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That would seem to be a rather silly suit,
in that disk drives don't come in small capacity increments anyway. The choice
isn't between, for example, 21 and 22 gigabytes. More typically, it's
between 20 and 32 or something like that. If, in estimating the eventual
size of a database (for example), someone doesn't allow an extremely large
margin of error, s/he's fooling her/himself.
Historically, too, disk capacities have been
stated in kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes (based, in other words, on powers
of 10). If a specification is actually gibibytes (but incorrectly labeled as
gigabytes), the manufacturer is understating the capacity, rather than
overstating it (e.g., 20 gibibytes is more than 20 gigabytes).
In addition to all that, the full
specification of a disk drive usually shows the total number of bytes, without
any prefixes. Any supplier or manufacturer who is bidding on a contract should
be required, by the potential customer, to provide a full specification. Someone
buying a single drive or a few drives, retail, is only going by a recommended
approximation.
Finally, the competition among drive
manufacturers is for real capacity, not perceived capacity.
As an aside, I don't think anyone would get
anywhere suing a car manufacturer because his nominally 2.7 L car only had an
engine capacity of 2.69 L.
Bill Potts, CMS
Roseville, CA
http://metric1.org [SI Navigator]
From:
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.
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