Re: Element for Numbers

On Tue, 19 Nov 2002 12:28:07 -0500
"Peter Foti (PeterF)" <PeterF@SystolicNetworks.com> wrote:

| Note that Decimal Multiples
| and Binary Multiples each have their own prefixes and definitions.  2^20
| has the symbol Mi, which means mebi (not mega).
| http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html
| http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

These have been proposed but were never widely adopted. One still typically refers to 1,048,576 bytes as a "megabyte".

And David Woolley wrote:
: Also how many people know that a RAM MB is not the same as a hard disk
: MB.

They are the same, although some hard disk marketers would prefer you to think otherwise, so they can make their hard disks sound bigger than they are. This practice started about 4 and a half years ago, from what I can tell.

Your operating system should report the *correct* size of your hard drive though, in megabytes rather than just millions of bytes.

Further to this, there is a *third* definition of megabyte. You know how 3.5" floppy drives are 1.44MB? Well, they define megabytes as 1,024,000 bytes -- a thousand kilobytes.

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