391–400 of 430 posts
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.
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Dunno but there are two similar but slightly different cross head screw designs https://www.pbswisstools.com/en/news/detail/phillips-and-poz...
Patents at work. Before the patent on Phillips screws & tools expired, Pozidriv was launched which was different enough to be capable of a bit more torque. Phillips was for mass-production, Posidriv for mass-production with a little more torque. Lots of people who wanted that still waited until the Pozidriv patent expired before considering it. The screws themselves are marked on the head with little ticks so you can…
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It's the forced revisionism of what "kilobyte", "megabyte" and "gigabyte", that has caused most of the confusion. Especially that it was only partially successful. Which is not to say that there had been zero confusion; but it was only made worse.
What forced revisionism? Things like hard drives often used decimal/metric sizing from the start . Because their capacity has always been based on physical platter size and density, not powers of two the way memory is. So this confusion has been with computing since the beginning. The attempt to introduce units like KiB isn't revisionism, it's an attempt at clarity around something that has always been ambiguous. And…
Yes it is; it is literally asking people who call 1024 bytes "kilobyte" to stop doing that and say "kibibyte" instead, and to revise the meaning of "kilobyte" to 1000 bytes.
Some people have not stopped doing that, so there is more confusion now. You no longer know whether a fellow engineer is using powers of 1000 or powers of 1024 when using kilobyte, megabyte or gigabyte; it depends on whether they took the red pill or the blue pill.
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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…
> 1024 bearing near ubiquitous was only the case in the 90s or so More like late 60s. In fact, in the 70s and 80s, I remember the storage vendors being excoriated for "lying" by following the SI standard. There were two proposals to fix things in the late 60s, by Donald Morrison and Donald Knuth. Neither were accepted. Another article suggesting we just roll over and accept the decimal versions is here: https://cacm.…
As a programmer, I think in the binary units.
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>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.
I think the author had it just right. There's a lot of inertia, but the traditional way can cause confusion.
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…
*rationale
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What forced revisionism? Things like hard drives often used decimal/metric sizing from the start . Because their capacity has always been based on physical platter size and density, not powers of two the way memory is. So this confusion has been with computing since the beginning. The attempt to introduce units like KiB isn't revisionism, it's an attempt at clarity around something that has always been ambiguous. And…
> The attempt to introduce units like KiB isn't revisionism Yes it is; it is literally asking people who call 1024 bytes "kilobyte" to stop doing that and say "kibibyte" instead, and to revise the meaning of "kilobyte" to 1000 bytes. Some people have not stopped doing that, so there is more confusion now. You no longer know whether a fellow engineer is using powers of 1000 or powers of 1024 when using kilobyte, megab…
> You no longer know whether a fellow engineer is using powers of 1000 or powers of 1024 when using kilobyte, megabyte or gigabyte
You never knew this, that's the point. You didn't know it in e.g. 1990, before KiB was introduced in 1998. People didn't only start using powers of 10 once KiB was formally introduced. They'd always used them, but conventions around powers of 10 vs 2 depended greatly on the computing context, and were frequently confusing.
There isn't more confusion now. Fortunately, places that explicitly state KiB result in less confusion because, at least in that case, you know for sure what it is.
Unfortunately, a lot of people won't get on board with it, so the confusion persists.
And frankly, I don't care what you call it when you're speaking, as long as you just use the right label in software and in tech specs.
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That’s basically what Kibi et al is though. It’s Ki(lo) bi(nary) — kibi. Yeah it sounds dumb, but it’s really not that different from your suggestion.
It's very different from the solution proposed by gp.
The difference is the GP focused more on the abbreviation, but the implementation logic is similar.