See also http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html and
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html .
An interesting question to consider is whether we think it's a good idea
to start adopting the proposed IEEE notation for binary multiples, i.e
name Name Symbol
2**10 kibi Ki
2**20 mebi Mi
2**30 gibi Gi
2**40 tebi Ti
So 1024 bytes == 1 KiB, 1024*1024 bytes == 1 MiB, etc.... and 1 MB is
exactly 1,000,000 bytes, 1GB is exactly 1,000,000,000 bytes, and so on.
This has the advantage of being precise, and removing the ambiguity of
exactly what did people mean by "8.4GB"? The disadvantage is that it's
not clear to me how successful this new proposed nomenclature will work
out. The proponents mean well, and the scheme is logical and
well-thought out. On the other hand, the same thing can be said of
Esperato and the International Phonetic Alphabet, and look how well
those things worked out! (My grandfather Anglicized our Chinese family
name using the IPA, back when IPA was popular. As a result, no one has
any idea how to pronouce my last name simply by looking at the
spelling. :-)
One potential solution would be print the message both ways. I.e.,
print out that the disk sizes both in "megabytes" and "mebibytes".
So instead of saying just this:
hda: IBM-DTCA-24090, 3909MB w/468kB Cache, CHS=993/128/63
we'd print out something like this:
hda: IBM-DTCA-24090, 3909MB (3727 MiB) w/468KiB Cache, CHS=993/128/63
It's more verbose, true, but when you consider the millions and millions
of innocent electrons slaughtered every few months as this thread
repeatedly comes vampire-like back from the dead, it might just be worth
it. :-)
- Ted
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