Kilobyte

[magic]

Basically the problem was that "kilo" was ambiguous because its value depended on whether it is followed by "meter" or "byte". So the solution was to make "kilobyte" ambiguous

[SiliconWizard]

Basically the problem was that "kilo" was ambiguous because its value depended on whether it is followed by "meter" or "byte". So the solution was to make "kilobyte" ambiguous

Sounds about right.

[Ysjoelfir]

Just wanted to add a story I read yesterday:
The german "Landesamt für Eich- und Messwesen in Berlin" (Berlins agency for calibration and metrology) tried to sue a baker for using "KG" as a unit for weight of his breads. They demanded 25.000€ for this great crime, since "It could be easily confused with a Komanditgesellschaft! [limited commercial partnership company]". And - as everybody knows - your local bread and bakery dealer usually also sells businesses for 1.99€. He decided to avoid the court by giving up trading businesses and instead changed his signs to show now weights of bakery products.
They also checked an old scale which was there purely for decoration, also reprimanding him for that thing not being calibrated.

Source: https://www.stern.de/wirtschaft/news/berlin--baecker-soll-25-000-euro-strafe--weil-er-kilogramm-falsch-abgekuerzt-hat-8898584.html

[Mr. Scram]

Just wanted to add a story I read yesterday:
The german "Landesamt für Eich- und Messwesen in Berlin" (Berlins agency for calibration and metrology) tried to sue a baker for using "KG" as a unit for weight of his breads. They demanded 25.000€ for this great crime, since "It could be easily confused with a Komanditgesellschaft! [limited commercial partnership company]". And - as everybody knows - your local bread and bakery dealer usually also sells businesses for 1.99€. He decided to avoid the court by giving up trading businesses and instead changed his signs to show now weights of bakery products.
They also checked an old scale which was there purely for decoration, also reprimanding him for that thing not being calibrated.

Source: https://www.stern.de/wirtschaft/news/berlin--baecker-soll-25-000-euro-strafe--weil-er-kilogramm-falsch-abgekuerzt-hat-8898584.html

Ordnung muss sein. If you don't do it proper you'd better not do it at all.

[magic]

Overregulation is the fault of technology, which is making dumb humans obsolete so they seek meaning of life in messianism.

Remember, even one confused consumer is one confused consumer too much. We must protect the least clever members of our society

[Mr. Scram]

Overregulation is the fault of technology, which is making dumb humans obsolete so they seek meaning of life in messianism.

Remember, even one confused consumer is one confused consumer too much. We must protect the least clever members of our society

It's common knowledge that the least clever members of our society express themselves most precisely and that engineers and scientists tend to be sloppy and imprecise. Or was it the reverse because the latter know expressing yourself carefully can make all the difference in the world? Yeah, it might be that. Let's go with that one. Some will consider it hard to get used to new terminology but I'm sure the stragglers can manage eventually.

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

Just wanted to add a story I read yesterday:
The german "Landesamt für Eich- und Messwesen in Berlin" (Berlins agency for calibration and metrology) tried to sue a baker for using "KG" as a unit for weight of his breads. They demanded 25.000€ for this great crime, since "It could be easily confused with a Komanditgesellschaft! [limited commercial partnership company]". And - as everybody knows - your local bread and bakery dealer usually also sells businesses for 1.99€. He decided to avoid the court by giving up trading businesses and instead changed his signs to show now weights of bakery products.
They also checked an old scale which was there purely for decoration, also reprimanding him for that thing not being calibrated.

Source: https://www.stern.de/wirtschaft/news/berlin--baecker-soll-25-000-euro-strafe--weil-er-kilogramm-falsch-abgekuerzt-hat-8898584.html

Somebody should sue UltraFire, they've got a 18650 whose model # is 10.000mAh.

[rsjsouza]

Just wanted to add a story I read yesterday:
The german "Landesamt für Eich- und Messwesen in Berlin" (Berlins agency for calibration and metrology) tried to sue a baker for using "KG" as a unit for weight of his breads. They demanded 25.000€ for this great crime, since "It could be easily confused with a Komanditgesellschaft! [limited commercial partnership company]". And - as everybody knows - your local bread and bakery dealer usually also sells businesses for 1.99€. He decided to avoid the court by giving up trading businesses and instead changed his signs to show now weights of bakery products.
They also checked an old scale which was there purely for decoration, also reprimanding him for that thing not being calibrated.

Source: https://www.stern.de/wirtschaft/news/berlin--baecker-soll-25-000-euro-strafe--weil-er-kilogramm-falsch-abgekuerzt-hat-8898584.html

Somebody should sue UltraFire, they've got a 18650 whose model # is 10.000mAh.

Nothing wrong with expressing 10mAh with an accuracy of 1uAh.

[SiliconWizard]

Somebody should sue UltraFire, they've got a 18650 whose model # is 10.000mAh.

I was just thinking, it takes some balls to use "'Ultrafire" as a brand name for Li-ion batteries. Or humor.

[RES]

The K in memory chips comes from K-RAM (1024 Bytes) 

[rstofer]

I was just giggling at some of the posts stating that the new unit names have been around for all of 20 years and I should get on board.

I started writing FORTRAN code on an 8K (word) IBM 1130 in 1970 - a little more than 50 years ago.  When IBM said 8K words, they meant exactly 8192 words - period!

Get on board?  I have been on the train for more than 50 years and see no reason to change for some silly 20 years old nonsense.  Kibbles and Bits is a brand of dog food.

https://www.google.com/search?q=kibbles+and+bits


Incidentally, IBM numbered the bits backwards.  The 0th bit was the high order bit and bit 15 was the low order bit.  Apparently, the LSB is not always bit 0...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_numbering

[Monkeh]

It's okay, you've been wrong 50 years, you may as well keep being wrong.

[Siwastaja]

It's nice to have an ultimate authority, standardization body specializing on what is not included in the SI system, who defines what is right and what is wrong, called Monkeh! 

(Seriously, so it appears you still don't get it, despite having two years to try to digest it. I spell it once again: kilo is a part of the SI system only with SI units. Your idea of combining parts of SI systems and parts of non-SI system is your own idea, and I agree your idea makes sense and is nice, but it's not your call to decide what is right and what is wrong. Natural human language is specified by actual usage, not by Monkeh, and language is often ambigious. That's exactly why the SI system exists and is needed, but kilobytes are not part of it. But having been wrong 2 years, you may as well keep being wrong.)

[rsjsouza]

The K in memory chips comes from K-RAM (1024 Bytes) 

Re-opening a two year-old heated exchange to state something that was said over and over? Let the discussion die on itself...

[Monkeh]

It's nice to have an ultimate authority, standardization body specializing on what is not included in the SI system, who defines what is right and what is wrong, called Monkeh! 

(Seriously, so it appears you still don't get it, despite having two years to try to digest it. I spell it once again: kilo is a part of the SI system only with SI units. Your idea of combining parts of SI systems and parts of non-SI system is your own idea, and I agree your idea makes sense and is nice, but it's not your call to decide what is right and what is wrong. Natural human language is specified by actual usage, not by Monkeh, and language is often ambigious. That's exactly why the SI system exists and is needed, but kilobytes are not part of it.)

It's very nice that you disagree. Bytes may not be part of the SI system, but intentionally misuing SI prefixes is not beneficial to anyone. I'm afraid that 'two years of trying to digest' your opinion doesn't mean I'll accept it and proceed with your way of thinking. Just as rstofer has had 20 years to consider an alternate opinion and still doesn't agree with it.

[CatalinaWOW]

It is funny watching a long argument about the prefix, when I still have some issues with the "byte" part.  Once upon a time, in the dark and distant past a byte was the smallest group of bits addressable on a given machine.  I have seen machines which had 2 bit bytes, 4 bit bytes, 8, 10 and 11 bit bytes. 

It was about the time of the home computer revolution that the definition seemed to gravitate towards 8 bits, which was the byte size of those home computers.  The spread of strongly typed languages also had an impact on this. 

I'm not a standards guy, so don't know if byte has been formalized to 8 bits (outside of various HOL and OS definitions).  If it has, there is some use for a new word to mean what byte used to mean.

[madires]

The modern byte with 8 bits is defined in ISO/IEC 2382-1:1993.

[SiliconWizard]

The modern byte with 8 bits is defined in ISO/IEC 2382-1:1993.

To be fair though:

- In ISO/IEC 2382-1:1993, the byte was defined like so: ( https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso-iec:2382:-1:ed-3:v1:en )

byte
A 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.

The standard defined the "octet" to be an 8-bit byte:

octet
8-bit byte
A byte that consists of eight bits.

-  ISO/IEC 2382-1:1993 has been withdrawn for a while. The corresponding relevant std is now ISO/IEC 2382:2015. The definition of byte hasn't changed. They still define the "octet" as an 8-bit byte, while the byte is "usually" 8-bit, but it's not formally guaranteed.

So what CatalinaWOW says is still valid, strictly speaking, even though byte is indeed "usually" 8-bit, and for all practical purposes, these days, it is. But the standard doesn't really help here.
To avoid all ambiguity, we should probably use "octet" instead. Anecdotically, this is the term we have been using in french for a long time.

[magic]

So, technically, we measure all that computer stuff in kibioctets?

I will try to remember that

BTW, I also like simply "kilos", "megs" and "gigs". These are invariably used only in computing so there is no ambiguity

[tggzzz]

So, technically, we measure all that computer stuff in kibioctets?

I will try to remember that

BTW, I also like simply "kilos", "megs" and "gigs". These are invariably used only in computing so there is no ambiguity

Except in conjunction with frequency and resistance, in English at least

[TimFox]

So, technically, we measure all that computer stuff in kibioctets?

I will try to remember that

BTW, I also like simply "kilos", "megs" and "gigs". These are invariably used only in computing so there is no ambiguity

Except in conjunction with frequency and resistance, in English at least

Also mass (kilograms), usually abbreviated as “kilos”.
Note that “giga” and, therefore “gigs”, should be pronounced with a soft initial “g”.
I am intrigued by the number of posts on this forum where the poster’s individual experience is generalized to “only”, “always”, “no one”, “invariably” and other invalid absolute terms.

[IDEngineer]

The standard defined the "octet" to be an 8-bit byte

...which is why I prefix my eight bit unsigned variables with the letter "o".

Yeah, it's also to avoid confusing boolean with byte. But nice that the "standard" supports my personal naming convention. 

[magic]

Except in conjunction with frequency and resistance, in English at least

Hmm, you aren't wrong

But in the sort of context where it's obvious they refer to bytes rather than ohms, I think they are much more likely to be used by computer nerds who mostly forgot how to count in decimal than by the sort of pedants who fuss about SI standard compliance. And certainly not by HDD salesmen.

So it should be safe, I think

[TimFox]

A less absolute statement than the one to which I objected.

[magic]

 

Generally, I must confess to seeing only one peculiar context in which it makes any sense whatsoever to talk about data in quantities of SI multi-bytes: that's when you store (big) files on disks. And it's only because total disk capacity is rated that way.

Consider low-level details of storage on the same HDD - it's 512 or 4096 byte sectors nowadays, or maybe pages and erase blocks if it's SSD - all binary. Put the data in RAM - it's done in units of pages, and individual numbers are sized in powers of two, except for space-optimized formats that are a PITA to process for this very reason.

Even in communications, though physical data rates may be decimal, there is almost always a protocol overhead, so calculations require a correction factor anyway. That may as well be computed for 1024 bytes as for 1000.

With the computers we have nowadays, we could easily forget that the number 1000 even exists, if not for HDD marketers. And this means Jihad as far as I'm concerned