Re: Bad Metric ... 1k = 1024 or 1000?

["Roger Johnstone" <bhmhome@es.co.nz>]

My understanding:

b=bit
B=byte

This seems to have gotten worse over the years, I constantly see articles
written for computer publications which confuse the two e.g. 8Gb harddrive
(8 gigabit, but meaning 8 gigabyte).

In computer use K=1024. I don't know if anyone decided on this or if it just
became common practice but it's normally written as a capital, K=1024,
k=1000.

On my Mac the Finder reports a file size in the Get Info box in both
kilobytes and bytes e.g. "140K on disk (143 360 bytes)". The first is the
amount of space it uses on the disk (which depends on the block size, but is
always going to be a muliple of 512 bytes) the second is the actual length
of the file.

One thing I don't like is Apple's continued use of K instead of KB. Just
because we say kay as an abbreviation doesn't mean you should write it that
way.

Has anyone else noticed Windows 95 gets confused about which convention to
use? When reporting a file size it gives it in kilobytes (multiples of 1024
bytes) up to 1000KB (1024000 bytes), then in megabytes (1048576 bytes). But
it means anything between 1000KB and 1024KB (1MB) is reported as 0.97MB (or
0.98,0.99). Make up your mind Windows!

Roger Johnstone