this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
96 points (68.2% liked)

Technology

60080 readers
3331 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 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
96
Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes (zeta.one)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
168 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€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Nobody gave a fuck until they bought a 300gb hd with 277gb of free space

The difference was a lot smaller when you were dealing with 700 byte files - it was often a rounding error. Also - you needed two sectors (1024 bytes at the time) two store your 700 byte file, so what did it matter anyway? If you want to get really specific, you actually needed three sectors - because there's metadata on the file... however the metadata will share space with other files so does that count?

Filesystems are incredibly complex and there's no way they can be explained to a lay person. Storage is and always has been an approximation.

It's even worse with RAM these days - my Mac has 298TB of memory address space currently allocated... but only between 6GB and 7GB of "app memory" in use (literally fluctuating between those two from one second to the next when I'm not even doing anything but watching the memory usage).

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, no, I'm sure I noticed it but I didn't really have the sophistication to get the implication.

Before we got our first Windows machine I had some DOS books. I remember a table in DOS for dummies talking about kilo/giga/petabytes and internalized it, but CDs were a thing by then.