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Old 20-04-2009, 15:16   #6
Chris
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Re: Kibibytes and Gibibytes

Quote:
Originally Posted by boroboi View Post
Can that actually translate to the digital world...

The weight of an object is one thing, memory storage is a completely different medium altogether!
Feast your eyes on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_prefix

Kilo is from the Greek chilia, which means 'thousand'. That's why the word was chosen as a metric prefix (as long ago as 1790 apparently). Its use has been usurped in computing and applied incorrectly. The kibis and gibis mentioned by Taf are in use and are slowly gaining acceptance in the technical literature because they are technically correct as binary prefixes.

It can translate to the digital world, because the SI prefix system was designed for all metric measurements, not simply physical ones. In the long term, it probably should translate into the digital world in common usage as well. Numbers derived from binary are meaningless to average users who want to know how big their new hard drive is.
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