K3b sees 4.7GB DVD+R as 4.4 GB

[Tim]

On Mon, 2006-01-16 at 14:33 +0000, Craig McLean wrote:
> Excuse my potential ignorance, but I thought that Kilobyte and its ilk
> were deprecated in favour of the binary prefixes Kibi, Mebi, Gibi,
> Pebi &c.
> 
> i.e.:
> 1 Kibibyte = 1024 bytes
> 1 Mebibyte = 1024 Kibibytes
> and so on...
> 
> Ref: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Kibibyte.html

It is, as far as smart people are concerned.  The problem is that
some people just won't use them.  They carry on using ambiguous and
incorrect terms.  Though, having said that, I prefer to use SI units,
but it must be absolutely clear that they are.  

When I see something listed as being 142.76MB I want to know that
there's one hundred and forty-two million, seven hundred and sixty bytes
in the file, without having to do math to convert the numbers into
normal figures, as if we were still using Pounds, Shillings and Pence.
K, M, G, T, etc., are part of the metric/decimal system, and should be
used as such.

Try running /sbin/ifconfig and you'll find one of the few things that
uses MiB (and says so, too).  At least you know what the figures it uses
represent.

It's also a good example at the problem with using MiB style multiplies
(as you can also see the byte count next to the figure).  Seeing
something like 1.6 MiB displayed when you're using 1.7 MB shows a
discrepency that only gets bigger as the amount of data gets bigger.
When you're transferring data, you often need to know what you're
sending (so it'll fit through some medium, or not go over some
allowance, etc.).  This is a lot easier to do if you don't have to
convert the figures that you're reading.

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