Differences between current version and revision by previous author of MegaByte.
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| Newer page: | version 3 | Last edited on Thursday, October 30, 2003 11:45:17 am | by AristotlePagaltzis | |
| Older page: | version 2 | Last edited on Thursday, October 30, 2003 9:39:56 am | by JohnMcPherson | Revert |
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-1,000 [KiloByte]s, but commonly refers to 1,024 [KibiByte]s which is actually called a MebiByte. However, this distinction has not been adopted in practice, so it's not always clear what exact capacity is meant by a particular mention of MegaByte.
+1,000 [KiloByte]s, but commonly refers to 1,024 [KibiByte]s which is actually called a MebiByte. Originally, the "kilo"/"mega"/etc prefixes were used for 2^(10*x) amounts in computer jargon, while they usually mean 10^(3*x). This was not a problem, since computer and non-computer jargon generally didn't overlap. When computers began pervading all aspects of life, some people deemed this duality confusing and proposed to introduce new "kibi"/"mebi"/etc prefixes for the base-2 factors and to use the "kilo"/"mega"/etc prefixes for traditional base-10 factors
. However, this distinction has not been adopted in practice, so it's not always clear what exact capacity is meant by a particular mention of MegaByte.
In speech, it's often cut down to "meg".
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-Traditionally in computer jargon, since computers use base 2 rather than base 10 for numbers, Kilo- means 2<sup>10</sup> (==1024) rather than the typical 1000. However, now that computers are used everywhere, this has confused many people who assume it implies base10; hence the proposal to use the Kibi- prefix for the base2 version. Similarly for Mega- traditionally meaning 2<sup>20</sup> (==1,048,576) rather than 1,000,000.
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This is a very common unit. The majority of sets of data dealt with in contemporary computing range from somewhere between half a MegaByte to about 50. 400-600 [MegaByte]s is a common size for MultiMedia data, owing to the fact that that's roughly the capacity of [CD]s.
See also KiloByte/KibiByte, MebiByte, GigaByte/GibiByte, TeraByte.
