Re: Types of numerals; bases in natlangs.

veritosproject@gmail.com wrote:
> 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.
A kilobyte is never 1000 bytes; "byte" isn't an SI unit and doesn't
follow the SI rules. A megabyte technically shouldn't be a million bytes
either, but someone in a hard disk marketing department thought it was a
good idea. In the context of RAM, a megabyte is always 2^20 bytes
(1,048,576). No one in my experience ever uses the bizarre "kibibyte"
and "mibibyte". The abbreviation "K" is generally used in place of
"kilobyte" (which is rarely heard). "Meg" and "megabyte" are both in
common use.

There really is no logical reason to want a name for a block of 1,000 or
1,000,000 bytes. The confusion could easily have been avoided by
sticking with the traditional definitions, and just saying "a million
bytes" if for some reason you want to talk about a million bytes.

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