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Comment by Taniwha

19 days ago

Oh sure, and next you'll say a byte is 10 bits ....

The word "octet" is absolutely the kibibyte of "bits in a byte".

  • I can go along with that, mostly. When you say "octet", some old-timer with an IBM 650 can't go whining that kids these days can't even read his 7-bit emails.

"byte" doesn't even remotely resemble any decimal prefix, so it's okay. The problem is that prefixes "kilo", "mega", etc. are supposed to be decimal prefixes, but are used as binary. And what's worse, they aren't used consistently, sometimes they really mean decimal magnitudes, sometimes they don't.