DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Well, this is interesting, at least to me.

There need no longer be any confusion as to whether a storage device claiming a capacity of, for example, 10 GB, actually holds 10 x 1000 MB or 10 x 1024 MB, and further whether a megabyte is 1000 Kb or 1024 Kb, etc. Although these measures have been applied somewhat randomly in the past, most egregiously by disk drive manufacturers, the “fix” has been available since December 1998. I just learned of it today, from Macintouch.

In short, the resolution was to create and standardize new unambiguous names for various things. Sample:

one kibibit 1 Kibit = 210 bit = 1024 bit
one kilobit 1 kbit = 103 bit = 1000 bit

Here is the full list of the “new” Prefixes for binary multiples, from the IEC. This is a part of the fantastically useful NIST Reference on Constants, Units and Uncertainty, which among other tidbits provides a complete listing of all the standard prefixes (or prefixen ? I’ll have to check the suffixes page!) from yotta (10²⁴) to yocto (10^-24).

Within your children’s lifetimes, someone will probably have to expand that list, as speeds and capacities grow. Now that is a cool thought.