371–380 of 430 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Celsius is already screwed up because it's not zero-based.
Celcius is eminently practical (similar to power of two prefixes). Absolute zero is completely irrelevant for day to day human life.
> Why does 1000 still make more sense? The author doesn’t actually answer their question, unless I missed something? They go on to make a few more observations, and say finally only that the current different definitions are sometimes confusing, to non experts. I don’t see much of an argument here for changing anything. Some non experts experience minor confusion about two things that are different, did I miss someth…
Because it would be literally correct. Kilo means 1000, not 1024.
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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.
Or...
Knowledge is understanding that ketchup is tomato jelly. Wisdom is refraining from putting it on your peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
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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.
Uppercase "B" stands for byte, and lowercase "b" stands for bit. But it's very common for people to miss the distinction, sadly, even professionals are sloppy.
Again? 1 kB is 1024 B. It's measurement unit thing. Not logics. 8 bits in a byte. Not 10, neither 6 nor 5. Just 8. Like feet in yards, inches in feet, meters in kilometers and ounces in pounds. It's 1024. Period. Then of course you are free to count as many bytes as you want and call that bunch a kB. Pretending anyone else will agree on that is a different thing.
Then of course you are free to count 1024 bytes and call that a kB. Pretending everyone else will agree on that is a different thing.
As I know 1000-based units are used only by hard-drive manufactures to sell hard drives with 930GB capacity as 1TB capactiy-drives.
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…
You've got it exactly the wrong way around. And that with such great confidence! There was always a confusion about whether a kilobyte was 1000 or 1024 bytes. Early diskettes always used 1000, only when the 8 bit home computer era started was the 1024 convention firmly established. Before that it made no sense to talk about kilo as 1024. Earlier computers measured space in records and words, and I guess you can see h…
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…
People were using metric words for binary numbers since at least the late 1950s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_binary_prefixes#19... Which doesn't make it more correct, of course, even through I strongly believe believe that it is (where appropriate for things like memory sizes). Just saying, it goes much further back than 1984.
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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…
Does anyone, other than HDD manufacturers who want to inflate their drive sizes, actually want a 1000-based kilobyte? What would such a unit be useful for? I suspect that a world which standardized on kibi = 1024 would be a world which abandoned the word "kilobyte" altogether.