Okay I think I'll educate the people here who do not understands.
First of all anyone who says KiB or MiB or anything like those is an SI units they are WRONG.
The "National Institute of Standards and Technology" is doing a very wrong things and made this website which has listed these units under the category of "International System of Units (SI)" http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html. If you read carefully the organisation that made up these units is "International Electrotechnical Commission" as you can see already this isn't and information technology body. Now the IEC isn't the body that controls the SI standards that is the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures ( BIMP ). If you go and consult the BIMP website and look at the prefixes page http://www.bipm.org/en/si/prefixes.html you will see there is no Ki or Mi or anything else prefix ( if your gonna argue about the related articles links please notice the "by the IEC" portion of the link title ).
OFF TOPIC why shouldn't a kilobyte be 1000 bytes since kilo is the SI prefix for 1000? Simply because a byte isn't an SI unit so wtf in gods name are you trying to place SI rules on it?
Okay where did KiB and MiB come about.
Well electrical engineers don't care about computer they just care about signal transistions on a piece of wire ( or firbe or air ) and basicly thats is measure in Hz which is cycles per second ( 1/s) and because a single signal can have more then two possible values in some signaling system well they made its Bits per second rather then Bit cylces per second or Bit Hertz which is rather poor sounding and the cycles doesn't add any extra meaning. Since number of bits per cycle is simple a constant and doesn't factor into 99% of the equations they just stuck with the Hertz for everything which of course is 1/seconds which is a derived SI unit and follows SI rules and makes life easy for the engineer.
Now computer scientists can quite handle network speeds being done in powers of 10s because we know the engineers don't care about powers of 2 but when we talk about data sizes rather then data transfer rates those poor engineers get confused. So they decided to make up their own units so they wouldn't get mixed up all the time.
Now NIST made a website showing off what the IEC and labbed it as an SI units website and well basicly millions of idiots are now taking the word of NIST as GOD and all the idiots have decided they will just force upon all the computer scientists the enigneers units. Since the website says KiB is an SI unit and we should all be using it.
Frankly Engineers can use it all they want but when someone tells me a file size based on powers of 2 should be using XiB I will kill them as I"m not an engineer I'm either an IT person or a Chemistry person and since neither of my backgrounds have ever used this XiB standard I don't see why I should use it now.
First of all anyone who says KiB or MiB or anything like those is an SI units they are WRONG.
The "National Institute of Standards and Technology" is doing a very wrong things and made this website which has listed these units under the category of "International System of Units (SI)" http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html. If you read carefully the organisation that made up these units is "International Electrotechnical Commission" as you can see already this isn't and information technology body. Now the IEC isn't the body that controls the SI standards that is the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures ( BIMP ). If you go and consult the BIMP website and look at the prefixes page http://www.bipm.org/en/si/prefixes.html you will see there is no Ki or Mi or anything else prefix ( if your gonna argue about the related articles links please notice the "by the IEC" portion of the link title ).
OFF TOPIC why shouldn't a kilobyte be 1000 bytes since kilo is the SI prefix for 1000? Simply because a byte isn't an SI unit so wtf in gods name are you trying to place SI rules on it?
Okay where did KiB and MiB come about.
Well electrical engineers don't care about computer they just care about signal transistions on a piece of wire ( or firbe or air ) and basicly thats is measure in Hz which is cycles per second ( 1/s) and because a single signal can have more then two possible values in some signaling system well they made its Bits per second rather then Bit cylces per second or Bit Hertz which is rather poor sounding and the cycles doesn't add any extra meaning. Since number of bits per cycle is simple a constant and doesn't factor into 99% of the equations they just stuck with the Hertz for everything which of course is 1/seconds which is a derived SI unit and follows SI rules and makes life easy for the engineer.
Now computer scientists can quite handle network speeds being done in powers of 10s because we know the engineers don't care about powers of 2 but when we talk about data sizes rather then data transfer rates those poor engineers get confused. So they decided to make up their own units so they wouldn't get mixed up all the time.
Now NIST made a website showing off what the IEC and labbed it as an SI units website and well basicly millions of idiots are now taking the word of NIST as GOD and all the idiots have decided they will just force upon all the computer scientists the enigneers units. Since the website says KiB is an SI unit and we should all be using it.
Frankly Engineers can use it all they want but when someone tells me a file size based on powers of 2 should be using XiB I will kill them as I"m not an engineer I'm either an IT person or a Chemistry person and since neither of my backgrounds have ever used this XiB standard I don't see why I should use it now.
