[USMA:27973] Binary prefixes

[Chimpsarecute]

On September 18 2003 Reuters has reported that Apple, Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba have been sued in a class-action suit in Los Angeles Superior Court for "deceiving" the true capacity of their hard drives. This of course was due to ambiguity of "KB" when used by software and hardware vendors. This precedent might prompt Apple to adapt binary prefixes in its Mac OS, as well as other companies to put pressure on Microsoft to adapt them in its Windows operating systems.     From:   http://members.optus.net/alexey/prefBin.html     I wonder what has become of this suit.  Anyone know?  This may be a very important step in forcing industry to adopt the binary prefixes.  Microsoft may have to come up with a fix that when installed will display capacities in either true binary or true decimal, but not both.   Note that the authors of the site call the floppy a 90 mm and only use the 3.5 inch designation as an afterthought.     Thus, a 90 mm (3� inch) floppy disk should be described as having a capacity of 1.41 MiB (equivalent to 1.47 MB), not "1.44 MB" as labelled. 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". 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 210 rather than ki.) These prefixes for binary multiples, which were developed by IEC Technical Committee (TC) 25, Quantities and Units, and Their Letter Symbols, with the strong support of CIPM and IEEE, were first adopted by the IEC as Amendment 2 to IEC International Standard IEC 60027-2: Letter symbols to be used in electrical technology - Part 2: Telecommunications and electronics. The full content of Amendment 2, which has a publication date of 1999-01, is reflected in the tables above and the suggestion regarding pronunciation. Subsequently the contents of this Amendment were incorportated in the second edition of IEC 60027-2, which has a publication date of 2000-11 (the first edition was published in 1972). The complete citation for this revised standard is IEC 60027-2, Second edition, 2000-11, Letter symbols to be used in electrical technology - Part 2: Telecommunications and electronics. On December 11 2002 IEEE-SA has approved proposal P1541 as a Trial-Use Standard for the duration of 2 years. IEEE Standard No.: 1541-2002, Name: IEEE Standard for Prefixes for Binary Multiples, ISBN: 0-73813385-X. It can be purchased at IEEE Online Store. The standard was prepared by Standards Coordinating Committee (SCC) 14, Quantities, Units, and Letter Symbols. ANSI has also accepted BSR/IEEE 1541-200x, Trial-Use Standard for Prefixes for Binary Multiples (trial use standard) for a trial period: 1 December, 2002 through 30 June, 2004. After a much heated discussion in December 2001 on linux-kernel mailing list, the binary prefixes have been accepted by key Linux developers, and are now extensively gaining ground across UNIX applications.