Re: OT: Rant about degres Celsius (was: introduction)

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> > PS It seems to be receeding, but a couple of years ago "Kb" for kilobyte
> > was
> > extremely widespread here around. It's yet another example that the
> > human
> > mind prefers irrgularity, since the same people who wrote that
> > unfailingly
> > wrote "km" for "kilometre".
> >
>
>But IIRC, the kilo in computer science is not the same as the official
>kilo-
>prefix. Normally a kilo- is 1000. In computer science a Kilo- is 1024, i.e.
>2^10. Maybe that's why they wanted to keep them different by writing Kb
>instead
>of kb. Of course, it doesn't work anymore with mega- and giga- (it's
>mandatorily M and G), and there a confusion arises (for instance, the
>computer
>I've just bought has officially a 40Gb hard drive, but Windows sees 37.2Gb
>or
>something. It's because the official number is calculated as: 1Gb=1000Mb,
>while
>Windows uses: 1Gb=1024Mb).
Hmm, it may be true that the capital "K" is there to indice the 1024
multiplier, but it's still outright wrong to write "Kb" for "kilobyte" as
lowercase "b" indicates bit in compsci. A kilobit is not the same as a
kilobyte, of course.



_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp

Reply