Please change this. R should not confuse people with things that have some issues to be put in practice because of comercial (yes) strategies. I have been working in TI area for about 10 years. And have been studying computing related subjects for almost 15 years.
The use of KB, MB, ... as base 10 or base 2 units is confuse, a variable "standard" depending on the niche we look at. The units KiB, MiB, ... unambiguously address the issue. Flash and hard drives are sold with "16GB" meaning 16 x 1.000 x 1.000 to small profits and big confusion, just that (read Wikipedia article Henrik pointed). The units KiB, MiB, ... exist for almost 10 years. But using "b" instead of "B" to indicate bytes is surely WRONG, very wrong! "b" is used to indicate bits, not bytes (this is IEEE standard). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_rate_units . For base 10 multiples of any unit, the most reasonable thing is to follow the Metric prefixes. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units#Prefixes and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix . And since the computing world made the absurd choice of using the same symbols for different quantities (KB, MB), lets not make wrong and confusing things last longer. Right things, international standards, not "the facto" standards, and surely not using WRONG units, please. ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
