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Lawsuits arising from alleged consumer confusion over the binary and decimal definitions of multiples of the byte have generally ended in favor of the manufacturers, with courts holding that the legal definition of gigabyte or GB is 1 GB = 1 000 000 000 (10 9) bytes (the decimal definition), rather than the binary definition (2 30, i.e., 1 073 ...
Commonly, a decimal SI metric prefix (such as kilo-) is used with bit and byte to express larger sizes (kilobit, kilobyte). But, this is usually inaccurate since these prefixes are decimal, whereas binary hardware size is usually binary. Customarily, each metric prefix, 1000 n, is used to mean a close approximation of a binary multiple, 1024 n ...
Like character strings, the first byte of the packed decimal – that with the most significant two digits – is usually stored in the lowest address in memory, independent of the endianness of the machine. In contrast, a 4-byte binary two's complement integer can represent values from −2,147,483,648 to +2,147,483,647.
Binary-coded decimal (BCD) is a binary encoded representation of integer values that uses a 4-bit nibble to encode decimal digits. Four binary bits can encode up to 16 distinct values; but, in BCD-encoded numbers, only ten values in each nibble are legal, and encode the decimal digits zero, through nine.
A binary prefix is a unit prefix that indicates a multiple of a unit of measurement by an integer power of two.The most commonly used binary prefixes are kibi (symbol Ki, meaning 2 10 = 1024), mebi (Mi, 2 20 = 1 048 576), and gibi (Gi, 2 30 = 1 073 741 824).
Computer engineers often need to write out binary quantities, but in practice writing out a binary number such as 1001001101010001 is tedious and prone to errors. Therefore, binary quantities are written in a base-8, or "octal", or, much more commonly, a base-16, "hexadecimal" (hex), number format. In the decimal system, there are 10 digits, 0 ...
For this reason, bit index is not affected by how the value is stored on the device, such as the value's byte order. Rather, it is a property of the numeric value in binary itself. This is often utilized in programming via bit shifting: A value of 1 << n corresponds to the n th bit of a binary integer (with a value of 2 n).
A binary encoding is inherently less efficient for conversions to or from decimal-encoded data, such as strings (ASCII, Unicode, etc.) and BCD. A binary encoding is therefore best chosen only when the data are binary rather than decimal. IBM has published some unverified performance data. [2]