Koenraad Lelong
Alexandr Malusek wrote:
Steve Kratz
writes: The difference is due to the wonderful world of hard drive manufacturer's marketing departments.
Standards define SI (k,M,G,...) and binary (Ki, Mi, Gi, ...) prefixes, see e.g. http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html. The problem is that (1) people are not aware of these standards, and (2) people ignore them. The situation will get better when binary prefixes are accepted by general public. Then everybody will understand that 160 GB = 149 GiB.
BTW, 100 mb stands for 100 millibits.
Are those bits or bytes ? Another cause of confusion. Or do you mean to say B=bytes, b=bits ?
The NIST document uses B as the symbol for byte. I'm not aware of any standard recommending "b" as the symbol for bit but it's quite natural, at least to me :-), to interpret it like that.
I just looked into that link, and we will have to adapt our speach also : Q : How much memory does your PC have ? A : It has one gibibyte of RAM.
Actually, 1 GiB is approximately 1 GB, so you may still use the "oldspeak" if you know its limits. -- A.M.