Karsten M. Self wrote: > Digging a bit deeper: advertisers and marketers stole the traditional > measures of storage: kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, by imposing the > interpretation of these as powers of ten, rather than powers of two.
True, but only the computer industry ever used kilo-, mega-, etc. for powers of two. The metric standards are based on powers of ten. It is convenient for the computer industry to use magnitudes based on powers of two, since digital computers use binary numbers, but misusing standard metric prefixes was a mistake. One of the great pluses of the metric system is its consistency, and the computer industry threw a wrench into that by redefining kilo as 2^10, mega as 2^20, etc. The new prefixes "kibi" (Ki), "mebi" (Me), etc., are kind of ugly, but new terms were needed, and now we have them. It's an improvement. Craig
