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1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

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Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#331

Post by reaperducer »

nixpulvis wrote: post #228
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.

Yea I don't understand the issue here. SI is pretty clear, and this post explains the other standard a little bit. It's really not all that crazy of a situation. What bothers me is when some applications call KiB KB, because they are old or lazy.

because they are old

I keep using "K" for kilobyte because it makes the children angry since they lack the ability to judge meaning from context.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#332

Post by bhokbah »

OJFord wrote: post #325
SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “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

It's not even inconsistent if we consider kilo as meaning 10^3 in base 10 and 2^10 in base 2, rather than just '1000 times' always.

Translation: It's not inconsistent if we consider the deviation from the rule as a second rule. Any future deviation will get their own rule. Perfectly consistent

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#333

Post by account42 »

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.

Definitions that don't reflect peoples usage are not very useful definition.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#334

Post by account42 »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #267
kazinator wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Since DDR5 has on-chip ECC bits they could just include those in the marketing number.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#335

Post by OJFord »

bhokbah wrote: post #332
OJFord wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even inconsistent if we consider kilo as meaning 10^3 in base 10 and 2^10 in base 2, rather than just '1000 times' always.

Translation: It's not inconsistent if we consider the deviation from the rule as a second rule. Any future deviation will get their own rule. Perfectly consistent

I don't think that's fair, I'm just saying considering kilo to mean 1000x in all bases is too narrow as a definition. Is 'car' a 'petrol-powered four-wheel transportation device with human-operated left-hand control'?

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#337

Post by jdsully »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #258
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…

Buy an SSD, and you can get both at the same time! That is to say, all the (high-end/“gamer”) consumer SSDs that I’ve checked use 10% overprovisioning and achieve that by exposing a given number of binary TB of physical flash (e.g. a “2TB” SSD will have 2×1024⁴ bytes’ worth of flash chips) as the same number of decimal TB of logical addresses (e.g. that same SSD will appear to the OS as 2×1000⁴ bytes of storage space…

"consumers don’t shop based on the endurance metrics even if they should"

Its been well over a decade now and neither I nor anyone I know has ever had an SSD endurance issue. So it seems like the type of problem where you should just go enterprise if you have it.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#338

Post by account42 »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #263
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.

Celsius is already screwed up because it's not zero-based.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#339

Post by account42 »

kalaksi wrote: post #289
its_magic wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Metric is stupid. The ancient Sumerians used multiples of 60, as we continue to do for time and angles (which are related) today. It makes perfect sense. 60 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, which makes it easy to use in calculations. Even the metric people are not so crazy as to propose replacing these with powers of 10. Same with pounds, for example. A pound is 16 ounces, which can be divided 4 times witho…

> Same with pounds, for example. A pound is 16 ounces, which can be divided 4 times without involving any fractions. Try that with metric. Not sure if you're actually serious... 1 kg is 1000 g, dividing with 4 gets you 250 g, no fractions. And no need to remember arbitrary names or numbers for conversions. > Then there's temperature. Fahrenheit just works more naturally over the human-scale temperature range without…

> Not sure if you're actually serious... 1 kg is 1000 g, dividing with 4 gets you 250 g, no fractions.

Dividing by four is not the same as dividing four times.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#340

Post by ahazred8ta »

purplehat_ wrote: post #296
fc417fc802 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think of base 10 being meaningful in binary computers. They communicate via the network, right? And telephony has always been in base 10 bits as opposed to base two eight bit bytes IIUC. So these two schemes have always been in tension. So at some point the Ki, Mi, etc prefixes were introduced along with b vs B suffixes and that solved the issue 3+ decades ago so why is this on the HN front page ?! A better…

To be fair, the octet as the byte has been dominant for decades. POSIX even has the definition “A byte is composed of a contiguous sequence of 8 bits.” I would wager many software engineers don't even know that a non-octet bytes were a thing, given that college CS curricula typically just teach a byte is 8 bits. I found some search results about Texas Instruments' digital signal processors using 16-bit bytes, and cam…

Back in the days of Octal notation, there were computers with a 12 bit word size that used sixbit characters (early DEC PDP-8, PDP-5, early CDC machines). 'Byte' was sometimes used for 6- and 9-bit halfword values.
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