K3b sees 4.7GB DVD+R as 4.4 GB

[Michael A. Peters]

On Mon, 2006-01-16 at 15:30 +1030, Tim wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-01-15 at 09:18 -0500, Gregory Pittman wrote:
> 
> > But MB, KB, GB are not SI units. I think they're more like the words 
> > millipede and centipede, which defy any strict mathematical meaning.
> 
> Nonsense!  M, K, G, etc., *are* SI.  They were paired up with bits and
> bytes to try and express the same sort of thing (millions, thousands,
> etc., of them).

My physics teacher would have flunked you that.
They are metric, not SI.

In SI you do not change the prefix, that leads to mistakes.

The SI units are m (meter), k (kilogram), s (second) - and I think they
have some others (ampre, newton, etc.) - but mks is SI units - you do
not use G for Giga, you use 10^9 to express Giga.

There is also cgs (what chemists prefer) - which is centimeter, graham,
and second - etc.

But

pico, nano, milli, centi, kilo, mega, etc. are metric abbreviations -
not SI abbreviations. SI defines the standard units of measure, which in
some cases happens to have a metric prefix.

-=-

Anyway - 1024 bytes being a kilobyte makes sense. Note that a byte isn't
necessarily 8 bits - there were other systems too - so a kilobyte isn't
necessary the same number of bits from one system to another. I think
that is part of the justification for using metric to describe space -
so it doesn't assume an 8 bit byte.