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From: Rob Landley <landley@trommello.org>
To: Jamie Lokier <lk@tantalophile.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Changing KB, MB, and GB to KiB, MiB, and GiB in Configure.help.
Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 18:05:34 -0500
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On Thursday 20 December 2001 04:41 pm, Jamie Lokier wrote:
> Ra?lN??ez de Arenas Coronado wrote:
> > >You are close - he uses "MiB" as short for "mebi" - Mega-binary.
> >
> >     Personally I don't like very much the abbreviations, but I must
> > recognize that they remove all possible ambiguity for the
> > Configure.help. With MiB, GiB, etc... you're completely sure that you
> > are talking about 2^20, 2^30 and not 10^6, 10^9, etc...
>
> Hah!  Everytime I have seen "MiB" before this thread I'd though it meant
> "Million Bytes", because everyone knows that MB in computers is a
> megabyte (<ahem>).

Me, I've got the "men in black" song running through my head now.  And I 
don't particularly like it, either.

This reminds me of people going after metric speed limit signs with shotguns 
back in the late 70's.  I never understood this impulse before now.

Trust the ISO to change the BINARY nomenclature on something that has, until 
now, DEFAULTED to binary.  I get the feeling nobody at the ISO actually uses 
computers much.  Is it too late to sober them up?

Rob
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