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
While we're at it, lets make a byte equal 10 bits, not 8. That is so confusing.
So from now on, ads will talk about 64MB RAM and 6.4GB harddisks, instead of 64MB RAM and 6.4GB harddisks.
I agree that it is stupid to try to change the name of a commonly used term like Megabyte, so how about just adding a term to clarify for when it makes a difference like they do with ton and metric ton. A metric megabyte could be 10**6 (metric is always based on tens) while english could be 2**10. The whole reason they don't usually distinguish is that it usually doesn't usually make a difference. "How big is that file?" "About a Megabyte." "English or metric?"
I think ISDN, which is 128kbps, can actually deliver 16KB/sec provided no data is wasted with IP headers and CRC and the like. I think most datacom works on the kilo == 1024 system. Ethernet's speed is related to it's frequency: 10Mbps ethernet operates at 10MHz, sending 1 bit per clock. For ethernet to conform to kilo == 1024, it wouls have to operate at like 10.5MHz, or redefine a MHz as 2**20Hz
This may get nuked for being off-topic, but I'm going to say it anyway. Are we really at the point where even slashdotters don't know who Kibo is??
Admittedly I've not followed the Kibo scene for quite some time, but there was once, way back when, where any mention of Kibo, at any time, in any newsgroup, summoned the Great One. There are probably FAQs on him still, and alt.religion.kibo or something probably still is around, too. But that's who Kibo is.
And he came unto the masses, armed with the power of `grep`!
...Megabytes, Gigabytes, Terabytes, etc? Those prefixes are already capitalized in SI.
The fact that marketing droids abuse their meaning is irrelevant. That's their job; if we started re-defining every word that has been abused by advertisers, we'd all be choosing a whole new language.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
It's obvious to me...
kibblebytes are what AIBO eats.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
Think about this for a moment:
These people want us to use these terms because they believe they conflict with the metric prefixes kilo-, mega-, giga-, etc. But the kilo-, mega-, etc. as prefixes for bytes as in "kilobyte" are completely different from the metric system!
Think about it... In metric, there are also the prefixes hecta- (100), deca- (10), deci- (0.1), milli- (0.001), etc. I just created a file three millibytes long! 0.003bytes? Is that possible? Of course not!
Kilo, mega, giga, etc. just happened to come into use to describe increasing large numbers of bytes. They are based on powers of 1024. They have nothing to do with the SI prefixes, other than the fact that they are close to one thousand, one million, etc., which explains the origin of their names.
I think the distance from my workplace to my house is 10 kibimetres -- 10,240metres. How useful are these new prefixes supposed to be...?
One other thing... When you think about it this way, hard drive manufacturers are indeed lying through their teeth when they say a drive which really has a capacity of 16.8GB is "18gigs."
And what about ctf? You get 50 points for capturing the flag! 50 "Gib"s in one pop? I support that!
I ran into this...
http://sunburn.stanford.edu/~knuth/new s.html
...the other day. It's written by Don Knuth- you know, the guy who wrote "The Art Of Computer Programming" and TeX. (scroll down a page or two)
You can see his thoughts on the matter, but it boils down to- "Why not use KB for 1000 bytes, and KKB for 1024 bytes?"
It makes sense to me, plus his homepage is kindof neat. ;^)=
All in all, I think the new terms suck. I can see why the scientifical types want to have a clear term to use in order to clarify what they're speaking about, but why not then say: "ex-twenty" for two to the twenty exponent, or "ex-forty". If *you're* going to make an international standard that sounds silly, don't make *me* use it. (but maybe that's just the 'merican side of me ;^)=
--Robert (rames@utdallas.edu)
Not to surprise anyone, but disk capacities have been in powers of 10 for some time now, not powers of two. In other words, that 4 GB disk is actually 4*1e9 bytes, which is somewhat less than 2^32 bytes...or about 73MBytes difference.
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