Metric Units

[Theodore J. Soldatos]

In <mailman.1004307974.31786.linux-greek-users at lists.hellug.gr>, Christos
Ricudis wrote:


>   On 27 Oct 01, Giorgos Pallas wrote to All with subject "Re: I never
>   thought
> I'd come to this, what's this aaaaaaaaall about?":
> 
>  GP> emena i aporia mou egkeitai sto eksis : oi misoi kathigites sti GP>
>  sxoli (pliroforiki thessalonikis) lene oti : GP> 1 Kbit = 1000 bits GP>
>  kai oi alloi misoi :
>  GP> 1 Kbit = 1024 bits
> 
> They both are right - dystyxws den yparxei symfwnhmeno protypo.
> 


Από το Large-Disk-HOWTO:

3.  Units and Sizes

  A kilobyte (kB) is 1000 bytes.  A megabyte (MB) is 1000 kB.  A
  gigabyte (GB) is 1000 MB.  A terabyte (TB) is 1000 GB.  This is the SI
  norm.  However, there are people that use 1 MB=1024000 bytes and talk
  about 1.44 MB floppies, and people who think that 1 MB=1048576 bytes.
  Here I follow the recent standard and write Ki, Mi, Gi, Ti for the
  binary units, so that these floppies are 1440 KiB (1.47 MB, 1.41 MiB),
  1 MiB is 1048576 bytes (1.05 MB), 1 GiB is 1073741824 bytes (1.07 GB)
  and 1 TiB is 1099511627776 bytes (1.1 TB).

  Quite correctly, the disk drive manufacturers follow the SI norm and
  use the decimal units. However, Linux boot messages and some fdisk-
  type programs use the symbols MB and GB for binary, or mixed binary-
  decimal units. So, before you think your disk is smaller than was
  promised when you bought it, compute first the actual size in decimal
  units (or just in bytes).

  Concerning terminology and abbreviation for binary units, Knuth has an
  alternative proposal, namely to use KKB, MMB, GGB, TTB, PPB, EEB, ZZB,
  YYB and to call these large kilobyte, large megabyte, ... large
  yottabyte.  He writes: `Notice that doubling the letter connotes both
  binary-ness and large-ness.' This is a good proposal - `large
  gigabyte' sounds better than `gibibyte'. For our purposes however the
  only important thing is to stress that a megabyte has precisely
  1000000 bytes, and that some other term and abbreviation is required
  if you mean something else.

T.


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