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COMING TO TERMS WITH BYTES Computer terminology is becoming more precise: the International Electrotechnical Commission, which creates standards for electronic technologies, is adopting new prefixes to describe data values. The new term "kibibyte" will more accurately describe the number of bytes in a kilobyte -- rather than being 1,000, as could be inferred by the prefix "kilo," a kilobyte actually has 1,024 (2 to the 10th power) bytes. The metric prefixes currently employed -- kilo, mega, giga, etc. -- accumulate as a power of 10, rather than the binary system used in computer code. Thus, the Commission will use kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi , pebi and exbi to express exponentially increasing binary multiples (2 to the 10th power, 2 to the 20th power, etc.). "There was a need to straighten this out," says Barry Taylor of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. (Science 12 Mar 99)