161–170 of 430 posts
The mistake was using the "Kibi" prefix. "Kibibyte" just sounds a bit silly when said out loud.
When I read "KiB" I say "kib" and it's fine. Similar for GiB, TiB, PiB. "I bought a two tib SSD." "I just want to serve five pibs."
no you didn't, that doesn't exist, you bought 2 trillion bytes, 99 billion bytes short
The author decidedly has expert syndrome -- they deny both the history and rational behind memory units nomenclature. Memory measurements evolved utilizing binary organizational patterns used in computing architectures. While a proud French pedant might agree with the decimal normalization of memory units discussed, it aligns more closely to the metric system, and it may have benefits for laypeople, it fails to accou…
What are you talking about? The article literally fully explains the rationale, as well as the history. It's not "denying" anything. Seems entirely reasonable and balanced to me.
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…
Interestingly, from 10GBit/s, we now also have binary divisions, so 5GBit/s and 2.5GBit/s.
Even at slower speeds, these were traditionally always decimal based - we call it 50bps, 100bps, 150bps, 300bps, 1200bps, 2400bps, 9600bps, 19200bps and then we had the odd one out - 56k (actually 57600bps) where the k means 1024 (approximately), and the first and last common speed to use base 2 kilo. Once you get into MBps it's back to decimal.
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I can see a precision argument for binary represented frequencies. A systems programmer would value this. A musician would not.
musicians use numbering systems that are actually far more confused than anything discussed here. how many notes in an OCTave? "do re mi fa so la ti do" is eight, but that last do is part of the next octave, so an OCTave is 7 notes. (if we count transitions, same thing, starting at the first zero do , re is 1, ... again 7. the same and even more confusion is engendered when talking about "fifths" etc.
The mistake was using the "Kibi" prefix. "Kibibyte" just sounds a bit silly when said out loud.
Yes, 2**10 times this, yes. Call me calcitrant, reactionary, or whatever, but I will not say kibibyte out loud. It's a dumb word and I'm not using it. It was a horrible choice.
Final edit: This ambiguity is documented at least back to 1984, by IBM, the pre-eminent computer company of the time. In 1972 IBM started selling the IBM 3333 magnetic disk drive. This product catalog [0] from 1979 shows them marketing the corresponding disks as "100 million bytes" or "200 million bytes" (3336 mdl 1 and 3336 mdl 11, respectively). By 1984, those same disks were marketed in the "IBM Input/Output Devic…
> The article presents wishful thinking. The wish is for "kilobyte" to have one meaning. For the majority of its existence, it had only one meaning - 1024 bytes. Now it has an ambiguous meaning. People wish for an unambiguous term for 1000 bits, however that word does not exist. People also might wish that others use kibibyte any time they reference 1024 bytes, but that is also wishful thinking. > The author's wishfu…
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The wiki page agrees with parent, "The double-sided, high-density 1.44 MB (actually 1440 KiB = 1.41 MiB or 1.47 MB) disk drive, which would become the most popular, first shipped in 1986"
To make things even more confusing, the high-density floppy introduced on the Amiga 3000 stored 1760 KiB
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It was earlier than the 90s, and came with popular 8-bit CPUs in the 80s. The Z-80 microprocessor could address 64kb (which was 65,536 bytes) on its 16-bit address bus. Similarly, the 4104 chip was a "4kb x 1 bit" RAM chip and stored 4096 bits. You'd see this in the whole 41xx series, and beyond.
Even then it was not universal. For example, that Apple I ad that got posted a few days ago mentioned that "the system is expandable to 65K". https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Apple_1_...
I don't know if that's correct, but at least it'd explain the mismatch.
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I understand the usual meaning, but I use the correct meaning when precision is required.
When dealing with microcontrollers and datasheets and talking to other designers, yes precision is required, and, e.g. 8KB means, unequivocally and unambiguously, 8192 bytes.
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That is a prescriptivist way of thinking about language, which is useful if you enjoy feeling righteous about correctness, but not so helpful for understanding how communication actually works. In reality-reality, "kilobyte" may mean either "1000 bytes" or "1024 bytes", depending on who is saying it, whom they are saying it to, and what they are saying it about. You are free to intend only one meaning in your own com…
It's not even really prescriptivist thinking… "Kilobyte" to mean both 1,000 B & 1,024 B is well-established usage, particularly dependent on context (with the context mostly being HDD manufacturers who want to inflate their drive sizes, and … the abomination that is the 1.44 MB diskette…). But a word can be dependent on context, even in prescriptivist settings. E.g., M-W lists both , with even the 1,024 B definition…
This is a myth. The first IBM harddrive was 5,000,000 characters in 1956 - before bytes were even common usage. Drives have always been base10, it's not a conspiracy.
Drives are base10, lines are base10, clocks are base10, pretty much everything but RAM is base10. Base2 is the exception, not the rule.