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1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

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Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowledge is understanding that tomatoes are a fruit. Wisdom is understanding that they don't belong in a fruit salad. Or... Knowledge is understanding that ketchup is tomato jelly. Wisdom is refraining from putting it on your peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

> Knowledge is understanding that ketchup is tomato jelly How is it a jelly? It lacks any defining feature of jelly.

I mean, a jelly is just broadly any thickened sweet goop (doesn't even have to be fruit, and is often allowed to have some savoury/umami, e.g. mint jelly or red pepper jelly). Usually a jelly also is relatively clear and translucent, as it is made with puree / concentrate strained to remove large fibers, but this isn't really a strict requirement, and the amount of straining / translucency is generally just a matter of degree. There are opaque jellies out there, and jellies with bits and pieces.

Ketchup has essentially all the key defining features of a jelly, technically, just is more fibrous / opaque and savoury than most typical jellies.

But, of course, calling a ketchup "jelly", due to such technical arguments, is exactly as dumb as saying "ayktually, tomato is a fruit": both are utterly clueless to how these words are actually used in culinary contexts.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Incorrect.

Can you elaborate on what's not correct, and what's the correct way to think about it?

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Celcius is eminently practical (similar to power of two prefixes). Absolute zero is completely irrelevant for day to day human life.

Fahrenheit is even more practical for daily life, as it was designed to be.

How so? 0 = freezing water, 100 = boiling water is at least more useful than more or less arbitrary points of F.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#414
> This "kilobyte = 1024 bytes" rule is actually an old (often confusing) convention. In the tech industry there is still huge inertia, this old convention is still used by RAM manufacturers (JEDEC), tons of software and some operating systems (such as Windows).

So, let’s all pretend that’s not the case and say how things REALLY are? Umm- I don’t think life works that way. If a large part of the world and recorded history works a particular way, it will in-part stay that way.

For example, many people believed we’d basically overcome racism and measles, and we see how that turned out in the U.S.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#415

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

Watt, hertz, meter, joule, volt, newton and pascal are all SI units, a byte is not.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#416

>Why do we often say 1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes? Because Windows, and only Windows, shows it this way. It is official and documented: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090611-00/?p=17... > Explorer is just following existing practice. Everybody (to within experimental error) refers to 1024 bytes as a kilobyte, not a kibibyte. If Explorer were to switch to the term kibibyte, it would merely be showing users in…

> Because Windows, and only Windows

ls does unless you pass --si.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#418
post #14

It's too late. Powers-of-two won. I'm the sort of person who uses "whom" in English, but even I acknowledge that using "KB" to mean 1,000, not 1,024, can only breed confusion. The purpose of language is to communicate. I'm all for pedantry when it's compatible with clarity, but we can't reconcile the two goals here.

Is it? Outside of Windows, I rarely ever see KB used to mean 1024 anymore. Linux and Mac usually uses KB for 1000, and "K" or "Ki" or "KiB" for 1024.

I do not know what "Linux" you are using.

    user@machine:~$ python3
    >>> with open('/tmp/a', 'wb') as f:
    ...     f.write (b'a'*1000);
    ... 
    1000
    >>> with open('/tmp/b', 'wb') as f:
    ...     f.write (b'a'*1024);
    ... 
    1024

    $ ll /tmp -h
    -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 1000 Feb  5 10:40 a
    -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 1.0K Feb  5 10:40 b

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which they're not...

by coming to the conclusion they did, they are

So not denying. You just disagree is all.

So please don't mischaracterize articles in the future simply because you disagree with their conclusions. That's misrepresentation, and essentially straight-up lying.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#420

Earlier 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.

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

Just because someone is wrong doesn't mean we need to reinforce their error.
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