
Tarsnap - Why is 1 GB 10^9 bytes instead of 2^30? - billpg
http://www.tarsnap.com/GB-why.html
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ErrantX
Has this not been hashed over a billion (or, ugh, 10^9) times :)

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cperciva
Yes, and some people _still_ get it wrong!

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Locke1689
At least for me, the problem isn't that I think GB should not be 10^9 bytes,
but that Gibibyte sounds stupid.

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wmf
Just write GiB but pronounce it "gigabyte".

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ntoshev
Then, OSes get this wrong and calculate storage in GiB.

Also when I see a 128 GB SSD I somehow expect this to mean a proper power of
2, not to mention it should be addressed similarly to RAM.

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alexk7
Mac OS X 10.6 get this right and calculate in true KB, MB and GB that is 10^3,
10^6, and 10^9 bytes. I heard that Linux also get this right and now use the
KiB, MiB and GiB prefixes for 2^10, 2^20, 2^30. Both options are good.

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ntoshev
The latest Linux I use (Ubuntu 9.04) uses M and G prefixes.

My point is it's a mess and it's unreasonable to claim proper rules are
followed.

E.g. how do you measure hosting bandwidth? A random calculator
(<http://www.ibdhost.com/help/bandwidth/>) says:

 _1KB = 1024B; therefore, 500MB = 512000KB = 524288000B .. and .. 1GB =
1048576000B_

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tesseract
The usual 'binary' scale goes like this: 1 kB = 1024 B, 1 MB = 1024 * 1024 B,
1 GB = 1024 * 1024 * 1024 B, etc. which may be at odds with SI but at least
it's self-consistent. The page you've quoted seems to be suggesting that 1 KB
= 1024 B, 1 MB = 1024 * 1024 B, and 1 GB = 1000 * 1024 * 1024 B. That seems
pretty absurd to me, but maybe they're just taking a page from the book of the
"1.44 MB" floppy disks which actually hold 1000 * 1024 B.

