It's a mixed bag in the industry, Greg. Apparently MB sometimes means 1000 times 1024 bytes, sometimes it means 1024 times 1024 bytes. The statement by IBM was an attempt to clarify their use of the symbology. The link that Bill Potts provided gives binary prefixes approved by IEC, but not yet by IEEE. The intended use is for work within the industry and almost entirely for storage devices. The commercial impact is nil in the retail market since storage has become so cheap that with a 40 GB drive, few people care (or can determine) whether that's actually 42.95 x 10^9 bytes or merely 40.00 x 10^9 bytes. The differences in the ways that individual operating systems report memory (or even different programs within the same OS) further cloud the issue. Jim member, IEEE/SCC14 Chair, IEEE/SCC14.3 Gregory Peterson wrote: > > I've seen in the small print of the IBM adds 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? > > greg > > >>> "Bill Potts" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 2001-05-02 11:23:33 >>> > Jonathan Dowling wrote: > > Yes, but they should be. This problem (that a "kb" is > > actually 1024 bytes) annoys me greatly because having > > to explain to people that "k" always means 1000 unless > > you mean computer bytes confuses them, reinforcing the > > belief that the metric system is complicated. > > See http://metric1.org/binprfx.htm. > > Bill Potts, CMS > Roseville, CA > http://metric1.org [SI Navigator] -- 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
