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Re: update material display
- From: Jim Kingdon <kingdon at panix dot com>
- To: mcdonald at phy dot cmich dot edu
- Cc: pgarrone at acay dot com dot au, xconq7 at sources dot redhat dot com
- Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2003 13:19:23 -0400 (EDT)
- Subject: Re: update material display
- References: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0310071228100.32273-100000@leon.phy.cmich.edu>
> Of course Peter is from .au, so he is not "bound" by a .us .gov entity
> such as NIST. But, what you refer to is essentially international
> convention.
The standards are from SI and IEC (http://www.bipm.fr/en/home/ and
http://www.iec.ch/ respectively). So yes, there is nothing
US-specific about them, even if NIST wrote one of the more concise web
pages describing them.
> The binary units are less well-accepted; how many mebibytes of RAM do
> you see advertised?
They are much newer, so of course it will take a while for people to
become comfortable with them.
But they are starting to get used; see for example "Units in the
kernel" at http://lwn.net/2002/0103/kernel.php3 or the Debian ifconfig
at
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2001/debian-user-200112/msg00996.html
I can think of no better argument for the binary prefixes than the
fact that in "1.44M floppy", M is not 1000*1000 or 1024*1024, but
1024*1000. This is called a "moronobyte" by
http://eies.njit.edu/~walsh/powers/newstd.html