Re: Types of numerals; bases in natlangs.

On Sun, 15 Jan 2006 11:44:13 -0500, <veritosproject@...> wrote:

> MiB, KiB are "mibibyte" and "kibibyte".
Correct, and pretty much uncontestable.

> Technically, unlike what you
> have heard, a kilobyte and megabyte are really exactly 1000 and
> 1000000 units.  A kibibyte is 1024 bytes and a mibibyte is 1024
> kibibytes.
Not "technically" anything. The IEEE have had various standards, the SI
has one standard, ISO and ANSI have kinda had some sorts of standards if
you ask the right quesions, and there's the various standards that include
things like K=1024, M=1024000, and even the standard that defines
approximately 1.44 million bytes as *two* megabytes. There's no unified
standard that applies (unlike with -i suffix numbers), so no way to say
"technically" what the unsuffixed numbers might or might not mean.

You can't refer to a "standard" that simply is not adhered to as being
standard. I might as well invent my own method based on an alternating 9^3
/ 9^4 system, and call that standard, just because I say so.



Paul