Comment on Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes
PsychedSy@sh.itjust.works 9 months agoI’m not sure if you just didn’t read or what. It seems like you understand the history but are insistent on awkward characterizations of the situation.
Kibi is the recon. Not kilo.
No. They didn’t modify the use of kilo for other units - they used it as an awkward approximation with bytes. No other units were harmed in the making of these units.
And they didn’t hijack it - they used the closest approximation and it stuck. Nobody gave a fuck until they bought a 300gb hd with 277gb of free space.
Nobody gave a fuck until they bought a 300gb hd with 277gb of free space
The difference was a lot smaller when you were dealing with 700 byte files - it was often a rounding error. Also - you needed two sectors (1024 bytes at the time) two store a 700 byte file, so what does it matter anyway?
Yeah, no, I’m sure I noticed it but I didn’t really have the sophistication to get the implication.
Before we got our first Windows machine I had some DOS books. I remember a table in DOS for dummies talking about kilo/giga/petabytes and internalized it, but CDs were a thing by then.
Eyron@lemmy.world 9 months ago
To me, your attempt at defending it or calling it a retcon is an awkward characterization. Even in your last reply: now you’re calling it an approximation. Dividing by 1024 is an approximation? Did computers have trouble dividing by 1000? Did it lead to a benefit of the 640KB/320KB memory split in the conventional memory model? Does it lead to a benefit today?
Somehow, every other computer measurement avoids this binary prefix problem. Some, like you, seem to try to defend it as the more practical choice compared to the “standard” choice every other unit uses (e.g: 1.536 Mbps T1 or “54” Mbps 802.11g).
The confusion this continues to cause does waste quite a bit of time and money today. Vendors continue to show both units on the same specs sheets (open up a page to buy a computer/server). News still reports differences as bloat. Customers still complain to customer support, which goes up to management, and down to project management and development. It’d be one thing if this didn’t waste time or cause confusion, but we’re still doing it today. It’s long past time to move on.
The standard for “kilo” was 1000 centuries before computer science existed. Things that need binary units have an option to use, but its probably not needed: even in computer science. Trying to call kilo/kibi a retcon just seems to be trying to defend the use of the 1024 usage today: despite the fact that nearly nothing else (even in computers) uses the binary prefixes.
PsychedSy@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
I don’t think it’s more practical. I think it’s what emerged from researchers trying to refer to concepts. I prefer the clarified prefixes.