Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
401–410 of 430 posts
Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a terribly nihilistic outlook on language. We agree to meaning to communicate and progress without endless debate and confusion. SI is pretty clear for a reason.
> That's a terribly nihilistic outlook on language. I'm pretty sure any linguist will agree with this definition. All language normalisation is an afterthought.
Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
It's a partial renaming but it's not revisionism . > 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 power…
False: source, I was there. Kilobyte and megabyte were powers of 1024, except in well-delineated circumstances (mass storage devices).
The size labeling of mass storage devices was widely reviled due to using a weasly definition of terms that everyone normally undestood to be powers of 1024.
> a lot of people won't get on board with it, so the confusion persists.
The idea that people refusing to change their behavior according to someone's wishes are causing confusion is fallacious.
Of course it's those introducing change that are introducing confusion.
The kibi-mebi people failed to predict human behavior; that they cannot just roll out a vocabulary change to all of humanity the way you roll out a new kernel throughout a machine cluster.
The irony is that you can even find people who were not born at the time, who are using kilobyte to mean 1024 bytes.
Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a partial renaming but it's not revisionism . > 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 power…
> You didn't know it in e.g. 1990 False: source, I was there. Kilobyte and megabyte were powers of 1024, except in well-delineated circumstances (mass storage devices). The size labeling of mass storage devices was widely reviled due to using a weasly definition of terms that everyone normally undestood to be powers of 1024. > a lot of people won't get on board with it, so the confusion persists. The idea that people…
Why don't you take a look at Wikipedia which clearly describes the many, many, many places in which powers-of-10 is used, and then also has a section on powers-of-2:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#Units_based_on_powers_of_...
Remember, it wasn't just hard drives either. It's been data transfer speeds, network speeds, tape capacities, etc. There's an awful lot of stuff in computing that doesn't inherently depend on powers of 2 for its scaling.
And so as long as we have both units and will always have both units, it makes sense to give them different names. And, obviously, the one that matches the SI system should have the same name as it. Can you seriously disagree? Again, I don't care what you say in conversation. But in labels and specifications, how can you argue against it?
Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
I chuckled ... and yet remain on side with Celsius.
Fahrenheit has finer granularity without fractions. IOW each Celsius degree is bigger than each Fahrenheit degree. Even though the F numbers are so much higher and it seems unbearably hot :) So for a thermostat that only can be set in 1 degree increments (without a decimal point), you have finer control when using F than using C. Anybody can memorize the conversion more easily by throwing out the math, using table lo…
So, I appreciate your rendition of things I have tables for already but any actual need is sadly non existant.
Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well the 1.44 MB, was called that because it was 1440 KB, twice the capacity of the 720k floppy, and 4x the 360k floppy. It made perfect sense to me at that time.
It may "make sense" but that's actually a false equivalence. The raw disk space for a 3.5" high-density floppy disk for IBM PCs is 512 bytes per sector * 18 sectors per track * 80 tracks per side * 2 sides = 1,474,560 bytes. It is 1.47 MB or 1.40 MiB neither of which is 1440 KB or KiB. The 1440 number comes from Microsoft's FAT12 filesystem. That was the space that's left for files outside the allocation table. Secto…
It is worse of a downer when there is a complete failure to make further sense like that, but I'll try to do something.
Of course one chart does not an expert make, I don't understand half of it but at least I worked with 3.5 floppies since they first came out.
3.5 floppies are "soft sectored" media and usually the drives were capable of handling non-standard arrangements too. What made non-standard numbers of sectors uncommon was it would require software most people were not using. DOS and Windows simply prepared virgin magnetic media with 2880 sectors, or reformatted them that way and that was about it.
PC's were already popular when 3.5 size came out, and most of the time they were not virgin magnetic media, they were purchased pre-formatted with 2880 sectors (of 512 bytes per sector) already on the entire floppy, of which fewer sectors were available for user data because a number of sectors are used up by the FAT filesystem overhead.
On the chart you see the 1440kb designation since each sector is considered 1/2 "kilobyte".
512 bytes is pretty close to half a kilobyte ain't it?
(The oddball 1680kb and 1720kb were slightly higher-density sectors, with more of them squeezed into the same size media, most people couldn't easily copy them without using an alternative to DOS or Windows. Sometimes used for games or installation media.)
With Windows when partitioning your drive if you want a 64 GB volume you would likely choose 64000 MB in either the GUI or Diskpart. Each of these GB is exactly 2880000 sectors for some reason ;)
But that's the size of the whole physical partition whether it contains only zeros or a file system. Then when you format it the NTFS filesystem has its own overhead.
Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are managed by different standards organizations. One doesn't like the other encroaching on its turf. "kilo" has only one official meaning as a base-10 scalar.
Who was appointed as arbiter of meaning for kilo? And by what right?
A little late to lawyer that...
Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
#408The 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…
The use of kilo for 1024 in computers precedes the formalization of kilo as an SI prefix. SI should have used a different prefix instead /s
Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
you'll eat your kibbles & bits and like it !
The Commdore 64 has 64 kibibytes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#Multiple-byte_units "the C64 took its name from its 64 kilobytes (65,536 bytes) of RAM" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64
Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Tomatoes are a fruit because the science says so. That non-scientific people call it something else does not change facts.
Depends if you're using the botanical definition or the (more common) culinary definition[0]. I would argue fruit and fruit are two words, one created semasiologically and the other created onomasiologically. Had we chosen a different pronunciation for one of those words, there would be no confusion about what fruits are. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit#Botanical_vs._culinary
This is such a basic and universal part of language, it is a mystery to me why something so transparently clueless as "actually, tomato is a fruit" persists.