RE: [802SEC] FW: Just when you thought you had all this figured out
So, for the cases where megabyte was used to mean (10^3) * (2^10) bytes, will this now be a kilokibibyte?
My objection to the IEEE standard on the same topic was that it appeared to require using the new units over other unambiguous options. In particular, when we use numbers such as 65,536 or (2^32 - 1) in a standard, we often mean exactly that number. Expressing it as 64 kibibytes wouldn't express the precision we need (as shown by the number often being a power of 2 minus 1 because it is represented by a bit field).
The confusion occurs more in the real world than in standards. I haven't read any standards that left themselves ambigous on number of bytes. They generally write the number out as above or as a power of 2.
Pat
-----Original Message-----
From: Stevenson, Carl R (Carl) [mailto:carlstevenson@agere.com]
Sent: Saturday, August 02, 2003 3:03 PM
To: 'stds-802-sec@ieee.org'
Subject: [802SEC] FW: Just when you thought you had all this figured out
FYI ... this was posted to one of the usenet ham
newsgroups with the above subject :-)
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html