kilopascal wrote:
>
> 2002-01-06
....
> ..... The "MI" for mibi, instead of "Mi" had to do
> with me not releasing the shift key fast enough and not checking the
> spelling manually.
I've done similar things many times myself.
> The ångstrom (alt-134 for the å) may not be deprecated, but telling people
> so may get them to refrain from its use quicker. You want to make them feel
> out of step with reality. Just telling them it is not encouraged only gives
> them an excuse to continue its use and not move over to the nanometre.
Oh, I agree! But then I didn't feel there was any danger of a member of
this list falling in love with the ångström as a result of my posting.
My colleagues now whisper that unit's name whenever they use it while
I'm around and they blush suitably.
> It is good to see the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
> starting to move on accepting the use of the "prefixes for binary
> multiples". Does this mean, if they accept the proposal, products such as
> memory and floppies will be properly marked and described as such in the
> market place?
The intent of the proposal is to support technical work, but that's not
to prevent migration to commercial applications.
> Thus 128 MB of RAM will appear as 128 MiB. ....
Correct, hopefully! Or as 134 MB, more preferably.
> .... But, what about floppies? If I
> remember correctly, isn't the kilobyte binary, but the megabyte is a
> combination of binary and decimal? Meaning the megabyte is the same as 1024
> x 1000 B, instead of either 1000 x 1000 or 1024 x 1024? If so, how will
> this mess be straighten out?
Right. To improperly use the compound-prefix approach, "1.44 MB"
diskettes are actually 1.44 kibikilobytes. The standard actually
contains an example discussing this and suggests that they be marketed
to the public as 1.47 MB diskettes. There is no desire at all on our
part to have the public learn two sets of prefixes (for SI and for
binary multiples); the SI would be better served if they learned only
one and left the prefixes for binary multiples to those involved in
technical work. [Purists will note that in actuality, the diskettes have
more space than even that cited above and it is the way that they are
forematted that dictates the 140.6 MiB or 147 MB limit.]
> I wonder if computer programmers will come up with patches that will allow
> the operating system of your computers to display the proper bytes in the
> proper prefixes.
They already have. In linux, I can do "ls -l" to list the contents of a
directory with the sizes of each file indicated in terms of blocks of 1
KiB, similar to "dir" in MS-DOS.f If I do 'ls -l --si' then I get the
file sizes in true count with prefix symbols appended (k=1000, M=1 000
000, etc.). Unfortunately, the comparable switch for binary form, 'ls -l
-h' to get the listings "in human readable form", appends G, M, and k
(k=1024) instead of Gi, Mi, and Ki, which they really should use. Some
of the newer manual ("man") and info ("info") pages online now properly
use the prefixes for binary multiples, by contrast. Programmers seem to
be quick on picking up the distinctions between these two sets of
prefixes. In fact, the oldest page I've seen doing this is dated 1999.
I have no idea what Microsoft or Apple will do in their public
documentation or user software.
Jim
--
Metric Methods(SM) "Don't be late to metricate!"
James R. Frysinger, CAMS http://www.metricmethods.com/
10 Captiva Row e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Charleston, SC 29407 phone/FAX: 843.225.6789
