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1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

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Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#111

Post by superjan »

kmm wrote: post #10

And a megabyte is depending on the context precisely 1000x1000=1,000,000 or 1024x1024=1,048,576 bytes*, except when you're talking about the classic 3.5 inch floppy disks, where "1.44 MB" stands for 1440x1024 bytes, or about 1.47 true MB or 1.41 MiB. * Yeah, I read the article. Regardless of the IEC's noble attempt, in all my years of working with people and computers I've never heard anyone actually pronounce MiB (o…

Well the 1.44 MB, was called that because it was 1440 KB, twice the capacity of the 720k floppy, and 4x the 360k floppy. It made perfect sense to me at that time.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#113

Post by nayuki »

publicdebates wrote: post #68
Sophira wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Early diskettes always used 1000 Even worse, the 3.5" HD floppy disk format used a confusing combination of the two. Its true capacity (when formatted as FAT12) is 1,474,560 bytes. Divide that by 1024 and you get 1440KB; divide that by 1000 and you get the oft-quoted (and often printed on the disk itself) "1.44MB", which is inaccurate no matter how you look at it.

Human history is full of cases where silly mistakes became precedent. HTTP "referal" is just another example. I wonder if there's a wikipedia article listing these...

It's "referer" in the HTTP standard, but "referrer" when correctly spelled in English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#114

Post by nayuki »

EuanReid wrote: post #64
none_to_remain wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course! I was being silly and just thinking of "k" for the smaller one and "K" for the bigger one.

Upper-K is for Kelvin, so can't be mixed in as a prefix in case someone decides to commit physics crimes and talk about temperature-mass (Kkg).

Not true. Several SI prefixes already overlap with units. m is both metre and milli-. T is tesla and tera-. c is a prefix of candela (cd) but also centi-. (G is gauss (cgs unit, not mks/SI) and giga-.)

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#115

Post by tombert »

pif wrote: post #46
kmm wrote: post #10

And a megabyte is depending on the context precisely 1000x1000=1,000,000 or 1024x1024=1,048,576 bytes*, except when you're talking about the classic 3.5 inch floppy disks, where "1.44 MB" stands for 1440x1024 bytes, or about 1.47 true MB or 1.41 MiB. * Yeah, I read the article. Regardless of the IEC's noble attempt, in all my years of working with people and computers I've never heard anyone actually pronounce MiB (o…

> I've never heard It doesn't matter. "kilo" means 1000. People are free to use it wrong if they wish.

All words are made up. They weren’t handed down from a deity, they were made up by humans to communicate ideas to other humans.

“Kilo” can mean what we want in different contexts and it’s really no more or less correct as long as both parties understand and are consistent in their usage to each other.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#118

Post by sippeangelo »

Symbiote wrote: post #73
cmovq wrote: post #21

The mistake was using the "Kibi" prefix. "Kibibyte" just sounds a bit silly when said out loud.

"Giga" was considered to sound silly until it became common and we no longer care. "Yotta" sounds silly (to me) now.

"Tera" always sounded cool though.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#119

Post by wmf »

pjdesno wrote: post #79

I had a computer architecture prof (a reasonably accomplished one, too) who thought that all CS units should be binary, e.g. Gigabit Ethernet should be 931Mbit/s, not 1000MBit/s. I disagreed strongly - I think X-per-second should be decimal, to correspond to Hertz. But for quantity, binary seems better. (modern CS papers tend to use MiB, GiB etc. as abbreviations for the binary units) Fun fact - for a long time consu…

An even bigger problem is that networks are measured in bits while RAM and storage are in bytes. I'm sure this leads to plenty of confusion when people see a 120 meg download on their 1 gig network.

(The old excuse was that networks are serial but they haven't been serial for decades.)

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#120

Post by bombcar »

Symbiote wrote: post #73
cmovq wrote: post #21

The mistake was using the "Kibi" prefix. "Kibibyte" just sounds a bit silly when said out loud.

"Giga" was considered to sound silly until it became common and we no longer care. "Yotta" sounds silly (to me) now.

Surely you mean Gibi ;)
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