[MLB-WIRELESS] RE: Gigabytes and Gigibytes (argh!)

[Simon Butcher]

<snip>
> Tell me it's not so, a sales person lying to me, I'm in shock....!
> 
> just when I was getting over that 80 gig hdd's aren't really 
> 80 Gigabytes too... tis such a shame :)

Funny, they are actually 80 "gigabytes", but perhaps not 80 "gibibytes",
though. Unfortunately, following the original Greek/Scientific form, the
"does a kilobyte = 1000 or 1024 bytes" confusion has been
"standardised". Now you have:

  1 kilobyte (KB)	 = 1000 bytes
  1 megabyte (MB)  = 1000 KB
  1 gigabyte (GB)  = 1000 MB

And so forth.. You're thinking of the following:

  1 kibibyte (KiB) = 1024 bytes
  1 mebibyte (MiB) = 1024 KiB
  1 gibibyte (GiB) = 1024 GiB

And so on..

The difference is, for example, a 'giga' in the old sense is now a
'gigabinary' (or 'gibi'). I personally hate it :( There are many
documents on this if you don't believe me - the IEC is a good place to
start (IEC 60027-2).

Cheers

 - Simon


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