Comment by crazygringo
21 days ago
Except it's not because it's constantly ambiguous in computing.
E.g. Macs measure file sizes in powers of 10 and call them KB, MB, GB. Windows measures file sizes in powers of 2 and calls them KB, MB, GB instead of KiB, MiB, GiB. Advertised hard drives come in powers of 10. Advertised memory chips come in powers of 2.
When you've got a large amount of data or are allocating an amount of space, are you measuring its size in memory or on disk? On a Mac or on Windows?
It's the forced revisionism of what "kilobyte", "megabyte" and "gigabyte", that has caused most of the confusion.
Especially that it was only partially successful.
Which is not to say that there had been zero confusion; but it was only made worse.
What forced revisionism?
Things like hard drives often used decimal/metric sizing from the start. Because their capacity has always been based on physical platter size and density, not powers of two the way memory is.
So this confusion has been with computing since the beginning. The attempt to introduce units like KiB isn't revisionism, it's an attempt at clarity around something that has always been ambiguous.
And obviously, if you need two separate prefixes, you're going to change the one whose unit of measurement differs from all the rest of science and technology.
> The attempt to introduce units like KiB isn't revisionism
Yes it is; it is literally asking people who call 1024 bytes "kilobyte" to stop doing that and say "kibibyte" instead, and to revise the meaning of "kilobyte" to 1000 bytes.
Some people have not stopped doing that, so there is more confusion now. You no longer know whether a fellow engineer is using powers of 1000 or powers of 1024 when using kilobyte, megabyte or gigabyte; it depends on whether they took the red pill or the blue pill.
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And that is because some people didn't like that a kilobyte was 1024 bytes instead of 1000, so they started using 1000 instead, and then that created confusion, so then they made up new term "kibibyte" that used 1024, and now it's all a mess.
And in most cases, using 1024 is more convenient because the sizes of page sizes, disk sectors, etc. are powers of 2.
> Macs measure file sizes in powers of 10 and call them KB, MB, GB.
That doesn't conform to SI. It should be written as kB mB gB. Ambiguity will only arise when speaking.
> Advertised hard drives come in powers of 10.
Mass storage (kB) has its own context at this point, distinct from networking (kb/s) and general computing (KB).
> When you've got a large amount of data or are allocating an amount of space, ...
You aren't speaking but are rather working in writing. kb, kB, Kb, and KB refer to four different unit bit counts and there is absolutely zero ambiguity. The only question that might arise (depending on who you ask) is how to properly verbalize them.
> That doesn't conform to SI. It should be written as kB mB gB
Little m is milli, big M is mega. Little g doesn’t exist, only big G.
Oh. Indeed you're correct. I was thinking in computer terms instead of scientific terms. Personally I see this as reinforcing that computers as a context wouldn't really benefit from using "proper" SI.
Note that no one is going to confuse mB for millibytes because what would that even mean? But also in practice MB versus Mb aren't ambiguous because except for mass storage no one mixes bytes with powers of ten AFAIK.
And let's take a minute to appreciate the inconsistency of (SI) km vs Mm. KB to GB is more consistent.
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