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1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

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Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#181

Post by kstrauser »

soneil wrote: post #158
nerdsniper wrote: post #9

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…

It goes back way further than that. The first IBM harddrive was the IBM 350 for the IBM 305 RAMDAC. It was 5 million characters. Not bytes, bytes weren't "a thing" yet. 5,000,000 characters. The very first harddrive was base-10. Here's my theory. In the beginning, everything was base10. Because humans. Binary addressing made sense for RAM. Especially since it makes decoding address lines into chip selects (or slabs o…

Almost all computers have used power-of-2 sized sectors. The alternative would involve wasted bits (e.g. you can't store as much information in 256 1000-byte units as 256 1024-byte units, so you lose address space) or have to write multiplies and divides and modulos in filesystem code running on machines that don't have opcodes for any of those.

You can get away with those on machines with 64 bit address spaces and TFLOPs of math capacity. You can't on anything older or smaller.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#182

Post by ozozozd »

waffletower wrote: post #103

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…

It’s not them denying it, it’s the LLM that generated this slop.

All they had to say was that the KiB et. al. were introduced in 1998, and the adoption has been slow.

And not “but a kilobyte can be 1000,” as if it’s an effort issue.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#183

Post by quotemstr »

kstrauser wrote: post #172
quotemstr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I think the power-ten SI people might have won the war against the power-two people if they'd just chosen a prefix that sounded slightly less ridiculous than "kibibyte". What the hell is a "kibibyte"? Sounds like a brand of dog food.

I genuinely believe you're right. It comes across like "the people who are right can use the disputed word, and the people who are wrong can use this infantile one". I don't know what the better alternative would have been, but this certainly wasn't it.

Thinking about it a bit, I think I'd have

1. defined traditional suffixes and abbreviations to mean powers of two, not ten, aligning with most existing usages, but...

2. deprecated their use, especially in formal settings...

3. defined new spelled-out vocabulary for both pow10 and pow2 units, e.g. in English "two megabytes" becomes "two binary megabytes" or "two decimal megabytes", and...

4. defined new unambiguous abbreviations for both decimal and binary units, e.g. "5MB" (traditional) becomes "5bMB" (simplified, binary) or "5dMB" (simplified, decimal)

This way, most people most of the time could keep using the traditional units and be understood just fine, but in formal contexts in which precision is paramount, you'd have a standard way of spelling out exactly what you meant.

I'd have gone one step further too and stipulate that truth in advertising would require storage makers to use "5dMB" or "5 decimal megabytes" or whatever in advertising and specifications if that's what they meant. No cheating using traditional units.

(We could also split bits versus bytes using similar principles, e.g. "bi" vs "by".)

I mean consider UK, which still uses pounds, stone, and miles. In contexts where you'd use those units, writing "10KB" or "one megabyte" would be fine too.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#184

Post by fsckboy »

waffletower wrote: post #180
fsckboy wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 7 note scale you suggest (do re mi fa so la ti do) is comprised of different intervals (2 2 1 2 2 2 1) in the 12-fold equal tempered scale. There are infinite ways of exploring an octave in music, but unfortunately listener demand for such exploration is near infinitesimal.

don't you mean 11-fold? ... oh wait, they aren't even consistent

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#185

Post by senfiaj »

Taniwha wrote: post #128

Oh sure, and next you'll say a byte is 10 bits ....

"byte" doesn't even remotely resemble any decimal prefix, so it's okay. The problem is that prefixes "kilo", "mega", etc. are supposed to be decimal prefixes, but are used as binary. And what's worse, they aren't used consistently, sometimes they really mean decimal magnitudes, sometimes they don't.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#186

Post by kstrauser »

quotemstr wrote: post #183
kstrauser wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely believe you're right. It comes across like "the people who are right can use the disputed word, and the people who are wrong can use this infantile one". I don't know what the better alternative would have been, but this certainly wasn't it.

Thinking about it a bit, I think I'd have 1. defined traditional suffixes and abbreviations to mean powers of two, not ten, aligning with most existing usages, but... 2. deprecated their use, especially in formal settings... 3. defined new spelled-out vocabulary for both pow10 and pow2 units, e.g. in English "two megabytes" becomes "two binary megabytes" or "two decimal megabytes", and... 4. defined new unambiguous a…

That seems like a better approach, and one that would've won me over.

It's leagues better than "kibibyte".

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#187

Post by SkiFire13 »

ValdikSS wrote: post #82

>Why do we often say 1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes? Because Windows, and only Windows, shows it this way. It is official and documented: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090611-00/?p=17... > Explorer is just following existing practice. Everybody (to within experimental error) refers to 1024 bytes as a kilobyte, not a kibibyte. If Explorer were to switch to the term kibibyte, it would merely be showing users in…

Windows also uses KB as measure unit which does not make sense (it's either kB or KiB)

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#188

Post by crazygringo »

kstrauser wrote: post #159
crazygringo wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Invent a new word for decimal, metric units where appropriate. No, they already did the opposite with KiB, MiB. Because most metric decimal units are used for non-computing things. Kilometers, etc. Are you seriously proposing that kilometers should be renamed kitrimeters because you think computing prefixes should take priority over every other domain of science and life?

Do you often convert between inherently binary units like RAM sizes and more appropriately decimal units like distances? It would be annoying of one frequently found themselves calculating gigabytes per hectare. I don't think I've ever done that. The closest I've seen is measure magnetic tape density where you get weird units like "characters per inch", where neither "character" nor "inch" are the common units for th…

I have no idea what that is supposed to have to do with anything.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#189

Post by crazygringo »

waffletower wrote: post #162
crazygringo wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are definitely denying the importance of 2-fold partitioning in computing architectures. VM_PAGE_SIZE is not defined with the value of '10000' for good reason (in many operating systems it is set to '16384').

No they're not? They very specifically address it.

Why do you keep insisting the author is denying something when the author clearly acknowledges every single thing you're complaining about?

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#190

Post by throw0101c »

tombert wrote: post #115
pif wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>> It doesn't matter. "kilo" means 1000. People are free to use it wrong if they wish.

> All words are made up.

Yes, and the made up words of kilo and kibi were given specific definitions by the people who made them up:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

> […] as long as both parties understand and are consistent in their usage to each other.

And if they don't? What happens then?

Perhaps it would be easier to use the words definitions as they are set up in standards and regulations so context is less of an issue.

* https://xkcd.com/1860/

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