Greg Peterson wrote:
> I've seen in the small print of the IBM ads something like this:
>
> "For hard drives 1 GB means 1 billion bytes"
>
> Maybe they're finally coming around to using SI prefixes for SI
> quantities?
That's a practice IBM has continued from the days when the only disk drives
were attached to mainframe computers. In other words, they've always used
the SI prefixes correctly in that particular context.
Microsoft, on the other hand, shows the actual capacity of your disk drive
in full, without prefixes, then shows an approximation that is, in fact, in
gibibytes, but expresses it using the giga prefix (i.e., as GB). On my
laptop, it shows (at this instant) as:
Used space: 5,340,479,488 bytes 4.97 GB
Free space: 6,716,588,032 bytes 6.25 GB
Capacity: 12,057,067,520 bytes 11.2 GB
Note the commas, in spite of the fact that I have Windows Me configured to
use spaces between groups of three digits. Microsoft doesn't always pay
attention to its own configuration data. <g>
Bill Potts, CMS
Roseville, CA
http://metric1.org [SI Navigator]
