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Re: update material display


> Of course Peter is from .au, so he is not "bound" by a .us .gov entity
> such as NIST.  But, what you refer to is essentially international
> convention.

The standards are from SI and IEC (http://www.bipm.fr/en/home/ and
http://www.iec.ch/ respectively).  So yes, there is nothing
US-specific about them, even if NIST wrote one of the more concise web
pages describing them.

> The binary units are less well-accepted; how many mebibytes of RAM do
> you see advertised?

They are much newer, so of course it will take a while for people to
become comfortable with them.

But they are starting to get used; see for example "Units in the
kernel" at http://lwn.net/2002/0103/kernel.php3 or the Debian ifconfig
at
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2001/debian-user-200112/msg00996.html

I can think of no better argument for the binary prefixes than the
fact that in "1.44M floppy", M is not 1000*1000 or 1024*1024, but
1024*1000.  This is called a "moronobyte" by
http://eies.njit.edu/~walsh/powers/newstd.html


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