how to rurn off word wrap

Eric" < XXXX@XXXXX.COM > wrote in message
news: XXXX@XXXXX.COM ...


You been living in your cave too long. There has been LOTS of confusion
of kilobyte meaning 1000 bytes or 1024 bytes. Those that are trained on
computers and work in that industry are quite familiar with 1024 bytes
(2^10) being a kilobyte, but not consumers who are the major users of
computers. After all, if computers were sold only to buyers within its
own industry, not many would've been sold. Just read the posts about
users wondering why the disk capacity listed by the drive manufacturer
(who uses decimal-based mega- and giga- prefixes) looks to be smaller
and that they somehow lost capacity when they see its size reported in
Windows (which uses the binary-based value).

The definition of kilo-, mega-, giga-, and other prefixes predates their
use in computers. It was a severe mistake to take a prefix which meant
1,000 (10^3) for use in computers where measurements are binary and
kilobyte got bastardized to mean 1024 (2^10). This is not a new
argument. I've been in the computer industry for 26 years building
mainframes, PCs, controllers, PCBs, hardware design analysis, and
software QA. Kilobyte with a meaning of 1024 bytes was always a stupid
definition. Just because it was close to 1000 was not a good enough
reason for attempting to usurp the prefix to denote a power of 2 when,
in fact, it has always meant a power of 10. Just because that's the way
it has been done because no one bothered to vehemetly object back then
doesn't mean it was right.

I don't believe the IEC (International Engineering Consortium) is not a
collection of {*filter*}. Neither is IEEE or ISO's joint committee that also
agreed on those redefinitions (which really is to return the original
definitions to be powers of 10 and create new terms for powers of 2).
They are professionals in the industry and they have good reasons for
trying to clear up the mess some marketing {*filter*} instituted some 30
years ago. Compared to them, you are the {*filter*}.

How many grams in a kilogram? 1000. How many meters in a kilometer?
Yep, a thousand. Yet how many bytes in a kilobyte? 1024. Yeah, like
let's not be consistent in our scientific measurement prefixes. The
magnitude of a prefix should not change simply because it is used within
a different field of technology. Yeah, I know Americans (of which I am
one) are still stuck with their non-metric measuring system but, Christ,
lets get the prefixes finally straightened out. To all the other
scientific realms, we computerites look like {*filter*} using the wrong
magnitudes when using the same prefixes.

KibiBIT was *your* made up name. KibiBYTE is proposed to correct an old
mistake and *remove* the confusion caused by using the wrong prefix
which was close but not an exact match, and as the magnitude of the
prefix increases so does the mismatch increase. Kilobyte which meant
1024 bytes (but only in the computer industry) is a deprecated term. Go
read http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html.

--
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