Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (5100 mails)

[Alexandr Malusek <Alexandr.Malusek@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Koenraad Lelong <k.lelong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Alexandr Malusek wrote:
>
>> Steve Kratz <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 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.