The mistake was using the "Kibi" prefix. "Kibibyte" just sounds a bit silly when said out loud.
"Giga" was considered to sound silly until it became common and we no longer care. "Yotta" sounds silly (to me) now.
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1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
131–140 of 430 posts
Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
#132I automatically assume that people that use KB=1000B want to sell me something (and provide less than promised), so should be aggressively ignored or removed from vicinities
KB is 1024 bytes, and don't you dare try stealing those 24 bytes from me
Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
#133The entire reason "storage vendors prefer" 1000-based kilobytes is so that they could misrepresent and over-market their storage capacities, getting that 24-bytes per-kb of expectation-vs-reality profit. It's the same reason—for pure marketing purposes—that screens are measured diagonally.
Not sure about that, SSDs historically have followed base-2 sizes (think of it as a legacy from their memory-based origins). What does happen in SSDs is that you have overprovisioned models that hide a few % of their total size, so instead of a 128GB SSD you get a 120GB one, with 8GB "hidden" from you that the SSD uses to handle wear leveling and garbage collection algorithms to keep it performing nicely for a longer…
More recently you'd have, say, a 512GB SSD with 512GiB of flash so for usable space they're using the same base 10 units as hard disks. And yes, the difference in units happens to be enough overprovisioning for adequate performance.
Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The wish is for "kilobyte" to have one meaning. Which is the reality. "kilobyte" means "1000 bytes". There's no possible discussion over this fact. Many people have been using it wrong for decades, but its literal value did not change.
That is a prescriptivist way of thinking about language, which is useful if you enjoy feeling righteous about correctness, but not so helpful for understanding how communication actually works. In reality-reality, "kilobyte" may mean either "1000 bytes" or "1024 bytes", depending on who is saying it, whom they are saying it to, and what they are saying it about. You are free to intend only one meaning in your own com…
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 being listed first. Wiktionary lists the 1,024 B definition, though it is tagged as "informal".
As a prescriptivist myself I would love if the world could standardize on kilo = 1000, kibi = 1024, but that'll likely take some time … and the introduction of the word to the wider public, who I do not think is generally aware of the binary prefixes, and some large companies deciding to use the term, which they likely won't do, since companies are apt to always trade for low-grade perpetual confusion over some short-term confusion during the switch.
Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
#135I had a computer architecture prof (a reasonably accomplished one, too) who thought that all CS units should be binary, e.g. Gigabit Ethernet should be 931Mbit/s, not 1000MBit/s. I disagreed strongly - I think X-per-second should be decimal, to correspond to Hertz. But for quantity, binary seems better. (modern CS papers tend to use MiB, GiB etc. as abbreviations for the binary units) Fun fact - for a long time consu…
I can see a precision argument for binary represented frequencies. A systems programmer would value this. A musician would not.
musicians use numbering systems that are actually far more confused than anything discussed here. how many notes in an OCTave? "do re mi fa so la ti do" is eight, but that last do is part of the next octave, so an OCTave is 7 notes. (if we count transitions, same thing, starting at the first zero do, re is 1, ... again 7.
the same and even more confusion is engendered when talking about "fifths" etc.
Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
#136Oh sure, and next you'll say a byte is 10 bits ....
The word "octet" is absolutely the kibibyte of "bits in a byte".
Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
#137To clear up any confusion, let's compromise at a 1012-byte kilobyte.
I like the binch better, it's like an inch, but its 25.6 mm instead.
Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
#138> 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.
Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
#139I had a computer architecture prof (a reasonably accomplished one, too) who thought that all CS units should be binary, e.g. Gigabit Ethernet should be 931Mbit/s, not 1000MBit/s. I disagreed strongly - I think X-per-second should be decimal, to correspond to Hertz. But for quantity, binary seems better. (modern CS papers tend to use MiB, GiB etc. as abbreviations for the binary units) Fun fact - for a long time consu…
I can see a precision argument for binary represented frequencies. A systems programmer would value this. A musician would not.
Musicians often use equal temperament, so they have their own numerical crimes to answer for.
Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The computer industry abused these definitions because 1000 is close to 1024, creating endless confusion. They didn't abuse the definitions. It's simply the result of dealing with pins, wires, and bits. For your problems, for example, you won't ever have a system with 1 "MB" of RAM where that's 1,000,000 bytes. The 8086 processor had 20 address lines, 2^20, that's 1,048,576 bytes for 1MB. SI units make no sense for…
> They didn't abuse the definitions. Yes they did. Kilo- means 1000 in SI/metric. The computer industry decided, "Gee that looks awfully close to 1024. Let's sneakily make it mean 1024 in our context and sell our RAM that way". > It's simply the result of dealing with pins, wires, and bits. For your problems, for example, you won't ever have a system with 1 "MB" of RAM where that's 1,000,000 bytes. I'm not disputing…
> Yes they did. Kilo- means 1000 in SI/metric.
I'm happy to say it isn't an SI unit. Kilo meaning 1000 makes no sense for computers, so lets just never use it to mean that.
> Therefore, use IEC 60027 prefixes like kibi-,
No. They're dumb. They sound stupid, they were decades too late, etc. This was a stupid plan. We can define Kilo as 1024 for computers -- we could have done that easily -- and just don't call them SI units if that makes people weird. This is how we all actually work. So rather than be pedantic about it lets make the language and units reflect their actual usage. Easy.