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Megabytes (MB) or Mebibytes (MiB)? 437

Posted by CmdrTaco from the something-to-think-about dept.
An anonymous reader says: "KernelTrap has an interesting story about megabytes versus mebibytes. Though the article refers to Linux, the topic is applicable to all computers. Will there be a time when all computer users will talk about adding mibibytes of RAM, rather than a megabytes? From the article: '[the kernel patch] changes references from the familiar MB (megabyte) and GB (gigabyte) to the NIST standard MiB (mebibyte) and GiB (gibibyte). According to these standards, technically a megabyte (MB) is a power of ten, while a mebibyte (MiB) is a power of two, appropriate for binary machines. A megabyte is then 1,000,000 bytes. A mebibyte is the actual 1,048,576 bytes that most intend.'"
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Megabytes (MB) or Mebibytes (MiB)? More

Megabytes (MB) or Mebibytes (MiB)?

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  • Pronounciation (Score:5, Funny)

    by OblongPlatypus ( 233746 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @01:22PM (#2744393)
    "Maybe Byte"?

  • Its a lousy goddamn word (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ostiguy ( 63618 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @01:24PM (#2744399)
    And that alone will hinder its acceptance.

    And will hard drive manufacturors decide to stop lying about the size of their drives? Magic 8 ball says doubtful.

    ostiguy

    • Re:Its a lousy goddamn word (Score:5, Insightful)

      by xigxag ( 167441 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @02:03PM (#2744537)
      I agree. It seems to me it would be much more unambiguous to simply state "metric megabytes" for the power of ten, and "long megabytes" for the power of two. No new words to learn, and the definition is crystal clear -- if a HD manufacturer advertises "80 metric GB," you know exactly what you're getting.

      In addition, since "80 long GB" sounds like you're getting more (and in fact, you ARE getting more) it might encourage HD makers to switch over to the same measure that RAM makers use, and thereby end all this confusion once and for all.
    • And that alone will hinder its acceptance.

      Amen, brother. Besides, the standard is power-of-two multiples. So, if people want to deviate from te standard, let them use a different word. I propose Mediabytes (1,000,000 bytes) and Greediabytes (a billion).

      Likewise I would like a penny for every faulty URL, per copy. That would probably teach everyone that www.somewhe.re in itself is meaningless, or at least not an URL.

      And will hard drive manufacturors decide to stop lying ...?

      Wrong question: when will corporations stop lying? Answer: when it stops being (seemingly) lucrative.

      Stefan.

      • Uhh, the prefix "Mega" is a standard prefix for 1,000,000, and the prefix "kilo" is a standard prefix for "1,000." The use of these prefixes predates the invention of computers. After all, a kilometer is not 1024 meters, so a kilobyte should not be 1024 bytes.
    • Yeah, a lot of people's displeasure on the kernel list seems to come from the fact that they think "mebibytes" sounds weird. Others point out that the terms have yet to reach wide acceptance.

      But think about this: outside of geek circles, *everything* we say sounds weird, and many things have yet to reach wide acceptance. If you tried to explain to someone that
      Slashdot ran an article from KernelTrap about some traffic on linux-kernel regarding ESR's use of "mebibytes" in CML2,

      then "mebibytes" would not be the only term they would not understand. Inside geek circles, on the other hand, if you say "mebibytes," people will know exactly what you mean.

      Precision in speech and writing is a virtue. In my mind, if this eliminates a little ambiguity in documentation, I think it's a suitable win.

      Regarding how the words sound, I happen to like them. They're cute. "Hey there, wittlwe mebibyte... don't be shy..." Perfect for use when talking to an iMac. Hey, wait a minute...

  • It would help (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Sawbones ( 176430 )
    It would certainly help me. I'd no longer have to explain to my parents that even though they bought a 30 GB hard drive it's going to show up as 27.6 GB, and that that's normal. And no it's not false advertising, it's math.
    • To make matters worse, there are actually 3 different ways to define, say, a "megabyte:
      • Decimal aka Metric: 1 MB = 10^6 or 1,000,000 bytes
      • Binary : 1 mb = 2^20 or 1,048,576 bytes. Note the lower case distinction here. SI prefixes for large units always use capital letters. OK, so I stole this from 4DOS. So shoot me.
      • Mixed: a meg (Mb or mB) is one K k, or one k K, which is 10^3 x 2^10, or 1,024,000. And I've actually seen this used a few places.
      The problem is that memory chips will always be measured in powers of 2, and marketdroids will always want to use the powers of 10 to make their hard drives look larger, with the fact of SI prefixes to back them up. (Things such as disk cluster/block sizes will tend to be binary, however.) So I always try to say "Binary gigabyte" when I'm talking about memory, if there's any question which I mean.

    • Re:It would help (Score:2, Insightful)

      by haruharaharu ( 443975 )

      And no it's not false advertising

      Yes it is. 1GB = 2^30 bytes, not 1e9. Drive manufacturers use the smaller unit so you'll think that their drives are bigger than they are. That's deceptive

      • Yes it is. 1GB = 2^30 bytes, not 1e9. Drive manufacturers use the smaller unit so you'll think that their drives are bigger than they are.
        That's deceptive

        Look carefully, you'll find the disclaimer in the fine print...

  • I heard this years ago (Score:3, Insightful)

    by johnburton ( 21870 ) <johnb@jbmail.com> on Sunday December 23, 2001 @01:25PM (#2744408) Homepage
    People have been trying to push this for years but there is no chance of it ever happening in my opinion for two reasons - Everyone is already used to the current names and we don't need new ones, and secondly the proposed names sound really stupid.
    • Everyone is already used to the current names

      Agreed. How many people here know that "gigabytes" is actually supposed to be pronounced "jigabytes"? Many I would presume, but that would be 0.0001% of the world. "a hundred jigs" just sounds so ridiculous now.

      Furthermore, the poster of the article couldn't even be consistent in *spelling* "mebibytes" or "mibibytes".

  • Conflict (Score:4, Funny)

    by OblongPlatypus ( 233746 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @01:27PM (#2744417)
    We have a potential conflict here. Megabytes and gigabytes are often referred to as "megs" and "gigs", right? Problem is, gibs is taken [thehaus.net].

  • Good Lord (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kitts ( 545683 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @01:30PM (#2744423) Homepage
    I have a theory. People who actually get any productive work done couldn't care less about Megabyte vs. Mebibyte. Ditto "hacker" vs "cracker".

    Hm... on second thought, maybe not. I'm not getting much productive work done lately and I still don't care about either of the above...

  • Metric Revolution (Score:4, Troll)

    by euroderf ( 47 ) <a@b.c> on Sunday December 23, 2001 @01:30PM (#2744424) Journal
    Kilobytes and Megabytes may have seemed like a decent measure back in the 70's, when it was important to quantize easily down to the byte level and all the users were computer scientists anyway, but these days it is rather archaic.

    Most users don't know how many bytes are in a megabyte or a kilobyte, or think (naturally) 1000 rather than 1024.

    However, hard drive manufacturers [ibm.com] already use Megabyte to specifically mean 1,000,000 bytes, Before long computer OS's and RAM manufacturers will use the same definition.

    Why come up with a new 'Mebibyte' system? What does 'kilo-' and 'mega-' actually mean? Answer: 1000 and 1,000,000, not the perversion of the computer scientists.

    Now that computers are becoming more popular, the meaning of the terms megabyte and kilobyte are shifting back to compatibility with normal English usage.

    There is no need for new terms at all, IMHO.

    • It pisses me off that Harddrive manufactures can lie and use (1000 per K not 1024 per K), thus a 100 Gigabyte drive is really only 97 Gigabytes. Seems like false advertising, even if they do add "In our world a gig is 1,000,000 bytes"

      8 bits make 1 byte. 1024 bytes is 1K. 1 Gigabyte is 1024 Megabytes. 1 Megabyte is 1024 Kilobytes. 1 Kilobyte is 1024 bytes.
      and
      1Kbps is 1024bps. 56kbps is 57344 bytes per second, about 5K per second. A 128Kbps is really 13K per second of bandwidth. A 768K is 78K per second of bandwidth. A Megabyte is 1024K not 1000K.

      Check here [jamesshuggins.com] for a good table.

      -
      Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well. - Samuel Butler (1835 - 1902)
      • 1Kbps is 1024bps. 56kbps is 57344 bytes per second, about 5K per second. A 128Kbps is really 13K per second of bandwidth. A 768K is 78K per second of bandwidth. A Megabyte is 1024K not 1000K

        1Kbps is 1000 bps. The communications industry follows the standard SI prefixes.

        And bandwidth should be measured in Hz, KHz, and MHz, not bps, Kbps, and Mbps. Bandwidth is the width of a frequency band, i.e. the difference between the highest frequency of the band and the lowest.

    • In SI units, a Megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes. They've come up with the word Mebibyte to mean 1048576 as some definition of 2^20 is still needed by computer scientists (& kernel hackers)

      HH
    • Why come up with a new 'Mebibyte' system? What does 'kilo-' and 'mega-' actually mean? Answer: 1000 and 1,000,000, not the perversion of the computer scientists.
      Oh, that's just great. If you don't like the way somebody talks, call them a pervert.

  • ugly (Score:4, Insightful)

    by suffering.bot ( 129214 ) <chad@magicfortres[ ]om ['s.c' in gap]> on Sunday December 23, 2001 @01:32PM (#2744427) Homepage Journal
    Alan Cox offers support to this change, "Eric using MiB seems the right thing. Its an ugly but appropriate unit, its at least recommended as a solution by a standards body. We can either redefine SI units ("You cannot change the laws of physics") or find a better label. What better than a recommended one others use.".

    That's right: ugly it just doesn't sound right, but it is a more accurate description. I don't see the computer world moving away from MB and GB anytime soon though.

  • Why not use the real numbers? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by LinuxMacWin ( 79859 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @01:33PM (#2744432)
    How come we don't use numbers like

    10E9
    10E12

    and

    2E15
    2E20

    and so on.... No confusion

    After all our car tires can work with sizes like 175-70 R13 and son on and we do not mess them up.
    • How come we don't use numbers like

      10E9
      10E12

      and

      2E15
      2E20

      Because it's wrong. 10E9 == 10*10^9 == 1E10, which I don't think is what you meant to say.

      "2E15" means 2*10^15. What you want to say is 2^15, or 2**15, or 2<sup>15</sup>.

  • And then we'll have gibibytes (gibby-bytes), tebibytes (tabby-bytes), and pebibytes (oh, forget it)?

    As if there isn't geeks are made fun of...
  • Why can't we all just get along and use scientific notation? (or should it be scientibic?) Like so:

    1KiB = 1024 bytes = 1x2^10 bytes
    1MiB = 1048576 bytes = 1x2^20 bytes
    ...

    or maybe even:

    1KiB = 1024 bytes = 1x1024^1 bytes
    1MiB = 1048576 bytes = 1x1024^2 bytes
    ...

    or we could abolish bytes too and just say everything in bits:

    1KiB = 8192 bits = 1x2^13 bits

    But then again, "Hey, I just got 1x2^31 bits of RAM!" just doesn't have the same ring to it...

  • language confusion? and for what?! (Score:3, Funny)

    by firewort ( 180062 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @01:38PM (#2744448)
    Let's see here;

    I already have a hard time convincing other people of the distinction between hacker and cracker.

    to them: hacker is a criminal, cracker is a southern, white, klansman-criminal.

    I give up, and try and express that every computer hacker is not a criminal, they are all computer science researchers, doing sometimes unpopular work.

    Now you want to change the terms for measuring storage? The normal aim for changing terms is to clarify the matter, but this is just obfuscation for 99% of the people in the world, who already suffer at understanding the difference between 1024 and 1000. Please, do not do this.

    • Use Attacker (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Effugas ( 2378 )
      You need to a soldier to really fight soldiers. You need to be a hacker to really fight hackers.

      In the world of hackers, there are attackers, and there are defenders. It's easy to attack. It's much more interesting and important to defend.

      --Dan

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @01:39PM (#2744457)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • No kidding...more effing BS terms.

      Mibi? Why not just call them "bibbity-bobbity-boo" bytes?

      When I think measurement of data (Meg, Gig) I think powers of 1024.

      When I think of measurements of physical objects (water, distance) I think powers of 10.

      Now some physicists are saying "no, no, use powers of 2"...STFU.

      What really gets me is that the same thing is going on with former @home-ers (charter/att or whatever you got switched to) where the phone monkeys here in Ga are saying kbits and the techs are saying Kbytes. Ok, which is it?

      Granted all this is freaking meaningless (check your cable modem settings by pointing your browser to 192.168.100.1) mine at the moment is set to 700000bits when during the switchover it was 128000bits--up and down, btw.

      The thing I got on to the tech about: if you are telling me bytes/s then why is my modem set to 128000...you are missing a zero, dude.
      (heh, scary that I knew more about DOCIS (sp?) compliance than the tech I was talking to, just a little more than he...but at least he saw my point of view.

      Anywho, don't wanna deal with it on vacation, so letting it drop for now...at least disconnections are getting fewer and further between.

      At least the are using a decent news server..but that download *speed* cap is annoying, and only 2 connects at once...they need to cache the downloads localy {if possible, mind you} to speed things up and decrease traffic outbound, IMO.

      Just my mild rant + $.02.

      .

      • DBZ (Score:3, Funny)

        by jpostel ( 114922 )
        Quote: "Why not just call them "bibbity-bobbity-boo" bytes?"

        Unfortunately Dragonball Z (Funimation) has already licensed the term "bibbity-bobbity-boo" from Disney for the naming of several bad guys.

        .
      • It isn't just physicists trying to 'impose' the decimal prefixes on poor defenceless computer users. What about Ethernet - 10, 100 or 1000 megabits per second? Or your 56 kilobit/s modem? Then of course hard disks have been measured in decimal megabytes and gigabytes for a long time now.

        BTW - the other thing the kernel patch should have fixed is to write 'byte' instead of 'B', since B often stands for bel as in decibel (and 'b' stands for bit). Sometimes in information theory you might be talking about bels and bits in the same sentence, so there is some scope for confusion. Alternatively, make it implicit that all memory sizes are in terms of the machine's addressing capability, and just say '40505 free' instead of '40505 bytes free'.
    • Damn, no reason to shoot a perfectly good Solaris box over a simple misunderstanding. I'll take it, dude. Just take a deep breath and count to ten before riddling your hardware with bullet holes :)

      Violence is destroying our future... and our boxen...

    • Why not? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by mcglk ( 10840 )

      I always find it odd when people resist what is otherwise a good (if initially less comfortable) idea.

      It is inevitable that as computers get more advanced, our technical terms will eventually fall out of use. For example, we don't often talk about "words" of memory anymore often even in the technical mainstream (outside of assembly language and code or storage optimization), because all the manufacturers eventually went to an eight-bit byte as a standard. (Eventually, the byte will become less meaningful to the mainstream, and will eventually shift to the "character" as we head towards the Unicode standard. Eventually, we'll be switching /.ebibytes/ for /.ebichars/, and the complaining will probably begin anew.)

      Resisting inevitable changes like this just hinders Linux (and *BSD) from making steps towards the mainstream and maintains the perception that it's only suited to technogeeks.

      While "mebibyte" sounds too close to "maybebyte" for my tastes, it does make sense to meld "mega" with "binary" in this way. I wish they'd gone farther; I could have dealt more easily with "mibyte" (pronounced either /mee-bite/ or /mih-bite/) rather than "mebibyte." Perhaps that will become the natural phonetic erosion as such terms get adopted, but that's hard to count on.

      On a personal level, clearing up the distinction would at least make things less annoying as far as my life goes. My mother still doesn't understand this whole powers-of-two thing, or even the concept of bits versus bytes, and I don't expect she ever will ("But the modem is 56K, and I'm only transferring at 5K!"). I don't know why I bought a 75GB disk six months ago (75 GiB, to be precise), and then bought an 80GB disk from the same manufacturer last month at about the same price to find myself with exactly the same amount of storage as last time (75 GiB). That ticks me off---I could have used the extra five /Gi?B/. It's really going to tick me off if memory manufacturers start playing similar games. At least unifying this usage will reduce the confusion in the marketplace. (I'd also quit wondering whether a transfer rate of "49K per second" meant 382,812, 384,000, 392,000, 393,216 or 401,408 bits per second. Fortunately, I don't wonder that often, but still.)

      I say, let's adopt /[KMGTPA]iB/ as a standard, call 'em /kib/, /mib/, /gib/, /tib/, /pib/ and, uh, /eyeb/, and be done with it. Maybe if we do that, we'll be one step closer to adopting the metric system as well.

  • something of a linguistic perspective.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by contre ( 545718 ) <contre@attbi.com> on Sunday December 23, 2001 @01:41PM (#2744468) Homepage
    The thing is, people have adopted the terms megabyte and gigabyte to mean what they do now, the power of two unit insted of the proper power of ten. This is how language evolves - the improper becomes accepted.

    The same thing happened with the word Judaism. It's supposed to be pronounced jew-DUH-ism, but in America we call it jew-DEE-ism. While it's not technically correct, everyone knows what you're talking about, and it's the standard, accepted way to talk about the Jewish faith.

    Basically this is an effort to reverse linguistic evolution. The current terminology isn't broken for the public which understands gigabyte and megabyte, so don't fix it.

  • No. (Score:2)

    by V50 ( 248015 )
    Will there be a time when all computer users will talk about adding mibibytes of RAM, rather than a megabytes?

    In a word, NO!

    Man I hate dumb sounding words.....
  • If we really want to be precise in our use of language, we should use bits or octets, not bytes. A byte is not always 8-bits.

  • hmm (Score:2)

    by nomadic ( 141991 )
    I don't know, I think it's kind of funny how such an important unit of measurement in a field that relies on accuracy to the nth decimal place is used so vaguely.
  • Okay, so I admit, it's a really good idea : since Mb and Gb aren't powers of ten, let's invent new units to alleviate the confusion. But it'll never work, because people aren't used to it. One might argue that people just have to get used to it, or that people will naturally use the better system, but that doesn't actually matter : metric is a better system than imperial or standard, yet people in the UK or the US still haven't adopted metric. Actually that's not true, the UK is adopting metric because the authorities are forcing it down people throats, wish reinforces my point that is that people don't change if they don't have to.

    The same goes with many things in spoken language : for example, the official translation for "email" in France is "mél", but nobody ever says or write that apart from people in the administration (i.e. look for "mél" in a letter and you know it's from the government).

    Finally, there is a small argument in favor of keeping Kb, Mb and Gb around : these units are not 1000, 1M or 1G, therefore they are confusing, therefore they constitute in themselves another way for CS teachers to weed out students who have no talent for CS : I used to teach C, and within a week of being told a what a Kb was, I could tell which of my 1st year students were going to struggle and/or not going to make it if they didn't handle the 1000/1024 distinction like they were breathing.

  • May seem silly now, but... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mbrubeck ( 73587 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @01:57PM (#2744514) Homepage
    The different between a gigabyte and a gibibyte is pretty small (7%), but once terabyte and larger arrays become more common, the distinction becomes more and more important. The different between a petabyte and a pebibyte is 13%. An exbibyte is more than 15% larger than an exabyte, which will surely lead to worse confusion than today's "80GB" hard drive specificiations...
    • Important how? Does anyone here megabyte and think "oh, a million bytes."? No, they think "oh, i know that that is. It's a relative measure of information, similar to 2x4 which is actually 1.5" x 3.5"" It's called nominal measurements and it's hear to stay, so just leave it. It is a label!!
  • Look, we'll get to the "Megabyte"/"Mebibyte" distinction just as soon as we're done with the "hacker"/"cracker" distinction. After that, we can switch everyone in the US to the metric system and call it a day.
  • I've been using computers, since, the mid 80's, granted we didnt have much cause to talk about a megabyte back then ;), but we've *always* called a megabyte a megabyte and a decimal megabyte, "million bytes" [at first it seems too large, but its the same number of syllables as "megabyte"]. Its simple and self explanitory :) It works for other things two [pun intended], "thousand bytes", "billion bytes" :)

    This aside, powers of 2 is the only metric that is usefull (IMHO) on computers -- and if it weren't for HD manufacturers thinking they are tricking people (I wager they're just pissing people off), we wouldn't be having this conversation.
    • There's no difference in efficiency between mallocing 1048576 bytes and mallocing 1000000 bytse. Powers of 2 are useful for efficiency now only because they match multiples of the register size of the CPU (but 1000000 does that too).
      Also, computers need not be based on powers of 2 anyway, so chaining everything to 2 is losing a level of abstraction (eg. quantum computers, ternary computers, EBCDIC computers (9 bits per byte), etc.)

      What abbreviation do you use for "million bytes"?
  • When will people learn that stupid names aren't cool! Besides, its like GNU/Linux. It'll never catch on!
  • I don't care what some obscure standards body tries to impose. Megabytes and Gigabytes have always been to the power of two, and to programmers always will be. Benjamin LaHaise states in the thread exactly what everyone knows: the power of ten measure is only used by hard drive manufacturers to con the public into thinking their hard drives are bigger than they really are. Bit like the old console manufacturers boasting "8Mb" cartridges knowing full well most of the public would think they meant "8MB".

    Phillip.
  • Will there be a time when all computer users will talk about adding mibibytes of RAM, rather than a megabytes?

    Will there be a time when all computer networks are based around OSI stacks, instead of TCP/IP?

    No.

    When it comes to a battle between de facto standards and de jure standards, the de facto standard always wins.

  • Better solution: switch to base-8 everywhere! (Score:5, Funny)

    by coyote-san ( 38515 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @02:11PM (#2744559)
    Instead of fixing the symptoms, we should address the underlying problem: our silly use of decimal numbers.

    If we used base 8 like God intended (after all, He gave us 8 finger and 2 thumbs, not ten fingers!) this wouldn't be an issue.

    As an extra benefit, the sudden conversion of account balances from decimal to octal numbers will be much need shot in the arm economically. Everyone will be richer! (or owe more money, but we can't all be winners unless we're competing in the Special Olympics.)
  • MiBs!?! MiBs!?! Un-ac-cept-a-ble!

    Seriously, this is going to be about as successful as the United States' official switchover to the metric system in 1980. The old ways are too ingrained, and the new ones, no matter how much more appropriate they are, will never catch on. The people who really need to know that 1KB=1024B and not 1000KB, already know, and without some fancy-schmancy new nomenclature to tell us.

    And manufacturers won't try to force everyone to use the new naming, because the vast majority of their customers can't even be bothered to learn the current terminology-- ever hear someone in CompUSA asking a salesperson how many RAMs or Megahertzes is in the computer they're looking at? I know I sure have.

    ~Philly

  • A quandary for dictionary makers... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Krokus ( 88121 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @02:15PM (#2744575) Homepage
    Traipsing through dictionary.com, we find the following definitions for "gigabyte"...

    The American Heritage dictionary can't decide:

    gigabyte (jg-bt, gg-) n.
    1. A unit of computer memory or data storage capacity equal to 1,024 megabytes (230 bytes).
    2. One billion bytes.

    Princeton University's WordNet decided to decide:

    gigabyte n : a unit of information equal to one billion (1,000,000,000) bytes or one thousand megabytes.

    The Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing chose the power or two, but went "outside the box" when it came to a definition:

    2^30 = 1,073,741,824 bytes = 1024 megabytes.

    Roughly the amount of data required to encode a human gene sequence (including all the redundant codons).

  • I still like the Homer Simpson version... (Score:3, Funny)

    by milkmandan9 ( 190569 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @02:19PM (#2744585)
    Mega-ma-bytes
    Giga-ma-bytes
    Saxa-ma-phone
    etc.
  • I spent 3 hours explaning Mega and Kilo bytes to my mom yesterday.... Now I'll have to open that can of worms again.

    Thanks alot!

  • My Vote: (Score:5, Funny)

    by mESSDan ( 302670 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @02:25PM (#2744598) Homepage
    Is to coin a term based on the word 'bit':

    1st: 'Bitches', this refers to 8 bits.

    2nd: 'MegaBitches', Obviously, in oldschool terms this would be a Megabyte.

    3rd: 'GigaBitches', following the entire byte-to-bitches theme, this would previously have been a Gigabyte.

    Some suggested slang based on 'bits-n-bitches':

    'Slap'N'ThemBitches', this is what you do when you add any amount of space (memory or harddrive) to your computer.

    'StankBitches', bad RAM or a crappy harddrive.

    'BadAssMofoBitches', this is any amount of space greater than what you have.

    'UglyBitches', this is typically an embarrassingly small amount of space, so much so that you don't tell anyone that's how much you have.

    Thanks to our so hip words, now your everyday average IT guy can have a conversation like this with his boss:

    "Yo man, yesterday I found some UglyBitches over at the office, and yo, some of them were some StankBitches, yo! So I got rid of them StankBitches and got me some BadAssMofoBitches, and yo, I slap'n'themBitches early this morning. That shit was shweet!"

  • Continue to use "megabyte" for 10^6. Use "binary megabyte" for 2^20. If people see "mebibyte" they will think it's a typo.

    Advertisers can continue to use "megabyte" in large type without fear since it has a clear-cut definition, even though it does lead to values that are somewhat inflated. The masses probably don't care about this. Geeks can either look for the binary megabyte number in the fine print, or guesstimate it themselves.

    • Use "binary megabyte"

      Thank you. That is the first term i've seen on the subject (aside from the real stuff like Megabyte) that doesn't make me want to break things. Perhaps i drink too much coffee...

  • The argument that there are accepted standards now and that everyone understands current usages carries no weight. I say off with the old, on with the new. How ironic it is that computers are now so old that computer people are stodgy, conservative, died-in-the-wool, and unable to change their ways... Going from "Cycles" to "Hertz" was DIFFICULT and didn't clarify a thing. Going from mega- to mebi- is a piece of cake by comparison--and there's actually some BENEFIT to it.

    RAM sizes, since they are relevant to hardware binary addressing logic, have always been in sized in power of two. It makes no sense to manufacturer or design for a RAM (or magnetic core array) with 1000 or 1000,000 or 1,000,000,000 bytes or words of memory.

    Clock speeds and communications speeds have always been decimal. Or do you think a 1 GHz Pentium has a clock speed of 1,073,741,824 Hz?

    Disks are a mess. The total amount of disk storage is continuously variable, and is rarely an exact power of two. On the other hand, the amount stored per sector is related to RAM considerations and is often 512 bytes or somesuch. Disk capacities are sometimes quoted in powers of ten, sometimes in powers of two, and I have even seen "mixed systems" in which 1 "megabyte" of disk space meant 2000 (decimal) sectors of 512 bytes each, i.e. one "disk megabyte" was 1,024,000 bytes.

    Nobody has any idea what the current terminology really means. At the one gig level, the discrepancy, 7%, is starting to be annoying. When we get to terabyte disks, which can't be far off, the discrepancy will be 10%. Let's start using terms that have well-defined meanings.
  • ...I think that must be a typo.

    We all know that KIBO is alive and well in our computers.
  • The words sound like you're saying megabyte and gigabyte with an impediment. E.G. "Jar-Jay hassa a puter with 512 mebibytes ofa RAM ansa 60 gibibytes of hard drive." Say it to yourself and see...

  • Origins... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by JTowner ( 545823 )
    I'm not sure if how many of you know this but anyway... Some (most) of you have shown a dislike of the new names. "It doesn't sound right." I have to agree, as it's not as sweer sounding as mega or kilo; however, there is simple logic behind why these names were chosen. Contrasting megabyte with mebibyte, we find the only difference are the third and fourth characters. Extracting this, we get "bi", a common prefix/suffix meaning "two of", or "in units of two". Remember the word "binary"? At least the new names make a lot of sense logically, if not acoustically.

  • A megabyte has *always* been 1024k, which is in turn 1024 bytes. Hence a megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes. Always has been, always will be. Giving it a new name simply validates the mistakes of the mail-in MCSEs who've never had to key anything in in hexadecimal.

    That's like saying "we're gonna start measuring network bandwidth in megabytes per second cause people are too dense to realize it's actually megabits". It's still wrong.

    • I'll just assume that you never learned what the SI (and that 'I' is for international; bigger than you) unit prefixes mean.

      mega = 10^6 _everywhere_ with an exception made for bytes, and only a mild exception. You'll notice that harddrives come with packaging that states "1GB = 1000000B" to avoid confusion.

  • Non issue (Score:2, Informative)

    by rtscts ( 156396 )
    Why is this an issue? Everyone already knows kilo = 1000, so kilobyte = 1000 bytes. Only geeks work in base 2, so only geeks need to know kibi = 1024.

    BTW, if you can't remember what the prefix is, remember: first two letters of the SI unit, then 'bi' for binary. A kilo-binary-byte = Kibibyte.

    • Re:Non issue (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Antibozo ( 410516 )
      BTW, if you can't remember what the prefix is, remember: first two letters of the SI unit, then 'bi' for binary. A kilo-binary-byte = Kibibyte.

      Brilliant. Now SI includes inherently ambiguous prefixes: what will "debi" mean? Will it be "deci-binary" or "deka-binary"?

  • MiB and GiB prevents miscommunication (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nedron ( 5294 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @04:36PM (#2745006) Homepage
    My group switched to the "binary" nomenclature about two years ago in order to prevent miscommunication with other parts of the company. Each group interpreted MB, GB, etc., differently depending on that their background was.

    For some reason, people who grew up in router land use GB to mean 10^6, while most software developers use GB to mean 2^20.

    To resolve this, my group prepared a document that explains the use of the binary nomemclature and we refer readers to this base document in all of our prepared documentation. The document also explicitly states what the accepted abbreviations are (KiB, MiB, GiB, etc.). We also explicity define the capital B to mean byte, while a lower case 'b' is a bit. Therefore, Mib means mebibit.

    This has reduced confusion to a great amount and now various groups looking at our performance testing results can make an accurate assesment.

  • This should catch on ... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ... about as well as Esperanto has.

  • I can see the motivation for this, but I would be much more impressed if they could get people to properly distinguish between bits and bytes as in Mbps (Mega bits per second) vs. MBps (Mega bytes per second). That's a FAR greater difference (800%) than the 4.8% difference between the proposed megabyte/mebibyte.

    While I'm at it, I'd like to see them also straighten out those people who write mbps (which actually means millibits per second; i.e. 1/1000 bits per second!) :^)

  • Hard to say (Score:3, Funny)

    by SiliconEntity ( 448450 ) on Sunday December 23, 2001 @05:47PM (#2745194)
    Will people change their usage? Mebi, mebi not.

  • Stephen quoted a piece from the diff, showing how Eric Raymond had changed the Configure.help. You'll notice this in incomplete, as I've highlighted below:

    Here is a snippet from the diff between versions 2.75 and 2.76 of Configure.help:

    @@ -344,8 +344,8 @@
    If you are compiling a kernel which will never run on a machine with
    more than 960 megabytes of total physical RAM, answer "off" here
    (default choice and suitable for most users). This will result in a
    - "3GB/1GB" split: 3GB are mapped so that each process sees a 3GB
    - virtual memory space and the remaining part of the 4GB virtual memory
    + "3GiB/1GiB" split: 3GiB are mapped so that each process sees a 3GiB
    + virtual memory space and the remaining part of the 4GiB virtual memory
    space is used by the kernel to permanently map as much physical memory
    as possible.

  • The whole notion of mebibytes is an ugly, illconsidered, and overly specific hack designed to fix a real, but by no means debilitating, problem. I made a similar post [debianplanet.org], anonymously, to debianplanet this morning, where I first saw this subject discussed, and only just now got around to checking out slashdot. I should warn you up front the the following is fairly opinionated rant, and probably represents a rather unpopular opinion to boot. You have been warned. :-)

    The thing that really annoys me about the whole Megabyte/Mebibyte thing is that the entire standard nomenclature is an ill-considered, quick, dirty, and above all ugly hack addressing an admittedly legitimate problem (Mega meaning 1^06 or 2^20).

    Their hack addresses only powers of 10 and powers of 2, which are a subset of a larger question: nomenclature for abitrary (integer) bases. Worse, it mixes the two together in a misguided effort to get one base's representation to approximate the others, despite the fact that the two bases are in fact quite different!

    Why is this so stupid? Well, aside from the internal lack of logic (and, I have to say, profound lack of elegance), let's suppose, for example, that in ten years we begin finding more widespread use of balanced trinary systems , or some other hitherto unforseen base. Where's our nomencalture now? Of completely no use, and requiring us to invent a new wheel, yet again.

    A far more reasonable approach would have been a subscript denoting the base, with the default being base ten if no subscript is present (i.e. defaulting to standard metric nomeclature). E.g. M(sub)2Byte would be 2^6 Bytes while M(sub)10Byte = MByte = 10^6 bytes. A M(sub)3trit would be 3^6 trits, and so on.

    One will immediately notice that what we consider a (base-2) Megabyte is not 2^6, but rather 2^20 Bytes, or 64 vs 1048576 bytes. Well, they want us to learn a different nomenclature anyway, so why not at least make it logical. If Mega always means to the power of six, regardless of base, then we have a rational basis for our nomenclature. Yes, it would take some getting used to, but I would argue it would be far less painful getting used to something this logical than to adopt the use of "mebibyte" in our daily language. YMMV of course.

    This ugly hybridization of base-10 nomenclature with base two numerology they are intending to replace (admittedly equally bad) common usage with is both illogical and unnecessarilly specific to one problem set. If we're going to be making up new (and apparently stupid) terms like mebibyte, then lets at least define mebi to represent a power of 20, or better yet 21 as it would then follow exa by an additional power of three, as every other prefix above kilo (and below milli) does. Or better yet, pick a name that doesn't start with the already (overused) 'M'.

    Does anyone else see the advantage of this? We have just extended our available nonemclature for all measures, in any base, in a rational, extensible, and fairly scalable approach. Yes, to our base-10 minds we may feel uncomfortable with the small size a Megabyte really is, but I would submit that that is no greater a psychological barrior to overcome than the use of really stupid, childish, and annoying terms such as "mebi," and a heck of a lot more rational to boot.

    Of course, this idea came from one person, spontaneously, on a Sunday morning, who (at the time) hadn't even had his coffee yet. Give a self-appointed committee time enough to dumb it down and who knows what hideous form it would then take...

  • With computers moving further and further into the daily lives of common (that is, non-CS) people, I suspect we're fighting against a horde of people who already believe that a megabyte is 10^6 bytes.

    I agree with some of the others here that "mebibyte" is a very clumsy word.

    But I'm wondering, what's with the attachment to the whole base-2 system anyway? I mean, I'm a CSist, and *I* don't know how many bytes are in a gibibyte. I have to run to my calculator.

    I'm probably speaking too late to be heard, anyway, but I say ditch the whole base-2 thing and start saying 42.9 gigabytes instead of 40 gigabytes. If you want the exact amount, read the documentation, where (one hopes) the size will be expressed precisely in bytes.

    I would like to think that of all the groups of people in the world, computer scientists would have the cool rationality to be able to let go of a misguided standard.

    But I guess that, so long as there are those who feel that it measures their penis size, they won't be able to let it go.

  • When one gives the size of floppy disks, the megabyte referred to is 1024000, as can easily be seen:

    Cylinders * heads * Sector * allocations
    = 80 * 2 * 18 * 512
    = 1474560 = 1.44 * 1024

    Seems the actual style is to use k indifferently for 1000 and 1024, as the end suits the need.

  • Pointless, Revisionist, And Stupid. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Bowie J. Poag ( 16898 ) on Monday December 24, 2001 @01:10AM (#2746344) Homepage



    1. A megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes. Always has been, always will be. It is a unit of measurement specific to its science, like the Mole is to Chemistry, and like the Newton is to Physics. It is not meant to be a general metric measurement, in other words, a megabyte isn't 1,000,000 anymore than a "dozen" is 10. Ever since the term was coined, it has meant that value, specifically. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something, namely marketing idiots who are responsible for great advancements in human culture like MTV and the Home Shopping Network.

    2. By accepting this "mebibytes" crap, you're allowing marketing people to revise history. The number 1,048,576 is an important value in Computer Science, similar to 8, 256, 1024, and other commonly-used powers of 2. An understanding of the powers of 2 is integral to having an understanding of the underlying principles that form the foundation of this discipline. If you cant think in anything but base 10, you should consider a different line of work, as most computer scientists have no problem thinking in terms of binary, octal, hexidecimal and otherwise. A failure to understand the basic nature of the device you intend on working with for the rest of your career is tantamount to unprofessionalism and neglect. After all, you can't be expected to code competently by using incorrect measurements any more than a carpenter can be expected to build a house competently if his tape measure is made out of elastic rubber.

    3. Its just plain stupid. A megabyte is a megabyte. Its not less than a megabyte, or more than a megabyte. If you for some reason feel the need to apply a term to "1,000,000" an essentially meaningless number in terms of the machine, we already have a word for it. Its called "million", as in "a million bytes." Call a spade a spade. A megabyte is 1,048,576. A million bytes is 1,000,000 bytes. They are not equal, and never will be.

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