this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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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”.
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:
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.
While we're nitpicking, the post says multiple times that SI prefix symbols are "all uppercase except for kilo (k)".
That's just factually wrong. More than half of them are lowercase! There's centi- (c), micro- (µ), nano- (n), etc. On the positive side there's even deca- (da) and hecto- (h), though they aren't particularly common or useful. I did at least see milli- (m) and bit (b) mentioned in a brief note though.
Obviously context matters and only the positive powers from kilo upward are relevant in computer science. But I studied chemistry and physics so I guess it irked me to see the statement repeatedly ignore all the negative powers of ten.
Overall, good rant though 😅 I'll be more careful to use KiB and MiB from here out when appropriate.
❤️ Thank you for taking the time to read it. And thank you so much for pointing that out, you are completely right and I totally didn't think about that while writing the article, probably because negative exponents are pretty rare in computer science (as in milli-bytes, etc.). I'll fix that in a few days. Thanks again for pointing that out.