5 ms·
Huh... I've always described 2^10 bytes as a "kilobyte" (kB) but I've always hated the ambiguity, even if the difference between 2^10 and 10^3 is usually not im
by CivBase 6y ago
Huh... I've always described 2^10 bytes as a "kilobyte" (kB) but I've always hated the ambiguity, even if the difference between 2^10 and 10^3 is usually not important. Thanks to this comment, I learned there is an formal set of units which are distinct from their SI counterparts[0].
1000^1 kB, 1024^1 kibibyte (kiB)
1000^2 MB, 1024^2 mebibyte (MiB)
1000^3 GB, 1024^3 gibibyte (GiB)
1000^4 TB, 1024^4 tebibyte (TiB)
1000^5 PB, 1024^5 pebibyte (PiB)
1000^6 EB, 1024^6 exbibyte (EiB)
1000^7 ZB, 1024^7 zebibyte (ZiB)
1000^8 YB, 1024^8 yobibyte (YiB)
It looks like those units have been around since 1995, but they haven't seen much mainstream adoption. Too bad.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte
- snazz 6y agoNotably, storage vendors and many operating system vendors use different units to describe capacity, so hard disks will always seem small as a result of this. [edit: add qualifying "many"]
- ken 6y agoWho? Not macOS [1], or Ubuntu [2]. Does Windows still use base-2? They probably shouldn't [3]. [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201402 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201402 [2]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnitsPolicy https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnitsPolicy [3]: https://www.tarsnap.com/GB-why.html https://www.tarsnap.com/GB-why.html
- snazz 6y agoWindows does. The df command does by default. Those are the two I use.
- brnt 6y agoI distinctly recall GNOME on Ubuntu using kibibytes. This may have been in the GNOME 2 era. Had thuis changed?
- jtvjan 6y agoWindows uses KB to mean KiB. Raymond Chen explained it in a blog post.[1] [1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=17933 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=17933
- pseudalopex 6y agoThat explains why Windows doesn't use KiB to mean KiB. It doesn't explain why Windows doesn't use KB to mean KB.
- CydeWeys 6y agoNow that you're aware of them you're going to start seeing them everywhere. There's more adoption than you realize.
- Nursie 6y agoI've been aware of these for around 20 years, I've not seen that nomenclature growing in popularity. It doesn't help that it just sounds silly to my ears.
- manojlds 6y agoKubernetes uses it throughout, so there mist be some increased usage just because of that.
- edbaskerville 6y agoNail on the head. They're just weird, at least in the context of English phonetics. That's the reason I discourage their adoption. I'd much rather we just all agree that kilobyte means 2^10 bytes. Or find words that aren't weird. If I remember correctly, a big motivation for this change was the fact that disk manufacturers intentionally used base-10 definitions so they could advertise larger numbers for disk capacity. But presumably they still do that, and presumably people still often don't notice.
- _jal 6y agoSure; there are a lot of distinctions that serve to frustrate casual users. And this is hardly limited to computers - the rant that sticks in my memory is that of a family friend being absolutely infuriated that nuts and bolts can be the same size but have different threads. The difference does matter, though, and matters a lot when you're working with storage at any scale. So people tend to use the right labels just to avoid ambiguity.
- earthboundkid 6y agoWhy should we use 2^10? Bits matter in the small—a machine with a 12-bit word and 1024 words of memory or whatever was popular in the ’70s—but at the scale of gigabytes, individual bits don’t matter anymore, so may as well just use decimal because that’s what our number system is based on. I don’t see any point besides retro nostalgia to use base 2 after you move out of the each bit counts space.