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

submitted 8 months ago by wischi@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world

187 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.

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[–] ElderWendigo@sh.itjust.works 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Kilobyte is 2^10 bytes or about a thousand bytes within a few reasonably significant digits.
Megabyte is 2^20 bytes or about a thousand megabytes within a few reasonably significant digits.
Terabyte is 2^30 bytes or about a a thousand megabytes within a few reasonably significant digits.

The binary storage is always going to be a translation from a binary base to a decimal equivalent. So the shorthand terms used to refer to a specific and long integer number should comes as absolutely no surprise. And that's just it; they're just a shorthand, slang jargon that caught on because it made sense to anyone that was using it.

Your whole article just makes it sound like you don't actually understand the math, the way computers actually work, linguistics, or etymology very well. But you're not really here for feedback are you. The whole rant sounds like a reaction to a bad grade in a computer science 101 course.

[–] psud@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

But on packaging of a disc it's misleading when they say gigabytes but mean gibibytes. These are technical terms with specific meaning. Kilo— means a factor of 1000, not "1000 within a couple of sig figs"

[–] ElderWendigo@sh.itjust.works 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

They don't advertise gigabytes or terabytes on the packaging though. They advertise gigabits and terabits, a made up marketing term that sounds technical and means almost nothing. If you want to rant against something, get angry with marketers using intentionally misleading terminology like this.

[–] psud@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

I don't think I have seen anything advertised with bits other than network speed.

Though some mistakenly use "b" to mean bytes where the correct symbol is "B"

GB, TB, PB are in millions of-, thousands of millions of-, and millions of millions of- bytes respectively

If you buy ram though, you'll buy a package that says 32GB but it will not have 32 million bytes.