@sjw @11112011 @GBCDude @Heliodramus @HonkeyKong @MKdiamond @Nobody @Oblivia @RehnSturm256 @Starcake @Terry @comfy @comradeagle @cowanon @daughter @haibane @happymoomoo @mischievous0lamented0vacume @proxeus @tejrnz @thebitchisback > No, MB now means 1 million bytes.
It means whatever I intend it to mean when I use the word. If I intend to convey 1024 bytes, I say "1kB". Some committee somewhere decides to change what I mean when I speak and they can go fuck themselves. Fuck the police, double-fuck the language police.
> So, 256 MB now means
No, it does not.
If I say "racism", I mean a prejudice based on race. Racism didn't start meaning "power plus prejudice" just because someone decided it. If I hear a foreigner say "yankee", I take it to mean "American". If I hear a southerner say "yankee", I take it to mean "Northerner" (or, since I've been called that plenty of times, probably more like "Non-Southerner"). If I hear a Northerner use it, I guess that's ambiguous, but that's natural language for you.
This is the difference between prescriptive and descriptive approaches to language. Everything that you learn about language as a kid is prescriptive, but the way language actually works is that you use a word and the people at the OED write down what people mean when they use that word. Prescriptive linguistics stops when you are done with primary education.
> Why did they change the definition and make a new term to mean what the old one used to mean?
They can't change a definition. To do that, they would have to change what people mean when they use a word.
> *B is now powers of 10 in decimal while *iB is powers of 2 in binary.
If that's what you mean when you say it. It's definitely not what I mean.