1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

Post by Flimm » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 8:54 AM UTC

fc417fc802 wrote: post #259

PostOnce wrote: post #244

There is a counterproductive obsession with powers of 10. Sometimes, other systems just make more sense. For example, for time, or angles, or bytes. There are properties of certain numbers (or bases) that make everything descending from them easier to deal with. for angles and time (and feet): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_highly_composite_numb... For other problems we use base 2, 3, 8, 16, or 10. Must we tr…

Now that I think about it, I see KiB and kb all the time but I don't know that I've ever encountered Kib or kB in the wild. Maybe I'm in a bubble? Or maybe we should accept that kb is power of 10 but kB is power of two? Well I guess we already basically have this in practice since Ki can be shortened to K seeing as metric prefixes are always lower case and we clearly aren't talking about kelvin bytes.

Post by tiagod » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 9:01 AM UTC

fc417fc802 wrote: post #270

svat wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by OJFord » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 9:29 AM UTC

SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #293

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.

> “Kilo” can mean what we want in different contexts Fair enough. 1000 watts is a kilowatt 1000 hertz is a kilohertz 1000 metres is a kilometre 1000 litres is a kilolitre 1000 joules is a kilojoule 1000 volts is a kilovolt 1000 newtons is a kilonewton 1000 pascals is a kilopascal 1024 bytes is a kilobyte, because that's what we're used to and we don't want to change to a new prefix

Post by TonyStr » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 9:35 AM UTC

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #317

philipswood wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, tomato's ARE actually a fruit. But really!? I'll keep calling it in nice round powers of two, thank you very much.

Yes. Tomatoes are a fruit because the science says so. That non-scientific people call it something else does not change facts.

Post by breezykoi » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 9:53 AM UTC

wat10000 wrote: post #221

cornonthecobra wrote: post #216

The meaning of kilo, mega, giga, tera, etc. are unambiguous: SI prefixes defined as powers of 10, not 2. 1 TB is 10*12 bytes, not 2*40 bytes. The misuse of those prefixes as powers of 1024, while useful as shorthand for computer memory where binary addressing means, is still exactly that: a misuse of SI prefixes. There's now a separate set of base-2 prefixes to solve this, and people need to update their language acc…

Just because an official body gives a single definition doesn't mean it's unambiguous. Real communication isn't bound by official bodies. When I say my computer has 16GB of RAM, that does not mean exactly 16 billion bytes. I need to update my language accordingly? No thanks. I'll keep saying what I say and nothing will happen.