At 16:01 03/19/99 -0500, Barry King wrote:
>My opinion is that the entire proposal is laughable.

that might not be a bad thing -- there wouldn't be much to laugh in these
spheres if we hadn't the bureaucrats :)

>Has anyone here EVER been unsure from the context whether a Mega- or
>a Kilo-something was 1024 or 1000 multipliers?

i guess in communications it is common to talk about 10^6 bits per second
as Mbps, since they're closer to MHz and (decimal) statistics than to
binary calculations.

the common 1.44MB floppy seems to have a capacity of 1.44*1000*1024 bytes,
if i'm not mistaken.

i guess it's the same as with "v" or "V" for volt or "mA" or 'Mamps" for
milli amperes: as long as you stay within a relatively small context, there
is not much ambiguity to bother about, and if it is -- you always can ask.

>And besides, can you pronounce MiByte ("me-bee-byte"???) without
>laughing?  Maybe-bytes?  That's the RAM where Windoze puts my data
>files, right?  Sigh.

some work-out for your face muscles won't hurt you -- imagine how much sun
this brings into your life if you laugh every time you talk or write about
kiwibytes or maybebytes :)

while i don't think that "maybe-bytes" are exactly a catchy solution, i
think =a= solution would be nice, to make it clear once and for all what
kind of mega one is talking about. (there's only two kinds of kilo and
three of mega, but there are already 4 of giga, and because the next
windows version will require terabyte disks, we better get used to the fact
that there will be 5 versions of tera around... :)

ge