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1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

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Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#261

Post by fc417fc802 »

schiffern wrote: post #246
ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...old lazy and wrong! Capital K is for Kelvin.

>Capital K is for Kelvin. It should be "kelvin" here. ;) Unit names are always lower-case[1] (watt, joule, newton, pascal, hertz), except at the start of a sentence. When referring to the scientists the names are capitalized of course, and the unit symbols are also capitalized (W, J, N, Pa, Hz). [1] SI Brochure, Section 5.3 "Unit Names" https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/41483022/SI-Brochure-9-...

Thus there's no ambiguity. kB is power of 10 and KB is clearly not kelvin bytes therefore it's power of two. Doesn't quite fit the SI worldview but I don't see that as a problem.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#262

Post by dietr1ch »

thfuran wrote: post #238
dietr1ch wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think of base 10 being meaningful in binary computers. Indexing 1k needs 10 bits regardless if you wanted 1000 or 1024, and the base 10 leaves some awkward holes. In my mind base 10 only became relevant when disk drive manufacturers came up with disks with "weird" disk sizes (maybe they needed to reserve some space for internals, or it's just that the disk platters didn't like powers of two) and realised that…

>I don't think of base 10 being meaningful in binary computers. Okay, but what do you mean by “10”?

10, not to be confused with 10 or even the weird cousin, 10

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#263

Post by fc417fc802 »

f33d5173 wrote: post #210

A mile is exactly 1000 paces, or 4000 feet. You may disagree, but consider: the word mile come from latin for "one thousand". Therefore a mile must be 1000 of something, namely paces. I hope you find this argument convincing.

Maybe after society has collapsed and been rebuilt we'll end up with km and cm having a weird ratio to the meter. Same for kg. At least celsius is just about impossible to screw up.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#264

Post by fc417fc802 »

ablob wrote: post #122
tombert wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I find it concerning that kilo can mean both 10^3 and 2^10 depending on context. And that the context is not if you're speaking about computery stuff, but which program you use has almost certainly lead to avoidable bugs.

Not as far as I can tell. There's power of 10 bits and power of 2 bytes. I've never seen the inverse of those in an actual real world scenario outside of storage manufacturers gaming the numbers but even then the context is once again perfectly clear.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#265

Post by fc417fc802 »

whichquestion wrote: post #171
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 worked with networked attached storage systems at pib scale several years ago and we referred to things in gib/tib because it was significant when referring to the size of systems and we needed to be precise. That being said, I think the difference between mib and mb is niche for most people

Speaking of significant Pib vs PiB is 8x. I assume you meant the latter.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#266

Post by hmry »

wvenable wrote: post #249
soneil wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the bit (sic) that drives me nuts. RAM had binary sizing for perfectly practical reasons. Nothing else did (until SSDs inherited RAM's architecture). We apply it to all the wrong things mostly because the first home computers had nothing but RAM, so binary sizing was the only explanation that was ever needed. And 50 years later we're sticking to that story.

Literally every number in a computer is base-2, not just RAM addressing. Everything is ulimately bits, pins, and wires. The physical and logical interface between your oddly sized disk and your computer? Also some base-2.

Not everything is made from wires and transistors. And that's why these things are usually not measured in powers of 2:

- magnetic media

- optical media

- radio waves

- time

There's good reasons for having power-of-2 sectors (they need to get loaded into RAM), but there's really no compelling reason to have a power-of-2 number of sectors. If you can fit 397 sectors, only putting in 256 is wasteful.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#267

Post by fc417fc802 »

kazinator wrote: post #223
ablob wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it concerning that kilo can mean both 10^3 and 2^10 depending on context. And that the context is not if you're speaking about computery stuff, but which program you use has almost certainly lead to avoidable bugs.

The "which program you use" confusion was instigated by the idiots insisting that we should have metric kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes (cheered on by crooked storage manufacturers). Before all that nonsense, it was crystal clear: a megabyte in storage was unambiguously 1024 x 1024 bytes --- with the exception of crooked mass storage manufacturers. There was some confusion, to be sure, but the partial success of a…

Now that RAM prices have spiked perhaps manufacturers should try marketing it in power of ten seven bit bytes.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#268

Post by osigurdson »

Honestly, when working with computers, KiB, MiB, GiB, etc. just makes more sense usually. It is easier to reason about address space and page sizes are often delineated in 4KiB chunks. It does come off like "inside baseball" a little but there are practical reasons for it.

If you really want to come at it from an information theory perspective, even the "byte" is rather arbitrary - the only thing that matters is the number of bits.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#269

Post by Sophira »

card_zero wrote: post #59
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.

I'm not seeing evidence for a 1970s 1000-byte kilobyte. Wikipedia's floppy disk page mentions the IBM Diskette 1 at 242944 bytes (a multiple of 256), and then 5¼-inch disks at 368640 bytes and 1228800 bytes, both multiples of 1024. These are sector sizes. Nobody had a 1000-byte sector, I'll assert.

Firstly, I think you may have replied to the wrong person. I wasn't the one who mentioned the early diskettes point, I was just quoting it.

But that said, we aren't talking about sector sizes. Of course storage mediums are always going to use sector sizes of powers of two. What's being talked about here is the confusion in how to refer to the storage medium's total capacity.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#270

Post by fc417fc802 »

svat wrote: post #214
kstrauser wrote: post #141

I'm sticking with power-of-2 sizes. Invent a new word for decimal, metric units where appropriate. I proposed[0] "kitribytes", "metribytes", "gitribytes", etc. Just because "kilo" has a meaning in one context doesn't mean we're stuck with it in others. It's not as though the ancient Greeks originally meant "kilo" to mean "exactly 1,000". "Giga" just meant "giant". "Tera" is just "monster". SI doesn't have sole owners…

Knuth is not in favour of using kilo/mega/etc with power-of-2 meanings: > I'm a big fan of binary numbers, but I have to admit that this convention flouts the widely accepted international standards for scientific prefixes. He also calls it “an important issue” and had written “1000 MB = 1 gigabyte (GB), 1000 GB = 1 terabyte (TB), 1000 TB = 1 petabyte (PB), 1000 PB = 1 exabyte (EB), 1000 EB = 1 zettabyte (ZB), 1000 Z…

It's odd though. Metric prefixes are always lower case, so GB isn't valid metric. Further, outside of storage manufacturers attempting to inflate their numbers when does is ever make sense to mix power of ten with 8 bit bytes? Networking is always in bits per second, not bytes.

Edit: Disregard the metric bit but I think the rest still stands.

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