Talk:Mebibyte

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Discussion about centralization took place at Talk:Binary prefix.

Contents 1 Explain why it was named as such 2 This naming seams forced 3 WTF is a mebibyte? Who made this up? 4 I think they should, as base 10 is really for you humans, we computers are base 2 freaks... 10 + 10 = 100 5 THIS IS BS 6 Why 'Mebibyte' won't work 7 I fought the law and the law won 8 This is worse than worthless

[edit] Explain why it was named as such

You sound like you're trying to say "megabyte" with cold when saying "mebibyte", so where did the word come from? Who decided to name them as such? And why does wiki use it so much on certain articles. None of my college proffessers have ever mentioned this term to me, and synonomously the most recent verison of the official A+ certification book states that a "megabyte" has the both the 1000x1000 and 1024x1024 meaning (and its up to a clarification to state how many bytes it really is). What this basically means is that mebibyte is by no means wide spread and I dont think its up to wikipedia authors to slap it into articles as if it was standard usage. The floppy article, for example, alternates on the term all the time and it gives it an unproffessional look.

See binary prefix for the origin of the term.

We use it in Wikipedia because it is a standard, it's unambiguous, and we use binary units in many fields; not just computer science. See the Manual of Style and this discussion. — Omegatron 16:23, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] This naming seams forced

Again, there should be vote and more options, this naming is just ridiculous. Aesthetically, phoneticaly, ortographicaly I don't like it and is confusing with 'bit' measures. Megabyte is 2^20, so its not 1,000,000 but 1,048,576. The reasoning behind the separate names for both is good, but the name for the 1,048,576=MiB is just bad chosen. -- IEEE 01:26, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] WTF is a mebibyte? Who made this up?

The IEC. It makes a lot of sense actually, even if it's a stupid sounding word. - Omegatron 22:37, Dec 31, 2004 (UTC)

Sorry, which IEC? That page has 20 seperate choices, some obviously wrong but not enough. In any case I'm sure it's the IEC whose members make money by being able to continue to sell hard drives completely against the common usage of the term in the computer world as it has stood for 40 years. And the "even if it's stupid sounding" means avoiding the realities of language. Emtymology of the meanings of words by academics/committe/corporation is a horrible method of creating language you hope to become common use. Come up with a word that's not stupid looking, stupid sounding, and hard/stupid to pronounce - and people might use it. Better yet, why not change the ONE thing that's "causing confusion" - hard drive capacity values printed on boxes - instead of asking everyone else in the rest of the world to change 10e12 other locations and the usage by 3e9 people. Sigh. Yes yes, I'll go somewhere else to complain about this :) 74.103.98.163 18:40, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

In any case I'm sure it's the IEC whose members make money by being able to continue to sell hard drives completely against the common usage of the term in the computer world as it has stood for 40 years.'

Surely you meant to refer to Microsoft making money using a measurement incorrectly in spite of a common usage that has stood for hundreds of years.  :-) — Omegatron 21:47, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

The use of mebibyte is being discussed at [1] --Thax 8 July 2005 02:56 (UTC)

A vote has been started on whether Wikipedia should use these prefixes all the time, only in highly technical contexts, or never. - Omegatron 14:49, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

Vote over, here's the Manual of Style on the subject. - Trevyn 04:42, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

I'd love to see the archived vote and discussion, but good luck finding it in the 62 pages of archives of the discussion page. Wikipedia needs the ability to search for simple text "on all pages directly linked from the current page" or something. Google is of no help. 74.103.98.163 20:55, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Google works, but you have to use the right search terms.  :-/ [2] A direct link is here. — Omegatron 21:47, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] I think they should, as base 10 is really for you humans, we computers are base 2 freaks... 10 + 10 = 100

THANK YOU FOR YOUR INPUT - Omegatron 13:56, July 18, 2005 (UTC)

Omegatron, please seek help. - Anonymous

How can I help you? — Omegatron 01:45, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

I think it would be useful to include a pronounciation key -- I would like to know if the "i" in Mebibyte should by short (as in "think") or long (as in "time").

It is suggested that in English, the first syllable of the name of the binary-multiple prefix should be pronounced in the same way as the first syllable of the name of the corresponding SI prefix, and that the second syllable should be pronounced as "bee." [3] — Omegatron 00:33, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Thank you! I added this to the main article on prefixes.

[edit] THIS IS BS

This is complete BS! Who gave the IEC complete control over the use of bits and bytes in everyday language. I bet they are receiving payola from marketing/sales industry to keep consumers confused.. I wrote this into the talk page of IEC 60027, I elaborated more on it in my blog at www.bl3nder.com:

Since computers calculate and manage data in base two, of which there are two states for each bit (often represented 0 and 1). It makes no sense to discuss information in base ten. A Kilobit thus must be counted in units that are aligned with byte quantitites.

   * One Kilobit = 1024 bits.
   * One Megabit = 1024 Kilobits.
   * One Gigabit = 1024 Megabits.
   * One Terabit = 1024 Gigabits.

This would make the conversion from bits to bytes easier:

   * 1/8 Kilobyte = One Kilobit.
   * 1/8 Megabyte = One Megabit.
   * 1/8 Gigabyte = One Gigabit.
   * 1/8 Terabyte = One Terabit.

When data rates are discussed in base ten, those data rates should be given a seperate unit of quantity and something impossible to confuse with the above.

Like

   * 1000 bits = Decabit = Deca-bit
   * 1000000 bits = DecaDecabit = BiDeca-bit
   * 1000000000 = DecaDecaDecabit = TriDeca-bit
   * 1000000000000 = DecaDecaDecaDecabit = Quad-Deca-bit
   * 1000000000000000 = DecaDecaDecaDecaDecabit = Penta-Deca-bit

Make the unit names different for base 10 measurement versus base 2 measurement. Since in the use of bits and bytes, base 2 was the preference, documentation shouldn't have to be changed to make discussion relevant to base-10 measurements as it would over-complicate existing documentation on existing systems.

Choose a human-friendly unit name for base-10 unit sizes, and a computer-friendly unit name for base-2 unit sizes.

BTW Sales/Advertising people use Mbps, MBps interchangeably, the purpose for this is to cheat/confuse consumers when discussing storage capacities and data rates, this topic is more political than practical.

Some may not consider this to be a big deal, but it makes the language sound funny and it forces the computing industry to change it's documents and not those of the communications and marketing/advertising industry. There was never a time when bits were used without reference to bytes. If a Kilobit should be 1000 bits, tell me how you intend to count that in bits, as 1000 bits represented with in binary is "1111101000", or in hexadecimal "2E8". 1024 in binary is represented as "10000000000", in Hexidecimal it is "400". Okay so which is more concise? To represent bit quantities in base 10 or in base 2?

I'm sick and tired of seeing advertising inserts that refer to "Megabits" as a scale of communication.. When you know, if it was discussed in bytes, it would not look as significant.

• 1 Kbps = 1 Kilobit per second = 128 bytes per second
• 1 Mbps = 1 Megabit per second = 128 Kilobytes per second = .125 Megabytes.
• 10 Mbps = 10 Megabits per second = 1.25 Megabytes per second.
• 100 Mbps = 100 Megabits per second = 12.5 Megabytes per second.
• 1 Gbps = 1000 Megabits per second = 125 Megabytes per second.

The only confusion here is how to represent a quantity in terms useful to a computer programmer and in terms useful to a human. The only people that would want to represent this information in base 10 are those who are confused or who do not do well with math and want to talk about thousands of bits and bytes without looking like a fool. Note that Mac users refer to graphics screens as having millions of colors and not 16,777,216 colors, which is 2^24th.

--Rofthorax 00:51, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

"You might wish to go to Usenet or start a blog if you want to convince people of the merits of your favorite views. You can also use Wikinfo which promotes a "sympathetic point of view" for every article. Wikipedia was not made for opinion, it was made for fact." - Wikipedia is not a soapbox — Omegatron 03:55, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

While I agree with the principle that the wikipedia is not a soapbox, keep in mind: This is a discussion about word usage, not about "facts". Common usage is still "mega" not "mebi." I've yet to see "mebi" on any consumer product. CobraA1 10:09, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Why 'Mebibyte' won't work

KB, MB, GB, etc are inaccurate because it's used by leighmen to mean "about 1000 bytes". Colloquial speech has then forced the notion into ambiguity, and i think Mebibyte will suffer the same fate. Here is my reasoning:

Fractional representation When a human sees a filesize, for instance, in bytes, it often amounts to a really large number, often in the millions. Such a large number is not really easy to glance over, so you'd like to express it in a higher unit. For instance, a file that's 8496792 bytes is expressed as 8297.6484375 KB, or 8.10317230224609375 MB. Not an exact representation since it does not divide even with 1024, and i'd say the overwhelming majority of numbers don't. So when Microsoft reports a file size to a user, they'd give a user-friendly representation, but sacrificing accuracy.

Even when i as a programmer want to express a filesize in bytes, i would hardly ever use the term Mebibyte or Megabyte for that matter as an exact term, because i know that accuracy will be lost in the translation. If i wanted to express a filesize accurately to the byte, i'd express it in bytes, never in megabytes, and if the mebibyte was the unambiguous gold standard i STILL wouldn't use it, because it STILL wouldn't be accurate unless the number divided evenly with 1024.

So the term mebibyte, and such, are useless. The only thing they contribute are confusion, and another layer of jargon. How often are you going to have to express something that's exactly 1 KiB, MiB, or TiB? hardly ever! And if you did, you'd probably be better off expressing it in exact number of bytes, or the "evil Micro$oft" *rolleyes* MB, because it's a pretty specific situation where you have an audience that knows what MiB is, and that's it supposedly unambiguos.

Anyway, i thought i'd drop that here in discussion. 64.173.240.130 01:03, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] I fought the law and the law won

I refer you to this article for some history on this definition and some legal cases taht have been influenced by it. Nothing has actually made it in front of a judge yet, though.

I am working in a corporate environment and we are looking for a way of differentiating the two amounts (mega and mebi) for consumers so this is actually a useful term. It's a real pain to be specific with customers when they don't understandthe difference and need explanatons of basic terms (and their contexts.) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Craigwbrown (talk • contribs) 04:33, 31 January 2007 (UTC).

Laymen are confused by the terms that computer experts have been using for years so what do they do? They rename the widely accepted value. MiB makes more sense as being short for Million Bytes than it does for Megabytes. BiB for Billion bytes, etc. This is a standard that won't stick even if a standards body is behind it.Jimberg98 22:44, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Another thing about MiB is an abbreviation for Mebibyte which is an abbreviation for Mega Binary Byte. That's pretty lame in itself, but it's also lame since it is redundant. Byte is an abbreviation for Binary Term. So MiB all expanded is Mega Binary Binary Term.Jimberg98 16:39, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] This is worse than worthless

Another sickening example of catering to the most stupid people of all. This is a made up word which will only cause problems, not solve any. If someone is unable to comprehend a base-2 number, what makes you think they could even tell you how many zeros are in the number one-million?