[tech] IEEE 1541-2002 binary prefixes

[Nick Bannon]

On Tue, Sep 20, 2005 at 09:58:57PM +0800, Davyd Madeley wrote:
> In a partially related topic, I will be instigating the cutting off of
> the nads of anyone who uses the acronyms GiB, MiB, KiB or anything
> else. 
[...]

Well, the abbreviations _are_ handy, but gibibytes, mebibytes and
kibibytes if you insist. <grin>

Sadly, context doesn't always make the exact unit obvious and there is
ambiguity. Floppy sizes, bus bandwidths, telco pipe sizes are a hideous
mixture of metric and binary. How many bytes can you store on a "4 gig"
compact flash if it's solid state? if it's a microdrive?

On Tue, 2005-09-20 at 21:53 +0800, Michael Deegan wrote:
> Unless a GiB has been redefined to mean 1000MiB (somehow I doubt it :P), I
> think you'll find the machine actually has 'only' 11.5GiB of RAM...

I was almost sure we had 11 x 1 gibibyte banks and three x 256 mebibyte
banks - but no, to the best of the visible diagnostics, there's only two
of the latter. 11.5 it is.

Nick.

-- 
   Nick Bannon   | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick-sig at rcpt.to | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal