Technology

WD needed to sell a drive with more advertised space than real space.

I was taught 1024 in my tech school. So I won’t ever refer to it as 1000 instead 1024. Not that it seems even remotely relevant though.

Unlike many comments here, I enjoyed reading the article, especially the parts in the "I don’t want to use gibibyte!" chapter, where you explain that this (the pedantry) is important in technical and formal situations (such as documentation). Seeing some of the comments here, I think it would have helped to focus on this aspect a bit more.

I also liked the extra part explaining the reasoning for using the Nokia E60.

I don't quite agree with the recommendation to use base 10 SI units where neither KiB or kB would result in nice numbers. I don't see why base 10 should have an influence on computers, and I think it makes more sense to stick to a single unit, such as KiB.

The reasons I have this opinion are probably to do with:

• My computer has shown me values using KiB, Gib, etc for years - I think it's a KDE default - so I'm already used to the concept of KiB being different from kB.
• I dislike the concept of base 10 in general. I like the idea of using base 16 universally (because computers. Base 12 is also valid in a less computer-dominant society). I therefore also think 1024 is a silly number to use, and we should measure memory in multiples of 2^8 or 2^16...

p.s, I agree with other commenters that your comments starting with "Pretty obvious that you didn’t read the article." or similar are probably not helping your case... I understand that some comments here have been quite frustrating though.

The only place where kilobyte is 1000 bytes has been Google and everywhere else it's 1024 so even if it's precise I don't see the advantage of changing usage. It would just cause more confusion at my work than make anything clearer.

• Kilobyte is 2^10 bytes or about a thousand bytes within a few reasonably significant digits.
• Megabyte is 2^20 bytes or about a thousand megabytes within a few reasonably significant digits.
• Terabyte is 2^30 bytes or about a a thousand megabytes within a few reasonably significant digits.

The binary storage is always going to be a translation from a binary base to a decimal equivalent. So the shorthand terms used to refer to a specific and long integer number should comes as absolutely no surprise. And that's just it; they're just a shorthand, slang jargon that caught on because it made sense to anyone that was using it.

Your whole article just makes it sound like you don't actually understand the math, the way computers actually work, linguistics, or etymology very well. But you're not really here for feedback are you. The whole rant sounds like a reaction to a bad grade in a computer science 101 course.