Re: assistance with disk ][ and modern 1.2M floppies

[greg@apple2.com]

In article <7uqnjq$asm$1@news.rt66.com>,
"Mike Westerfield" <MikeW50@aol.com> wrote:
>dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson) wrote:

>> There is a growing suggestion of inventing new terms for the "binary"
>> kilobyte and megabyte, to reduce this sort of confusion and misleading
>> information.  I believe the suggested terms are "kibibyte" and
>> "mebibyte" (short for "kilo-binary-byte" and "mega-binary-byte", as far
>> as I can tell).  I'm not sure what is being suggested for the
>> abbreviations.

KiB and MiB, and so on for other multipliers.

> Sounds to me like someone was mumbling when they said this. Did you give the
> person you heard it from a sobriety test?
>
> Seriously, I hope this was a joke.

No, it is serious.  The reasoning is that the binary senses confuse those
who are familiar with their metric meanings, even people in the industry. 
Yup, even Bill Gates couldn't answer the question, "what is a megabyte?"
correctly.

> I know that some people, though
> ignorance, believe 1K = 1000, 1M = 1,000,000,

Where are your units?  You have only multipliers there.  And are bytes (B)
unique to the binary meanings of kilo- and mega-?  Sometimes we talk about
kilobits per second (Kb/s).  Should that only be binary or metric sense?

It isn't so cut and dried.  But I agree, the shortened pronunciation forms
sound rather silly (replacing last syllable of the metric prefix with
"bi").  An alternative could have been kilo-base2-byte and written:

    K B
     2

where the 2 is a subscript, much like log base 2.  I don't think you can
bind two potassium atoms with one of boron, so there should be no
confusion there.

I haven't heard of the proposal being finalized/accepted yet.

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