Re: Types of numerals; bases in natlangs.

MiB, KiB are "mibibyte" and "kibibyte".  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.

On 1/15/06, Tristan McLeay <conlang@...> wrote:
> Andreas Johansson wrote:
> > Quoting Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>:
>
> >>There have been efforts to introduce -i and -o suffixes (thus Mi for 2^20,
> >>or Mo for 10^6, for example) to help cut through this confusion, but I've
> >>only encountered them sporadically, and frankly only in cases where the
> >>conversants ought to be familiar with which base was in play anyway.
> >>They're fighting 50 years of computer-geek groupthink, and frankly that's
> >>seldom a good idea.
>
> No; it's a pity when people can't admit they've always not only been
> wrong, but also ambiguous.
>
> > There's also Mo = megaoctet. But I seem to see MiB, TiB, etc with some
> > frequency.
>
> "Megoctet", I think, isn't -a dropped before o-? (Also "megohm".)
>
> I also see KiB, MiB etc. occasionally---when my computer starts up, one
> of the things it says that I ignore is "... KiB ...". Some Linux module
> or other... I also saw something advertising a computer somewhere just
> recently that said it came with 512 MiB of RAM, upgradable to 2 GiB.
>
> --
> Tristan.
>

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