Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Fri, 29 Nov 1996 00:16:15 -0500 | From | Rob Hagopian <> | Subject | Re: GB vs. MB |
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Olaf Titz <olaf@bigred.inka.de> wrote: >This question comes up every few months, there has even been a >proposal to amend the SI specifications for 2^10-based prefixes to >resolve the ambiguity... It doesn't help that "kilo" is 10^3 again >when measuring network bandwidth, but for storage size it is well >established.
There's SI and there's another international group (4 letter acronym...) I don't even want to think about the results if these two groups deviate...
Here's fix, use: 10dMB for decimal and 10bMB for binary... Ugly and confusing at first but VERY unambiguous once you know what they mean. I'd take that tradeoff over nice and pretty at first but VERY ambiguous once you (think you) know what they mean...
Ob-linux-kernel: if k=1000 and K=1024, the kernel is wrong when it reports memory sizes... (ahhhhhhh!!!!)
>As for hard disk sizes, I've gotten used to take the marketed size as >an estimate only. ;-)
No kidding, besides the 2^10 vs 10^6 (which is inconsistantly used even by drive manufactures) there's also: formatted vs unformatted, 512B vs 1024B sectors, compressed vs uncompressed, ad nausem (sp...)... IMO, linux shouldn't even bother trying to figure out what the ad copy said, it should just report what it sees.
-Rob H.
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