this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
144 points (69.6% liked)

Technology

59671 readers
3463 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
L3s@fry.gs
L4s@fry.gs
L4s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
144
Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes (zeta.one)
submitted 11 months ago by wischi@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world
159 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I often find myself explaining the same things in real life and online, so I recently started writing technical blog posts.

This one is about why it was a mistake to call 1024 bytes a kilobyte. It's about a 20min read so thank you very much in advance if you find the time to read it.

Feedback is very much welcome. Thank you.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] gens@programming.dev 20 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The mistake is thinking that a 1000 byte file takes up a 1000 bytes on any storage medium. The mistake is thinking that it even matters if a kB means 1000 or 1024 bytes. It only matters for some programmers, and to those 1024 is the number that matters.

Disregarding reality in favor of pedantics is the real mistake.

[โ€“] CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

I dunno it makes up a few gigabytes of lost storage on a terrabyte hard drive.