I often find myself explaining the same things in real life and online, so I recently started writing technical blog posts.

This one is about why it was a mistake to call 1024 bytes a kilobyte. It’s about a 20min read so thank you very much in advance if you find the time to read it.

Feedback is very much welcome. Thank you.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      11 year ago

      To me the bigger problem is the fact we don’t have a written standard. Idc what people say, but if you buy a 10TB hard drive, then plug it in and the OS doesn’t show 10TB, then it can be easy to blame the drive manufacturer when the OS is just using a different prefix quantity, but calling it the same. There should be some way to know exactly how many bytes there are on a drive before you buy it, and it should match when you plug it into your computer. I don’t think that’s crazy, but the article is a little overboard for that sentiment

  • KinNectar
    link
    fedilink
    91 year ago

    Nice to learn about the SI standard notation KiB, MiB, etc. I had no idea.

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      61 year ago

      KiB and MiB are not SI prefixes but IEC binary prefixes but the names are derived from the SI names for simplicity.

  • HubertManne
    link
    fedilink
    491 year ago

    I was confused when I just read the headline. Should be “Why I (that would be you not me) think a kilobyte should be 1000 instead of 1024”. Unpopular opinion would be a better sub for it.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        481 year ago

        Just because you wrote about a topic doesn’t mean you’re suddenly the authority figure lol.

      • HubertManne
        link
        fedilink
        181 year ago

        I know there is no option as 1024 is what the standard is now. Im not reading that anymore than someone saying how a red light really means go.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          161 year ago

          1024 is not the standard. The standard term for 1024 is “kibi” or “Ki” and the standard term for 1000 is “kilo” and has been since the year 1795.

          There was a convention to use kilo for 1024 in the early days of computing since the “kibi” term didn’t exist until 1998 (and took a while to become commonly used) — but that convention was always recognised as an incorrect use of the term. People just didn’t care much especially since kilobytes were commonly rounded anyway. A 30,424 byte file is 29.7109375 kibibytes or 30.424 kilobytes… both will likely be rounded to 30 either way, so who cares if it’s slightly wrong? Just use bytes if you need to know the exact size.

          Also - hard drives, floppy disks, etc have always referred to their size in base 1000 numbers so if you were working with 30KB in the early days of computers it was very rarely RAM. A PDP-11 computer, for example, might have only had 8196 bytes of RAM (that’s 8 kibibytes).

          There are some places where the convention is still used and it can be pretty misleading as you work with larger numbers. For example 128 gigs equals 128,000,000,000 bytes (if using the correct 1000 unit) or 137,438,953,472 bytes (if kilo/mega/giga = 1024).

          The “wrong” convention is commonly still used for RAM chips. So a 128GB RAM chip is significantly larger than a 128GB SSD.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            51 year ago

            I’ve never met anyone that actually uses the new prefixes for 1024 and the old prefixes to mean 1000

          • Martin
            link
            fedilink
            English
            31 year ago

            Also - hard drives, floppy disks, etc have always referred to their size in base 1000 numbers

            That is not true. For a long time everything (computer related) was in the base 2 variants. Then the HD manufacturers changed so their drives would appear larger than they actually were (according to everyone’s notions of what kn/mb/gb meant). It was a marketing shrinkflation stunt.

      • silly goose meekah
        link
        fedilink
        English
        521 year ago

        It totally is a matter of opinion. These are arbitrary rules, made up by us. We can make up whatever rules we want to.

        I agree that it’s weird that only in CS kilo means 1024. It would be logical to change that, to keep consistency across different fields of science. But that does not make it any less a matter of opinion.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          11 year ago

          You can’t store data in base 10, nor address memory or storage in base 10 given present computers. It’s a bit more than a matter of opinion that computers are base 2

          • silly goose meekah
            link
            fedilink
            English
            51 year ago

            Yes computers are base 2 but we can still make up whatever rules we want about them. We could even make up rules that say that we are to consider everything a computer does to be in base 10 but it can only use the lowest 2 values of any given digit. It would be a total mess and it would make no sense whatsoever but we could define those rules.

  • billwashere
    link
    fedilink
    English
    821 year ago

    Well it’s because computer science has been around for 60+ years and computers are binary machines. It was natural for everything to be base 2. The most infuriating part is why drive manufacturers arbitrarily started calling 1000 bytes a kilobyte, 1000 kilobytes a megabyte, and 1000 megabytes a gigabyte, and a 1000 gigabytes a terabyte when until then a 1 TB was 1099511627776 bytes. They did this simply because it made their drives appear 10% bigger. So good ol’ shrinkflation. You could make drives 10% smaller and sell them for the same price.

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      71 year ago

      If a hard drive has exactly 8’269’642’989’568 bytes what’s the benefit of using binary prefixes instead of decimal prefixes?

      There is a reason for memory like caches, buffer sizes and RAM. But we don’t count printer paper with binary prefixes because the printer communication uses binary.

      There is no(!) reason to label hard drive sizes with binary prefixes.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        91 year ago

        It more accurately describes how much space you have and how you can expect to see it shown in your software when you actually install it somewhere.

      • billwashere
        link
        fedilink
        English
        61 year ago

        So here’s the thing. I don’t necessarily disagree with you. And if this had done from the start it would never had been a problem. But it wasn’t and THAT is what caused the confusion. You put a lot of thought and research into your post and I can very much respect that. It’s something you feel strongly about and you took the time to write about your beef with this. IEC changed the nomenclature in the late 90s. But the REASON they changed it was to avoid the confusion caused by the drive manufacturers (I bet you can guess who was in the committee that proposed the change).

        But I can tell you as a professional IT person we never really expect any drive (solid state or otherwise) to be any specific size. RAID, file system overhead, block size fragmentation, etc all take a cut. It’s basically just bistromathics (that’s a Hitchhiker’s reference) and the overall size of any storage system is only vaguely related to actual drive size.

        So I just want to basically apologize for being so flippant before. It’s important enough to you that you took the time to write this. It’s just that I’m getting rather cynical as I get older and just expect the enshittification of every to continue ad infinitum on everything digital.

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      171 year ago

      Pretty obvious that you didn’t read the article. If you find the time I’d like to encourage you to read it. I hope it clears up some misconceptions and make things clearer why even in those 60+ years it was always intellectually dishonest to call 1024 byte a kilobyte.

      You should at least read “(Un)lucky coincidence”

      • λλλ
        link
        fedilink
        English
        16
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        kilobit = 1000 bits. Kilobyte = 1000 bytes.

        How is anything about that intellectually dishonest??

        The only ones being dishonest are the drive manufacturers, like the person above said. They sell storage drives by advertising them in the byte quantity but they’re actually in the bit quantity.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          35
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          They sell storage drives by advertising them in the byte quantity but they’re actually in the bit quantity.

          No, they absolutely don’t. That’d be off by 8x.

          The subject at hand has nothing to do with bits. Please, read what OP posted. It’s about 1024 vs 1000

      • billwashere
        link
        fedilink
        English
        241 year ago

        Ok so I did read the article. For one I can’t take an article seriously that is using memes. Thing the second yes drive manufacturers are at fault because I’ve been in IT a very very long time and I remember when HD manufacturers actually changed. And the reason was greed (shrinkflation). I mean why change, why inject confusion where there wasn’t any before. Find the simplest least complex reason and that is likely true (Occam’s razor). Or follow the money usually works too.

        It was never intellectually dishonest to call it a kilobyte, it was convenient and was close enough. It’s what I would have done and it was obviously accepted by lots of really smart people back then so it stuck. If there was ever any confusion it’s by people who created the confusion by creating the alternative (see above).

        If you wanna be upset you should be upset at the gibi, kibi, tebi nonsense that we have to deal with now because of said confusion (see above). I can tell you for a fact that no one in my professional IT career of over 30 years has ever used any of the **bi words.

        You can be upset if you want but it is never really a problem for folks like me.

        Hopefully this helps…

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          3
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Pushing 30 years myself and I confirm literally not a single person I’ve worked with has ever used **bi… terms. Also, I recall the switch where drive manufacturers went from 1024 to 1000. I recall the poor attempt from shill writers in tech saying it better represents the number of bits as the format parameters applied to a drive changes the space available for files. I recall exactly zero people buying that excuse.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          11 year ago

          I just think that kilobyte should have been 1000 (in binary, so 16 in decimal) bytes and so on. Just keep everything relating to the binary storage in binary. That couldn’t ever become confusing, right?

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            1
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Because your byte is 10 decimal bits, right? EDIT: Bit is actually an abbreviation, BIT, initially, so it would be what, DIT?.. Dits?..

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    29
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    A kilobyte (kB) is 1000 bytes, that’s what the prefix kilo means. A kibibyte (KiB) is 1024 bytes (the “bi” in the prefix means base 2 or binary). People often confuse them, but they’re similar enough for smaller units, 10^3 ~ 2^10.

    Oh and at first, kilobyte was used for both amounts, which is why kibibytes were introduced to fix the confusion, which perhaps was a bit late anyway.

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      81 year ago

      True and that’s what the article is about. You should check out the interactive diagram in the “(Un)lucky coincidence” section.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    371 year ago

    I know it’s already been explained but here is a visualization of why.

    0 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 512 1024

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      101 year ago

      Did you read the blog post? If you don’t find the time you should at least read “(Un)lucky coincidence” to see why it’s not (and never was) a bright idea to call 1024 “a kilo”.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        16
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Dude you’re pretty condescending for a new author on an old topic.

        Yeah I read it and it’s very over worded.

        1024 was the closest binary approximation of 1000 so that became the standard measurement. Then drive manufacturers decided to start using decimal for capacity because it was a great way to make numbers look better.

        Then the IEC decided “enough of this confusion” and created binary naming standards (kibi gibi etc…) and enforced the standard decimal quantity values for standard names like kilo-.

        It’s not ground breaking news and your constant arguing with people in the thread paints you as quite immature. Especially when plenty of us remember the whole story BECAUSE WE LIVED IT AS IT PROFESSIONALS.

        We lacked a standard, a system was created. It was later changed to match global standard values.

        You portray it with emotive language making decisions out to be stupid, or malicious. A decision was made that was perfectly sensible at the time. It was then improved. Some people have trouble with change.

        Your writing and engagement styles scream of someone raised on clickbait news. Focus on facts, not emotion and sensationalism if you want to be taken seriously in tech writing.

        Focus on emotion and bullshit of you want to work for BuzzFeed.

        And if you just want an argument go use bloody twitter.

  • TigrisMorte
    link
    fedilink
    91 year ago

    It is only a mistake from a Human PoV. It is more efficient for the chip since 1000 bytes and 1024 bytes take up the same space. But Humans find anything not base 10 difficult.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    67
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I genuinely don’t understand your disdain for using base 2 on something that calculates in base 2. Do you know how counting works in binary? Every byte is made up of 8 bits, and goes from 0000 0000 to 1111 1111, or 0-15. When converted to larger scales, 1024 bytes is a clean mathematical derivation in base 2, 1000 is a fractional number. Your pedantry seems to hinge on the use of the prefix right? I think 1024 is a better representation of kilo- in base 2, because a kilo- can be directly translated up to exabytes and down to nybbles while “1000” in base 2 is extremely difficult. The point of metric is specifically to facilitate easy measuring, right? So measuring in the units that the computer uses makes perfect sense. It’s like me saying that a kilogram should be measured in base 60, because that was the original number system.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      61 year ago

      TLDR: the problem isn’t using base 2 multipliers. The problem is doing so then saying it’s a base 10 number

      In 1998 when the problem was solved it wasn’t a big deal, but now the difference between a gigabyte and a gibibyte is large enough to cause problems

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        51 year ago

        Using kilo- in base 2 for something that calculates in base 2 simply makes sense to me. However, like I said to OP, ultimately this debate amounts to rage bait for nerds. All I ask is that I’m not pedantically corrected if the conversation isn’t directly related to kibi- vs kilo-

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      171 year ago

      Did you read the post? The problem I have is redefining the kilo because of a mathematical fluke.

      You certainly can write a mass in base 60 and kg, there is nothing wrong about that, but calling 3600 gramm a “kilogram” because you think it’s convenient that 3600 (60^2) is “close to” 1000 so you just call it a kilogram, because that’s exactly what’s happening with binary and 1024.

      If you find the time you should read the post and if not at least the section “(Un)lucky coincidence”.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        34
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        I started reading it, but the disdain towards measuring in base 2 turned me off. Ultimately though this is all nerd rage bait. I’m annoyed that kilobytes aren’t measured as 1024 anymore, but it’s also not a big deal because we still have standardized units in base 2. Those alternative units are also fun to say, which immediately removes any annoyance as soon as I say gibibyte. All I ask is that I’m not pedantically corrected if the discussion is about something else involving amounts of data.

        I do think there is a problem with marketing, because even the most know-nothing users are primed to know that a kilobyte is measured differently from a kilogram, so people feel a little screwed when their drive reads 931GiB instead of 1TB.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          10
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Yeah I’m with you, I read most of it but I just don’t know where the disdain comes from. At most scales of infrastructure anymore you can use them interchangeably because the difference is immaterial in practical applications.

          Like if I am going to provision 2TB I don’t really care if it’s 2000 or 2048GB, I’ll be resizing it when it gets to 1800 either way, and if I needed to actually store 2TB I would create a 3TB volume, storage is cheap and my time calculating the difference is not.

          Wait until you learn about how different fields use different precision levels of pi.

  • Melllvar
    link
    fedilink
    English
    191 year ago

    Because SI prefixes are always powers of the base. Base 10 is the most common, but that’s more human psychology that math.

      • Victor
        link
        fedilink
        English
        71 year ago

        I think they mean it’s easier to refer to powers of 1000 with the SI units, rather than of 1024 as with Kibi and the lot. Especially higher up in the prefixes, because it starts to diverge more and more from the expected value.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    391 year ago

    Thanks for this article. Unfortunately, you used the word “prefix” when you really meant “unit symbol”. So, “kilo” and “mega” are prefixes, kB and MB are unit symbols. You repeatedly called the latter “prefixes”.

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      111 year ago

      Thank you for the feedback. I know that only the “first” part is the prefix and I tried to be careful to not use it wrong. I just checked all 53 instances of “prefix” and I don’t see a wrong one, but to be fair there are situations that could be misunderstood easily like here:

      Today the only correct conversions are to either use SI prefixes (like 1 MB = 1000² bytes) or binary prefixes (1 MiB = 1024² bytes).

      But with prefix I only meant the “M” and “Mi” part and they are both prefixes.

      I’ll try to clarify that later so the difference is clear to all readers. Thank you.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        111 year ago

        Ok, I understand what you are trying to do, but I that is not how I read it at the time. Prefix to me in this context means e.g., “kilo” in “kilobyte”, and not the “k” in “kB”. I am not sure it is helpful to split the unit symbol up like that.

        • @[email protected]OP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          31 year ago

          But the first part is called prefix even in the standard itself. I wanted to make that distinction because it’s not important what the base unit is. By speaking about prefixes instead of the unit as a whole I wanted to make it clear that you can (at least in theory) use any base unit. So everything I said about KiB and kB is also true for Kib and kb and even for kK (kilokelvin) and KiB (kibikelvin) 🤣

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          11 year ago

          In terms of language you are correct. But in terms of SI usage it seems to me OP is expressing it correctly. The SI unit prefixes have a name, a symbol and a multiplier. The prefix is a concept that encompasses all three of those attributes. So “kilo” is one way of identifying the 10^3 unit prefix, but the name kilo is not the prefix itself. It’s just the name we use to refer to it. And the symbol k in km is certainly the unit prefix portion of that unit of measure.

      • Deconceptualist
        link
        fedilink
        English
        1
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        While we’re nitpicking, the post says multiple times that SI prefix symbols are “all uppercase except for kilo (k)”.

        That’s just factually wrong. More than half of them are lowercase! There’s centi- ©, micro- (µ), nano- (n), etc. On the positive side there’s even deca- (da) and hecto- (h), though they aren’t particularly common or useful. I did at least see milli- (m) and bit (b) mentioned in a brief note though.

        Obviously context matters and only the positive powers from kilo upward are relevant in computer science. But I studied chemistry and physics so I guess it irked me to see the statement repeatedly ignore all the negative powers of ten.

        Overall, good rant though 😅 I’ll be more careful to use KiB and MiB from here out when appropriate.

        • @[email protected]OP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          21 year ago

          ❤️ Thank you for taking the time to read it. And thank you so much for pointing that out, you are completely right and I totally didn’t think about that while writing the article, probably because negative exponents are pretty rare in computer science (as in milli-bytes, etc.). I’ll fix that in a few days. Thanks again for pointing that out.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    241 year ago

    you can’t ask for feedback, then attack everyone who doesn’t share your opinion with “did you read it?”, that’s not cool…

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      21 year ago

      I still don’t get how “did you read it?” is attacking anyone? It’s true I asked for feedback but I’m a bit overwhelmed that I had to clarify that I’m interested in feedback about the post from people who actually read it.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        61 year ago

        “the tone makes the music” as the Germans would say. you’re asking for volunteer help and are rude to the ones replying

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    161 year ago

    I was taught 1024 in my tech school. So I won’t ever refer to it as 1000 instead 1024. Not that it seems even remotely relevant though.

    • PupBiru
      link
      fedilink
      15
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      kilobyte (KB) is 1000, kibibyte (KiB) is 1024

      at least according the the IEC, and id tend to go with them… SI units say that kilo means 1000

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        251 year ago

        That was a retcon, though. Initially the SI prefixes were used and used 1024 instead of 1000. I feel like people started getting more fussy about it as hard drives started hitting hundreds of gb.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          5
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          How do you define a recon? Were kilograms 1024 grams, too? When did that change? It seems it’s meant 1000 since metric was created in the 1700s, along with a binary prefix.

          From the looks of it, software vendors were trying to recon the definition of “kilo” to be 1024.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            81 year ago

            Kilo was used outside of decimal power rules for data storage/memory because it could only use binary powers at smaller scales. Well, that’s the standard we went with anyway.

            They didn’t ‘retcon’ the use of kilo as applicable to other units, they went with the closest power of two. When hard drive manufacturers decided to use power of tens it confused people and eventually got standardized by making kb power of ten and kib power of two.

            From the looks of it you aren’t familiar with the situation.

            • @[email protected]
              link
              fedilink
              English
              4
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              This is all explained in the post we’re commenting on. The standard “kilo” prefix, from the metric system, predates modern computing and even the definition of a byte: 1700s vs 1900s. It seems very odd to argue that the older definition is the one trying to retcon.

              The binary usage in software was/is common, but it’s definitely more recent, and causes a lot of confusion because it doesn’t match the older and bigger standard. Computers are very good at numbers, they never should have tried the hijack the existing prefix, especially when it was already defined by existing International standards. One might be able to argue that the US hadn’t really adopted the metric system at the point of development, but the usage of 1000 to define the kilo is clearly older than the usage of 1024 to define the kilobyte. The main new (last 100 years) thing here is 1024 bytes is a kibibyte.

              Kibi is the recon. Not kilo.

              • @[email protected]
                link
                fedilink
                English
                61 year ago

                Kilo meaning 1,000 inside computer science is the retcon.

                Tell me, how much RAM do you have in your PC. 16 gig? 32 gig?

                Surely you mean 17.18 gig? 34.36 gig?

                • @[email protected]
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  21 year ago

                  209GB? That probably doesn’t include all of the RAM: like in the SSD, GPU, NIC, and similar. Ironically, I’d probably approximate it to 200GB if that was the standard, but it isn’t. It wouldn’t be that much of a downgrade to go to 200GB from 192GiB. Is 192 and 209 that different? It’s not much different from remembering the numbers for a 1.44MiB floppy, 1.5436Mbps T1 lines, or ~3.14159 pi approximation. Numbers generally end up getting weird: trying to keep it in binary prefixes doesn’t really change that.

                  The definition of kilo being “1000” was standard before computer science existed. If they used it in a non-standard way: it may have been common or a decent approximation at the time, but not standard. Does that justify the situation today, where many vendors show both definitions on the same page, like buying a computer or a server? Does that justify the development time/confusion from people still not understanding the difference? Was it worth the PR reaction from Samsung, to: yet again, point out the difference?

                  It’d be one thing if this confusion had stopped years ago, and everyone understood the difference today, but we’re not: and we’re probably not going to get there. We have binary prefixes, it’s long past time to use them when appropriate-- but even appropriate uses are far fewer than they appear: it’s not like you have a practical 640KiB/2GiB limit per program anymore. Even in the cases you do: is it worth confusing millions/billions on consumer spec sheets?

                • @[email protected]
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  11 year ago

                  abhibeckert in this thread had a good point. Floppies used the power of ten prefixes, so it wasn’t particularly consistent.

              • @[email protected]
                link
                fedilink
                English
                4
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                I’m not sure if you just didn’t read or what. It seems like you understand the history but are insistent on awkward characterizations of the situation.

                Kibi is the recon. Not kilo.

                I mean kibi is the retcon because it made all previous software wrong.

                They didn’t modify the use of kilo for other units - they used it as an awkward approximation with bytes. No other units were harmed in the making of these units.

                And they didn’t hijack it - they used the closest approximation and it stuck. Nobody gave a fuck until they bought a 300gb hd with 277gb of free space.

                • @[email protected]
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  21 year ago

                  To me, your attempt at defending it or calling it a retcon is an awkward characterization. Even in your last reply: now you’re calling it an approximation. Dividing by 1024 is an approximation? Did computers have trouble dividing by 1000? Did it lead to a benefit of the 640KB/320KB memory split in the conventional memory model? Does it lead to a benefit today?

                  Somehow, every other computer measurement avoids this binary prefix problem. Some, like you, seem to try to defend it as the more practical choice compared to the “standard” choice every other unit uses (e.g: 1.536 Mbps T1 or “54” Mbps 802.11g).

                  The confusion this continues to cause does waste quite a bit of time and money today. Vendors continue to show both units on the same specs sheets (open up a page to buy a computer/server). News still reports differences as bloat. Customers still complain to customer support, which goes up to management, and down to project management and development. It’d be one thing if this didn’t waste time or cause confusion, but we’re still doing it today. It’s long past time to move on.

                  The standard for “kilo” was 1000 centuries before computer science existed. Things that need binary units have an option to use, but its probably not needed: even in computer science. Trying to call kilo/kibi a retcon just seems to be trying to defend the use of the 1024 usage today: despite the fact that nearly nothing else (even in computers) uses the binary prefixes.

                • @[email protected]
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  2
                  edit-2
                  1 year ago

                  Nobody gave a fuck until they bought a 300gb hd with 277gb of free space

                  The difference was a lot smaller when you were dealing with 700 byte files - it was often a rounding error. Also - you needed two sectors (1024 bytes at the time) two store your 700 byte file, so what did it matter anyway? If you want to get really specific, you actually needed three sectors - because there’s metadata on the file… however the metadata will share space with other files so does that count?

                  Filesystems are incredibly complex and there’s no way they can be explained to a lay person. Storage is and always has been an approximation.

                  It’s even worse with RAM these days - my Mac has 298TB of memory address space currently allocated… but only between 6GB and 7GB of “app memory” in use (literally fluctuating between those two from one second to the next when I’m not even doing anything but watching the memory usage).

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          2
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Initially the SI prefixes were used and used 1024 instead of 1000

          Only CPUs and RAM use 1024. Floppy disks and hard drives going way back to the 1970’s used 1000. In software, both are used depending on the context (and also obviously depending on the software). Most modern operating systems use 1024 for RAM and 1000 for file sizes (in the early days of computing, that agreed upon approach didn’t exist, and it varied from one computer to the next).

          @smokin_shinoby’s tech school was shit. There has never been consistency on this issue and it’s really sad that they failed to teach both numbering systems as they are (and always were) widely used.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        121 year ago

        I went to school before that took effect. But go ahead and downvote me for chiming in I guess.

        • PupBiru
          link
          fedilink
          71 year ago

          i didn’t downvote you, and i went to school before a bunch of things but technology evolves and either we evolve with it or we end up being just straight up wrong in a modern context

      • Hyperreality
        link
        fedilink
        15
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        That’s a relatively recent change though. AFAIK KB=1024 and MB=1024^2 was more common. As the article mentions, it’s still commonly used in some sectors:

        https://www.jedec.org/standards-documents/dictionary/terms/mega-m-prefix-units-semiconductor-storage-capacity

        If you ask someone in their twenties, they’re going to say 1000. If you ask someone who’s older, or someone who knows a lot about disk storage they’re likely to say 1024. Hell, as the article mentions windows uses the 1024 definition, which is one of the rasons why drives always seem smaller than their advertised size. The box says 250 GB, but when you install it windows says it’ll say it’s less than that. It’s not actually less than 250 GB. It’s just that windows is using GiB/Gibibytes but calling them GB/Gigabytes.

        TLDR: no wonder people are confused.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          1
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Only recent in some computers: which used a non-standard definition. The kilo prefix has meant 1000 since at least 1795-- which predates just about any kilobyte.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      21 year ago

      Yes. When the standards were changed, and they where, the old world should have no longer been used. Setting the definition to something only makes things more confusing.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    5
    edit-2
    1 year ago
    • Kilobyte is 2^10 bytes or about a thousand bytes within a few reasonably significant digits.
    • Megabyte is 2^20 bytes or about a thousand megabytes within a few reasonably significant digits.
    • Terabyte is 2^30 bytes or about a a thousand megabytes within a few reasonably significant digits.

    The binary storage is always going to be a translation from a binary base to a decimal equivalent. So the shorthand terms used to refer to a specific and long integer number should comes as absolutely no surprise. And that’s just it; they’re just a shorthand, slang jargon that caught on because it made sense to anyone that was using it.

    Your whole article just makes it sound like you don’t actually understand the math, the way computers actually work, linguistics, or etymology very well. But you’re not really here for feedback are you. The whole rant sounds like a reaction to a bad grade in a computer science 101 course.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      21 year ago

      But on packaging of a disc it’s misleading when they say gigabytes but mean gibibytes. These are technical terms with specific meaning. Kilo— means a factor of 1000, not “1000 within a couple of sig figs”

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        11 year ago

        They don’t advertise gigabytes or terabytes on the packaging though. They advertise gigabits and terabits, a made up marketing term that sounds technical and means almost nothing. If you want to rant against something, get angry with marketers using intentionally misleading terminology like this.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          11 year ago

          I don’t think I have seen anything advertised with bits other than network speed.

          Though some mistakenly use “b” to mean bytes where the correct symbol is “B”

          GB, TB, PB are in millions of-, thousands of millions of-, and millions of millions of- bytes respectively

          If you buy ram though, you’ll buy a package that says 32GB but it will not have 32 million bytes.