It has been pointed out to me that in a previous post I incorrectly suggested the Ki/Mi/Gi style of units for describing binary multiples has something to do with SI units. These style of units are officially described in IEC 60027-2: Letter symbols to be used in electrical technology - Part 2: Telecommunications and electronics, thus you might like to refer to them as "IEC Units" or similar.

The NIST reference has this to say:

It is important to recognise that the new prefixes for binary multiples are not part of the International System of Units (SI), the modern metric system. However, for ease of understanding and recall, they were derived from the SI prefixes for positive powers of ten.

It is a considerable faux pas in many circles to get these things mixed up.

posted at: Thu, 20 Oct 2005 09:56 | in /code/badcode | permalink | add comment (0 others)