Technology

59569 readers

3431 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

147

Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes (zeta.one)

submitted 11 months ago by wischi@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world

211 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Tatters@lemmy.world 37 points 11 months ago (6 children)

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”.

[–] wischi@programming.dev 1 points 11 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] Tatters@lemmy.world 9 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (3 replies)