Comment on Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes
Australis13@fedia.io 10 months agoOf course. The thing is, though, that if the units had been consistent to begin with, there wouldn't be anywhere near as much confusion. Most people would just accept MiB, GiB, etc. as the units on their storage devices. People already accept weird values for DVDs (~4.37GiB / 4.7GB), so if we had to use SI units then a 256GiB drive could be marketed as a ~275GB drive (obviously with the non-rounded value in the fine print, e.g. "Usable space approx. 274.8GB").
wewbull@feddit.uk 10 months ago
They were consistent until around 2005 (it’s an estimate) when drives got large enough where the absolute difference between the two forms became significant. Before that everyone is computing used base 2 prefixes.
I bet OP does too when talking about RAM.