3 ms·
The problem is that “kibibyte”, “mebibyte”, “gibibyte”, etc. are extremely ugly words whose existence is fundamentally offensive. If you heard anyone say them
by philwelch 6y ago
The problem is that “kibibyte”, “mebibyte”, “gibibyte”, etc. are extremely ugly words whose existence is fundamentally offensive. If you heard anyone say them aloud you’d think they were a toddler with a speech impediment.
- protomyth 6y agoI'm sure they were picked specifically because they sound bad. Using only the the first letter would probably work for the US (e.g. kbytes) since it wouldn't step on SI's toes.
- jbverschoor 6y agoLooks like me-bit-byte But yeah, phonetically they pretty much suck
- sep_field 6y agoSorry, but you're wrong. They are adorably cute words and I named my cat kibibyte.
- LocalH 6y agoI always thought it should just have been "binary/decimal kilobyte" etc which would have neatly sidestepped the awkwardness of saying those words out loud and would have also likely satisfied most people who preferred using the traditional-within-computing binary meanings. In theory that would be universally applicable to any units and any base. Instead we have this ugly linguistic hack.