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The "kilo", "mega", and "giga" prefixes are part of the SI system of units. They have been around far longer than computers, and are all defined in terms of bas
by s_tec 11y ago
The "kilo", "mega", and "giga" prefixes are part of the SI system of units. They have been around far longer than computers, and are all defined in terms of base 10. A "megawatt" is one million Watts, and has been for over a century. These units don't belong to the computer industry, and computer people can't define them to mean something else just because "byte" is the next word.
If you want to insist that 1KB is 1024 bytes, then you aren't talking about real "kilos", you are talking about fake, computer-nerd "kilos". Stealing these units was wrong, and should have never happened in the first place. The SI isn't being moronic in introducing KiB, MiB, and friends, it's just asking us to return what we've stolen.
- kazinator 11y agocomputer people can't define them to mean something else Well, the "computer people" did in fact do that, through natural language extension, which is often irregular and inconsistent. It is this committee-designed "kibi", "mebi" and "gibi" which are prescriptive. And for that reason they are broadly rejected in the industry. "Mega" is just a foreign prefix that can flexibly serve any purpose you want, just like a Greek letter in mathematics. Just like the Greek λ can be "anonymous function", "eigenvalue", or "air/fuel ratio", the Latin "mega-" can be 1000000 or 1048576. Nobody had any problem with this whatsoever, until storage manufacturers started lying in order to sell you a 781 Mb drive as 800 Mb.