Hi Group, >From one of our software engineers comes this interesting tidbit. Enjoy.
Scott s_doug...@ecrm.com ECRM Incorporated Tewksbury, MA USA -----Original Message----- From: Dan Smith [mailto:d_sm...@ecrm.com] Sent: Friday, September 17, 1999 1:30 PM To: software_eng...@ecrm.com; product_eng...@ecrm.com; electrical_eng...@ecrm.com Cc: sqa...@ecrm.com; customer_service_...@ecrm.com; p_pars...@ecrm.com Subject: Kibbles and bits and kibis and mebis and gibis... BIG NEWS! Well, actually it's a year old, but _I_ didn't know about it--did anyone else? There are a bunch o' new names and abbrevations for "binary prefixes," e.g. "mebi" for 1,048,576. I haven't had so much excitement since they changed "cycles" to "Hertz," and I, for once certainly plan to use these exciting new terms as often as possible in my memos, documents, party conversation, etc. So any "cool cats" out there who want to be "hep" to the latest "jive," pay attention: According to the NIST, http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html "In December 1998 the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the leading international organization for worldwide standardization in electrotechnology, approved as an IEC International Standard names and symbols for prefixes for binary multiples for use in the fields of data processing and data transmission. The prefixes are as follows:" Name, symbol = value [My summary--DPBS] kibi Ki 2^10 = 1,024 mebi Mi 2^20 = 1,048,576 gibi Gi 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 tebi Ti 2^40 = 1,099,511,627,776 pebi Pi 2^50 = 1,125,899,906,842,624 exbi Ei 2^60 = 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 "It is suggested that in English, the first syllable of the name of the binary-multiple prefix should be pronounced in the same way as the first syllable of the name of the corresponding SI prefix, and that the second syllable should be pronounced as 'bee.'" "It is important to recognize that the new prefixes for binary multiples are not part of the International System of Units (SI), the modern metric system. However, for ease of understanding and recall, they were derived from the SI prefixes for positive powers of ten. As can be seen from the above table, the name of each new prefix is derived from the name of the corresponding SI prefix by retaining the first two letters of the name of the SI prefix and adding the letters 'bi,' which recalls the word 'binary.' Similarly, the symbol of each new prefix is derived from the symbol of the corresponding SI prefix by adding the letter "i," which again recalls the word 'binary.' (For consistency with the other prefixes for binary multiples, the symbol Ki is used for 2^10 rather than ki.)" --------- This message is coming from the emc-pstc discussion list. To cancel your subscription, send mail to majord...@ieee.org with the single line: "unsubscribe emc-pstc" (without the quotes). For help, send mail to ed.pr...@cubic.com, jim_bac...@monarch.com, ri...@sdd.hp.com, or roger.volgst...@compaq.com (the list administrators).
