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

[–] rockSlayer@lemmy.world 28 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I started reading it, but the disdain towards measuring in base 2 turned me off. Ultimately though this is all nerd rage bait. I'm annoyed that kilobytes aren't measured as 1024 anymore, but it's also not a big deal because we still have standardized units in base 2. Those alternative units are also fun to say, which immediately removes any annoyance as soon as I say gibibyte. All I ask is that I'm not pedantically corrected if the discussion is about something else involving amounts of data.

I do think there is a problem with marketing, because even the most know-nothing users are primed to know that a kilobyte is measured differently from a kilogram, so people feel a little screwed when their drive reads 931GiB instead of 1TB.

[–] bigredgiraffe@lemmy.world 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah I’m with you, I read most of it but I just don’t know where the disdain comes from. At most scales of infrastructure anymore you can use them interchangeably because the difference is immaterial in practical applications.

Like if I am going to provision 2TB I don’t really care if it’s 2000 or 2048GB, I’ll be resizing it when it gets to 1800 either way, and if I needed to actually store 2TB I would create a 3TB volume, storage is cheap and my time calculating the difference is not.

Wait until you learn about how different fields use different precision levels of pi.

[–] wewbull@feddit.uk 7 points 11 months ago

It's not 2000 Vs 2048. It's 1,862 Vs 2048

The GB get smaller too.