Re: kilo is k and not K

[Phillip Susi]

Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
> Standards should never be followed blindly, and standards should be
> broken when one thinks one has good reasons.
>
> SI also "conflicts" with POSIX in this case.  Not to mention that SI
> does not define prefixes for all possible units, only SI units, and a
> byte is not a SI unit.  So SI-wise, there is nothing wrong about using
> k or K as a prefix symbol for `kilo'.
>
> > From (coreutils)Block size:
>
> `k'
> `K'
> `KiB'
>      kibibyte: 2^10 = 1024.  `K' is special: the SI prefix is `k' and
>      the IEC 60027-2 prefix is `Ki', but tradition and POSIX use `k' to
>      mean `KiB'.

Well put.  Personally I can't stand the fact that someone decided to 
make up such a silly sounding word as "kibi" because they don't like the 
fact that the contextualized definition of Kilo-Byte was slightly at 
odds with the SI use of the Kilo prefix.  It was well established that a 
Kilo-Byte was 1024 bytes and was abbreviated as KB well before this 
silly 'kibi' nonsense started.

SI does not define what a kilo-byte is, computer scientists do, and they 
defined it as 1024.