Mebibyte

[Pete]

I noticed something in the admin panel, our database has a size of "105 MiB". Apparently this means a Mebibyte, which is 1024² bytes. Megabyte is now apparently meant to mean 1000² bytes (the hard disk selling capacity).

Is anyone else aware of this? It's certainly news to me.

[marksi]

Never heard of such a thing. Silly name.

Now I'm going back to watching the gymnasts. Sorry, gymnastics.

[Sput]

Ah, it all makes sense now. Technically mega is a million so it's right, and I assume the Bi in mebibite refers to the base 2 thing that gets us to 2^20. Didn't realise that hard drive makers were marketing in base 10 though. How poor.

[Nini]

Isn't the whole set of *bi-byte units actually referred incorrectly to as the more common units in use? I know that 1,024 bytes != 1 Mb but Windows tells me otherwise, the dink.

[Sput]

MB

[Nini]

My fault, obviously 1,024 kilobytes and not bytes. MB's a whole different kettle of bits which is smaller by a factor of 10.

[Sput]

Chalk that up as a double fail then: I was correcting you from b to B!

[Nini]

See why MiB is much simpler?!

[Sput]

That depends, VIrgin claim their connections are 10Mb but are in fact 10Mib!

[Nini]

Not surprised, all this guff about "it's a stupid name" shouldn't decide the display of the correct amount of data a given product delivers.

That and Microsoft, it's always Microsoft.