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In article <2v16mm$153 -at- panix3 -dot- panix -dot- com> vicric -at- panix -dot- com (Vicki Richman)
writes:
>From <2v03ul$597 -at- news1 -dot- digex -dot- net>, by Keith Ivey <kcivey -at- cpcug -dot- digex -dot- net>:
>> The SI system, of course, uses "k" for 1,000, so there is an
>> argument that "K" should be used for 1,024--but this leaves open the
>> question of how to distinguish between "M" meaning 1,000,000 and "M"
>> meaning 1,048,576.
>The uppercase K is frequently used for 1000, as in "The
>property is reduced to $290K."
>Of course, megabytes and megabits are MB and Mb. But
>hard-drive vendors may use your cited ambiguity to make
>their products seem larger. They advertise, say, 105 M bytes
>for a drive with 100 MB.
This is incorrect. Before a disk can be used, it has to udergo a few
procedures: formatting, creating file systems, and possibly others.
These procedures significantly decrease the effective disk capacity.
In the recent past, vendors used to advertise the capacity of
unformatted disks; nowadays they tend to advertise the capacity of
formatted disks, but since creating file systems involved overhead, the
user still ends up with less disk space than advertised. It has nothing
to do with the ambiguity between k as 1000 and k as 1024.
