wischi

Did you read the post? The problem I have is redefining the kilo because of a mathematical fluke.

You certainly can write a mass in base 60 and kg, there is nothing wrong about that, but calling 3600 gramm a "kilogram" because you think it's convenient that 3600 (60^2) is "close to" 1000 so you just call it a kilogram, because that's exactly what's happening with binary and 1024.

If you find the time you should read the post and if not at least the section "(Un)lucky coincidence".

I'm not sure if I'm too stupid, but how so?

But the first part is called prefix even in the standard itself. I wanted to make that distinction because it's not important what the base unit is. By speaking about prefixes instead of the unit as a whole I wanted to make it clear that you can (at least in theory) use any base unit. So everything I said about KiB and kB is also true for Kib and kb and even for kK (kilokelvin) and KiB (kibikelvin) 🤣

It's true that the actual "story" is very short. 1 kB is 1000 bytes and 1 KiB is 1024 bytes. But the post is not about this, but about why calling 1024 a kilobyte always was wrong even in a historical context and even though almost everybody did that.

It's not really about the space numbers need inside the computer but about unit prefixes.

Did you read the blog post? It's not a scam. HDD vendors might profit from "bigger numbers" but using the units they do is objectively the only sensible and correct option. It's like saying that the weather report is in Fahrenheit because in Celsius the numbers would be lower and feel somehow colder 🤣

If it would be about bigger numbers why don't HDD manufacturers just use Terabit instead of terabyte? The "bigger number" argument is not a good one.

It's not as simple as that. A lot of "computer things" are not exact powers of two. A prominent example would be HDDs.