Kilobyte poll

[Jan Audio]

Lets see what a kilobyte is in reality.
Please vote to save the planet.

[SL4P]

Neither.
While, i’m old school, 1024 is my leaning, but if something so trivial is slowing the world down, we deserve Donald Trump.

KiBiByte = Kilo Binary Bytes
It’s not hard, let’s get on with life!

[Yansi]

It was trivial, until IEC decided to make a mess out of it together with HDD manufacturers, who just wanted to scam people.

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

Did you write Kilobyte and not kilobyte on purpose?

[Nominal Animal]

Term "kilobyte" has similar issues as "lead": the meaning depends on the context.
While "lead" can be pronounced differently, "kilobyte" can be written in unambiguous format.

Both 1 kB = 1000 B, and 1 KiB = 1024 B, are called "kilobyte" in typical spoken English; which one, depends on the context.

[brucehoult]

It's 1000, no question.

I'm absolutely comfortable with using it to imply 1024 in any context where it's clear that the logical necessity is a power of two, such as in registers, cache, ROM or RAM in a computer with binary addressing. KiB can fuck right off.

In contexts outside the CPU such as serial communications (e.g. internet) or mass disk storage it is and should be 1000 and this is not a conspiracy by disk manufacturers or your ISP.

[Mr. Scram]

Lets see what a kilobyte is in reality.
Please vote to save the planet.

Our opinion is irrelevant. That’s how facts work, although many are confused by this.

[Stray Electron]

Lets see what a kilobyte is in reality.
Please vote to save the planet.

Our opinion is irrelevant. That’s how facts work, although many are confused by this.

  A "kilo" is defined as 1000 (10^3) units in the normal human base 10 numbering system but in modern digital computers everything is based on a base 2 numbering system (binary) so in computer terms a kilo is 1024 (2^10) units and a kilobyte means 1024 bytes. But a number of unscrupulous manufacturers took/take their memory size or disk drive capacity and divided by 1000 instead of 1024 so that they ended up with a larger numeric number.  In their (mis)usage "kilo" means 1000 and not the normal computer related 1024.

[fourfathom]

Our opinion is irrelevant. That’s how facts work, although many are confused by this.

You do realize that we are discussing language, idiom, and common-usage, right?

[Mr. Scram]

You do realize that we are discussing language, idiom, and common-usage, right?

It’s all fairly well defined. Our feelings on the matter are irrelevant.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobyte

[Stray Electron]

  Without "feelings" any human language would be meaningless so obviously feelings DO matter. It's only because the differences in human interpretation of the meaning of the kilo prefix that its meaning becomes confused.  There are a great many words in English and in other languages that have multiple meanings.  In this case "kilo" means 1000 in normal usage but 1024 in computer storage/memory related usage, for reasons that I already explained. It's worth noting that even in the computer field "kilo" in regards to frequency, such as a CPU frequency, still means 1000 and not 1024.

[Mr. Scram]

Pretty soon we’re going to need a kilobyte safe space where definitions don’t matter but feelings do.

[Stray Electron]

  Pretty soon is already here!

[rhodges]

One kilobyte is 1024 bytes of RAM. This is at least four decades old.
A megabyte of RAM is 1024 kilobytes. That was defined three decades ago.
RAM is always, as far as I know, 2^N in size. So it makes sense to make one KB == 2^10 bytes.

Hard drive storage is different. There is no natural sizing. If Seagate states that their ST??? drive is 20 megabytes, we can hope that it is 20 million bytes, maybe more.

In communication, one kilobit is exact. A DS1 line is 1.544 megabits/second, with 1.536 usable (BZ8s). A DS3 and OC3 line have specific bit rates.

[Monkeh]

One kilobyte is 1024 bytes of RAM. This is at least four decades old.

'kilo' is a multiplier of 1000. This is more than 220 years old.

[David Hess]

I stopped counting on my fingers in early grade school.  At this point I would be happy if we switched to base-8 and used 9 bit bytes although that presents problems with multiplexing.  It never ends.  Base-16 anybody?

[TJ232]

For modern computing, at least since 1993, we have always 8 bits to a byte -> ISO/IEC 2382-1:1993

1 byte = 8 bits.
1 kilobyte (K / Kb) = 2^10 bytes = 1,024 bytes.
1 megabyte (M / MB) = 2^20 bytes = 1,048,576 bytes.
1 gigabyte (G / GB) = 2^30 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes.

In the last revised ISO/IEC 2382:2015 it didn't change to much:
--------------------------------------------------
2121333
byte
string that consists of a number of bits, treated as a unit, and usually representing a character or a part of a character
Note 1 to entry: The number of bits in a byte is fixed for a given data processing system.
Note 2 to entry: The number of bits in a byte is usually 8.
Note 3 to entry: byte: term and definition standardized by ISO/IEC [ISO/IEC 2382-1:1993; ISO/IEC 2382-4:1999].
Note 4 to entry: 01.02.09 (2382)
[SOURCE: ISO-IEC-2382-1 * 1993 * * * ]
---------------------------------------------------

[magic]

It’s all fairly well defined. Our feelings on the matter are irrelevant.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobyte

The International System of Units (SI) defines the prefix kilo as 1000 (103); per this definition, one kilobyte is 1000 bytes.[1] The internationally recommended unit symbol for the kilobyte is kB.[1]

Remember that this is a free "encyclopedia" that anyone and his dog can edit and it's notoriously full of bullshit as a result.

In this case, SI's definition of 'kilo' is irrelevant because SI prefixes only apply to SI units and SI doesn't define 'byte'.
Meanwhile other standards define 'kilo' as either 1024 or 1000 when referring to bytes. The latter kind of standards should of course be abolished.

[Mr. Scram]

It’s all fairly well defined. Our feelings on the matter are irrelevant.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobyte

The International System of Units (SI) defines the prefix kilo as 1000 (103); per this definition, one kilobyte is 1000 bytes.[1] The internationally recommended unit symbol for the kilobyte is kB.[1]

Remember that this is a free "encyclopedia" that anyone and his dog can edit and it's notoriously full of bullshit as a result.

In this case, SI's definition of 'kilo' is irrelevant because SI prefixes only apply to SI units and SI doesn't define 'byte'.
Meanwhile other standards define 'kilo' as either 1024 or 1000 when referring to bytes. The latter kind of standards should of course be abolished.

It was obviously a matter of time before someone started targeting Wikipedia instead of addressing what it says. I'll spare people the effort by referring to the EC 80000-13:2008 standard devised by the International Electrotechnical Commission and also NIST. We trust and covet NIST traceable calibrations so I gather we also trust how they define common terminology. In NIST we trust.

https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

[madires]

The voting options of either 1024 or 1000 are polarizing and don't reflect the reality. As already explained in the other thread, the number of bytes depends on the standard applied (or context). The best solution is to have an unambiguous prefix since it can be hard to figure out the standard applied. Take datasheets for hard disks for example. The storage size is noted as TB (IEC multiplier of 1000) and the cache as MB (JEDEC multiplier of 1024). And both sizes aren't followed by "(IEC)" or "(JEDEC)" to indicate the standard. It's a mess.

[magic]

It was obviously a matter of time before someone started targeting Wikipedia instead of addressing what it says.

Excuse me?
I quoted garbagepedia and explained exactly what is wrong with their claims this time around.
Don't want to be called out for using shitty sources, don't use shitty sources.

Notice that NIST doesn't falsely claim that SI has any business standardizing kilobytes.

[Mr. Scram]

Excuse me?
I quoted garbagepedia and explained exactly what is wrong with their claims this time around.
Don't want to be called out for using shitty sources, don't use shitty sources.

Notice that NIST doesn't falsely claim that SI has any business standardizing kilobytes.

Excellent, more distraction plus an insult to ensure the bait is taken. Notice that Wikipedia never claims what you say it claims but the claim is providing an excellent diversion. Good show, back to the factual situation.

[Jan Audio]

KiBiByte = Kilo Binary Bytes
It’s not hard, let’s get on with life!

A byte is always binary right.
It is the same as LCD display.

[magic]

Excellent, more distraction plus an insult to ensure the bait is taken. Notice that Wikipedia never claims what you say it claims but the claim is providing an excellent diversion. Good show, back to the factual situation.

The biggest insult to wikipedia is their content. If they don't think that SI has anything to do with standardization of the kilobyte then why even mention SI at all in an article about kilobyte?
This is some distraction.

And of course the factual situation is that there exist two competing standards of "kilobyte" and a third standard of "bibibyte" has been created to reduce confusion.

[Mr. Scram]

The biggest insult to wikipedia is their content. If they don't think that SI has anything to do with standardization of the kilobyte then why even mention SI at all in an article about kilobyte?
This is some distraction.

Did you notice how the NIST page says "The NIST Reference on Constants, Units, and Uncertainty" and just below that "International System ofe Units (SI)" and below that "Prefixes for binary multiples"?