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Thursday, October 28, 2004
Bytes
I have had an interesting 'conversation' with Ben Roe, who pointed out that the Palm is reporting the 1gb card as 975mb because Lexar are regarding 1,000,000,000 bytes as a gigabyte. This struck both of us as dubious practice by Lexar, but Ben looked up the SI definitions and found the following:
Apparently Lexar are in the right: the prefixes kilo, mega and giga do imply the base-10 version. We should use kibi(KiB = 1024), mebi(MiB = 1,048,576) and gibi(GiB = 1,073,741,824) for the base-2 versions, according to the SI people. The 'bi' part of the name stands for binary.
It seems that marketing trumps programming in the language wars.
posted by Tom at 2:13 PM
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