Comment by quotemstr

24 days ago

It's too late. Powers-of-two won. I'm the sort of person who uses "whom" in English, but even I acknowledge that using "KB" to mean 1,000, not 1,024, can only breed confusion. The purpose of language is to communicate. I'm all for pedantry when it's compatible with clarity, but we can't reconcile the two goals here.

16 comments

quotemstr

eviks 24 days ago

No it didn't, look at your flash/hard drive labels. Also, there has been confusion since the beginning, and the core cause of confusion is refusing to use the common meaning of K, so insisting on that is just perpetuating said confusion

NetMageSCW 23 days ago
And what is the common meaning of K? K was used to mean 1024 before SI was standard.
- eviks 23 days ago
  
  You know the meaning very well, that's why it's common. Though your SI reference isn't that relevant: first, common doesn't need to follow SI even though it does in this case. Second, kilo is more ancient than SI.

digiown 24 days ago

Is it? Outside of Windows, I rarely ever see KB used to mean 1024 anymore. Linux and Mac usually uses KB for 1000, and "K" or "Ki" or "KiB" for 1024.

1718627440 22 days ago

I do not know what "Linux" you are using.

    user@machine:~$ python3
    >>> with open('/tmp/a', 'wb') as f:
    ...     f.write (b'a'*1000);
    ... 
    1000
    >>> with open('/tmp/b', 'wb') as f:
    ...     f.write (b'a'*1024);
    ... 
    1024

    $ ll /tmp -h
    -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 1000 Feb  5 10:40 a
    -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 1.0K Feb  5 10:40 b

none_to_remain 24 days ago
KiB is a an abbreviation for "kilobyte" which emphasizes that it means 1024.
- hnlmorg 24 days ago
  
  No it’s not. KiB is an abbreviation for kibibyte
  Eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobyte
  
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