6 ms·
Unfortunately around '99 "the powers that be" (NIST and IEC, if memory serves) decided to stop the confusion between SI units and (the usual) power-of-two usage
by opless 12y ago
Unfortunately around '99 "the powers that be" (NIST and IEC, if memory serves) decided to stop the confusion between SI units and (the usual) power-of-two usage.
Now it's Xebibytes for power-of-two and regular SI units for the rest.
It irks me no end, I'm a power-of-two person. But that's the way it is. (Also floppy disks had it wrong too 1024 * 1000 ... sigh)
You might as well argue the usage of Crackers vs Hackers.
- dragonwriter 12y agoMarketers had already for many years been leveraging the ambiguity to sell things in powers-of-1000 scale (SI uses of prefixes) knowing that much of the market would read them in the powers-of-1024 uses of the prefixes. While standardizing the marketing use as wrong might have been better in some senses, consistency with SI and providing a standard and unambiguous (if new and less familiar) set of prefixes for the useful powers-of-1024 scale was better the status quo at the time.