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For many of us a kilobyte will always be 1024 bytes despite the newfangled fashion for “kibi” this and “gibi” that. Fortunately the people who adhere to the “i

by biztos 4y ago

For many of us a kilobyte will always be 1024 bytes despite the newfangled fashion for “kibi” this and “gibi” that. Fortunately the people who adhere to the “ibi” cult are usually sticklers for compliant capitalization, so when I see “kB” I know it Must Be One Of Them. Now get off my lawn, all 1000 of you!

pmontra 4y ago
I'm more in the 1024 camp because that's what I grew up with but K is kelvin degrees and k is kilo. I can forgive everybody living in a non metric country but not someone living in a metric one.
- wruza 4y ago
  And I don’t mind counting in 1000s or in 1024s depending on situation, but that -bi- just sounds so stupid. Kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi, pebi… bruh. Like childish mockery. Binary kilobyte could be fine.
  - thrill 4y ago
    Nope, it's kilobyte. The "other one" is disk-manufacturer-marketing-speak-kilobyte.
    - dusted 4y ago
      Yes, you're exactly right, in the same way as kilometer is 1024 meters and the other one is just car-manufacturer-distance-per-fuel-unit-marketing-speak-kilometer.. Kilo means 1000, and meant it before computers were a thing.. We retrofitted 1024 onto it literally hundreds of years later.. because it was close enough, it got annoying to deal with, we fixed it, if only recently in 2008, but better late than never..
      - biztos 4y ago
        > it got annoying to deal with, we fixed it Well, you published a standard for it, but as long as the new words use Teletubby speak to try and prevent people from using them, since nobody is going to say “gibibibitibi” out loud on purpose and the standardizers surely knew this, you’re gonna just have to keep living with the ambiguity. Fixed, it ain’t.
sshine 4y ago
I also assume that "kilobyte" (along with the acronyms "kb" and "KB") is "probably 1024 bytes". When I see "KiB" or "kB", I just assume that the distinction matters.
dusted 4y ago
I did pleasure in "no ackthually! it's 1024" before it got its own name, but something in my mind also finds it satisfactory that we're no longer hiding two values under the same name :)
Someone 4y ago
> For many of us a kilobyte will always be 1024 bytes Will it? In my memory, and I think that’s common for old hands, it always has been context-dependent. A kilobyte of RAM is 1,024 bytes, a megabyte of RAM 1,048,576 bytes, but a kilobyte of disk space is 1,000 bytes, a megabyte of disk space 1,000,000 bytes. I think USB sticks and SSDs follow the hard disk convention of decimal kilobytes, but wouldn’t know for sure. Smartphones with a flash ‘disk’ use binary ones, though.
- int_19h 4y ago
  Nope, storage space was always measured in binary as well, except in ads. It's network stuff that's consistently decimal. Windows, in particular, still uses binary units for file and disk sizes pretty much everywhere (Explorer, Disk Management, all command-line tools etc). MacOS uses decimal, but it only switched sometime around 2015. I'm not sure what the story is with Linux DEs, but CLI tools usually default to binary.

by biztos 4y ago

pmontra 4y ago

I'm more in the 1024 camp because that's what I grew up with but K is kelvin degrees and k is kilo. I can forgive everybody living in a non metric country but not someone living in a metric one.

wruza 4y ago
And I don’t mind counting in 1000s or in 1024s depending on situation, but that -bi- just sounds so stupid. Kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi, pebi… bruh. Like childish mockery. Binary kilobyte could be fine.
- thrill 4y ago
  Nope, it's kilobyte. The "other one" is disk-manufacturer-marketing-speak-kilobyte.
  - dusted 4y ago
    Yes, you're exactly right, in the same way as kilometer is 1024 meters and the other one is just car-manufacturer-distance-per-fuel-unit-marketing-speak-kilometer.. Kilo means 1000, and meant it before computers were a thing.. We retrofitted 1024 onto it literally hundreds of years later.. because it was close enough, it got annoying to deal with, we fixed it, if only recently in 2008, but better late than never..
    - biztos 4y ago
      > it got annoying to deal with, we fixed it Well, you published a standard for it, but as long as the new words use Teletubby speak to try and prevent people from using them, since nobody is going to say “gibibibitibi” out loud on purpose and the standardizers surely knew this, you’re gonna just have to keep living with the ambiguity. Fixed, it ain’t.

sshine 4y ago

I also assume that "kilobyte" (along with the acronyms "kb" and "KB") is "probably 1024 bytes". When I see "KiB" or "kB", I just assume that the distinction matters.

dusted 4y ago

I did pleasure in "no ackthually! it's 1024" before it got its own name, but something in my mind also finds it satisfactory that we're no longer hiding two values under the same name :)

Someone 4y ago

> For many of us a kilobyte will always be 1024 bytes Will it? In my memory, and I think that’s common for old hands, it always has been context-dependent. A kilobyte of RAM is 1,024 bytes, a megabyte of RAM 1,048,576 bytes, but a kilobyte of disk space is 1,000 bytes, a megabyte of disk space 1,000,000 bytes. I think USB sticks and SSDs follow the hard disk convention of decimal kilobytes, but wouldn’t know for sure. Smartphones with a flash ‘disk’ use binary ones, though.

int_19h 4y ago
Nope, storage space was always measured in binary as well, except in ads. It's network stuff that's consistently decimal. Windows, in particular, still uses binary units for file and disk sizes pretty much everywhere (Explorer, Disk Management, all command-line tools etc). MacOS uses decimal, but it only switched sometime around 2015. I'm not sure what the story is with Linux DEs, but CLI tools usually default to binary.