I do agree up to a point as I still need to double take when I see MiB, but that said, I also do agree keeping SI unit prefixes standardized has great advantages.

So the "sane" options would be either not using SI for digital, or, what was chosen, change the colloquial prefixes in the digital world. The former would have been easier in the short term.

Yes, tomato's ARE actually a fruit.

But really!?

I'll keep calling it in nice round powers of two, thank you very much.

It’s not them denying it, it’s the LLM that generated this slop.

All they had to say was that the KiB et. al. were introduced in 1998, and the adoption has been slow.

And not “but a kilobyte can be 1000,” as if it’s an effort issue.

He probably uses Phillips head screws.

*rationale

What are you talking about? The article literally fully explains the rationale, as well as the history. It's not "denying" anything. Seems entirely reasonable and balanced to me.

None of your criticisms--which start with an absurd and meaningless ad hominem--apply to the actual content of the article.

Elsewhere you write

> They are definitely denying the importance of 2-fold partitioning in computing architectures.

No, they definitely aren't. There are no words in the article that deny anything at all.

Well the 1.44 MB, was called that because it was 1440 KB, twice the capacity of the 720k floppy, and 4x the 360k floppy. It made perfect sense to me at that time.

> I've never heard

It doesn't matter. "kilo" means 1000. People are free to use it wrong if they wish.

I worked with networked attached storage systems at pib scale several years ago and we referred to things in gib/tib because it was significant when referring to the size of systems and we needed to be precise.

That being said, I think the difference between mib and mb is niche for most people

> classic 3.5 inch floppy disks

90 mm floppy disks. https://jdebp.uk/FGA/floppy-discs-are-90mm-not-3-and-a-half-...

Which I have taken to calling 1440 KiB – accurate and pretty recognizable at the same time.

They should be more precise if they are talking about KiB in a context where the difference matters... luckily those contexts are usually written down.

Interestingly, HD floppies actually are 2 "MB" unformatted without the various overhead. This is how 1.68 "MB" DMF is possible. Extra-high Density (ED) 2.88 "MB" is similarly 4 "MB" unformatted.

Knuth is not in favour of using kilo/mega/etc with power-of-2 meanings:

> I'm a big fan of binary numbers, but I have to admit that this convention flouts the widely accepted international standards for scientific prefixes.

He also calls it “an important issue” and had written “1000 MB = 1 gigabyte (GB), 1000 GB = 1 terabyte (TB), 1000 TB = 1 petabyte (PB), 1000 PB = 1 exabyte (EB), 1000 EB = 1 zettabyte (ZB), 1000 ZB = 1 yottabyte (YB)” in his MMIX book even before the new binary prefixes became an international standard.

He is merely complaining that the new names for the binary prefixes sound funny (and has his own proposal like “large megabyte” and notation MMB etc), but he's still using the kilo/mega/etc prefixes with decimal meanings.

> Invent a new word for decimal, metric units where appropriate.

No, they already did the opposite with KiB, MiB.

Because most metric decimal units are used for non-computing things. Kilometers, etc. Are you seriously proposing that kilometers should be renamed kitrimeters because you think computing prefixes should take priority over every other domain of science and life?

5000, but a slightly shorter foot than the modern one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#Roman

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

There is a "metric mile" which is 1500 m. This is something in the context of track and field athletics.

Maybe after society has collapsed and been rebuilt we'll end up with km and cm having a weird ratio to the meter. Same for kg. At least celsius is just about impossible to screw up.

Webster’s dictionary defines a mile as …

I think your comment is supposed to be sarcastic, but I'm not sure what the sarcasmcis about? Yes, a mile is 1000 paces. That is why it's called a mile. It's not an "argument", it's just what a mile is.

They almost always mean power of 10, unless you're discussing RAM, RAM addressing, or RAM pages. (or flash, which has inherited most of the same for most of the same reasons)

Nice page, and nice link to Colin Percival's page too! Let me toss you one example: CDs are marketed in mebibytes. A "650 MB" burnable CD is actually 650 MiB ≈ 682 MB, and likewise for "700 MB" being actually 700 MiB ≈ 734 MB. DVD and BD do use metric prefixes correctly, like you pointed out. Back in the day, I archived my data on CD/DVD/BD, and I planned out my disc burns to have only about 1 to 10 MB of wasted space, so I had to be very aware of the true definition and exactly how much capacity was available for me to use.

> The only few places where binary prefixes are used are to refer to RAM capacity and file sizes, whereas decimal prefixes apply to all other areas and all units (not "only bitrates"): storage capacity, clock frequency, stream bandwidth, baud, pixel numbers, data throughput, processing power

Storage capacity also uses binary prefixes. The distinction here isn't that file sizes are reported in binary numbers and storage capacity is reported in decimal numbers. It's that software uses binary numbers and hard drive manufacturers use decimal numbers. You don't see df reporting files in binary units and capacities in decimal units.

Of that large list of measurements, only bandwidth is measured in bytes, making the argument mostly an exercise in sophistry. You can't convince anyone that KB means 1000 bytes by arguing that kHz means 1000 Hz.

It makes it inconvenient to do things like estimate how long it will take to transfer a 10GiB file. Both because of the the difference between G and Gi, and because one is in bytes and the other is in bits.

There are probably cases where corresponding to Hz, is useful, but for most users I think 119MiB/s is more useful than 1Gbit/s.

There's a good reason that gigabit ethernet is 1000MBit/s and that's because it was defined in decimal from the start. We had 1MBit/s, then 10MBit/s, then 100MBit/s then 1000MBit/s and now 10Gbit/s.

Interestingly, from 10GBit/s, we now also have binary divisions, so 5GBit/s and 2.5GBit/s.

Even at slower speeds, these were traditionally always decimal based - we call it 50bps, 100bps, 150bps, 300bps, 1200bps, 2400bps, 9600bps, 19200bps and then we had the odd one out - 56k (actually 57600bps) where the k means 1024 (approximately), and the first and last common speed to use base 2 kilo. Once you get into MBps it's back to decimal.

This is the bit (sic) that drives me nuts.

RAM had binary sizing for perfectly practical reasons. Nothing else did (until SSDs inherited RAM's architecture).

We apply it to all the wrong things mostly because the first home computers had nothing but RAM, so binary sizing was the only explanation that was ever needed. And 50 years later we're sticking to that story.

NAND flash has overprovisioning even on a per-die basis, eg. Micron's 256Gbit first-generation 3D NAND had 548 blocks per plane instead of 512, and the pages were 16384+2208 bytes. That left space both for defects and ECC while still being able to provide at least the nominal capacity (in power of two units) with good yield, but meant the true number of memory cells was more than 20% higher than implied by the nominal capacity.

The decimal-vs-binary discrepancy is used more as slack space to cope with the inconvenience of having to erase whole 16MB blocks at a time while allowing the host to send write commands as small as 512 bytes. Given the limited number of program/erase cycles that any flash memory cell can withstand, and the enormous performance penalty that would result from doing 16MB read-modify-write cycles for any smaller host writes, you need way more spare area than just a small multiple of the erase block size. A small portion of the spare area is also necessary to store the logical to physical address mappings, typically on the order of 1GB per 1TB when tracking allocations at 4kB granularity.

An even bigger problem is that networks are measured in bits while RAM and storage are in bytes. I'm sure this leads to plenty of confusion when people see a 120 meg download on their 1 gig network.

(The old excuse was that networks are serial but they haven't been serial for decades.)

Wirespeeds and bitrate and baud and all that stuff is vastly confusing when you start looking into it - because it's hard to even define what a "bit on the wire" is when everything has to be encoded in such a way that it can be decoded (specialized protocols can go FASTER than normal ones on the same wire and the same mechanism if they can guarantee certain things - like never having four zero bits in a row).

I can see a precision argument for binary represented frequencies. A systems programmer would value this. A musician would not.

Yes, 2**10 times this, yes.

Call me calcitrant, reactionary, or whatever, but I will not say kibibyte out loud. It's a dumb word and I'm not using it. It was a horrible choice.

"Giga" was considered to sound silly until it became common and we no longer care. "Yotta" sounds silly (to me) now.

When I read "KiB" I say "kib" and it's fine. Similar for GiB, TiB, PiB.

"I bought a two tib SSD."

"I just want to serve five pibs."

I usually just say kilobyte when speaking, and say “binary kilobyte” or “decimal kilobyte” if it’s not clear from context. I still (usually, but I forget) use the IEC symbols when I mean binary and the SI symbols when I mean decimal. The extra ‘i’ doesn’t cost that much.

"mebi" and "gibi" aren't any better, last one in particular if you say it as "jibby-bytes"

Does it really matter if it sounds silly?

Actually, it sounds very serious and appropriate.

Agreed. Metric is stupid.

The ancient Sumerians used multiples of 60, as we continue to do for time and angles (which are related) today. It makes perfect sense. 60 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, which makes it easy to use in calculations. Even the metric people are not so crazy as to propose replacing these with powers of 10.

Same with pounds, for example. A pound is 16 ounces, which can be divided 4 times without involving any fractions. Try that with metric.

Then there's temperature. Fahrenheit just works more naturally over the human-scale temperature range without involving fractions. Celsius kind of sucks by comparison.

Now that I think about it, I see KiB and kb all the time but I don't know that I've ever encountered Kib or kB in the wild. Maybe I'm in a bubble? Or maybe we should accept that kb is power of 10 but kB is power of two?

Well I guess we already basically have this in practice since Ki can be shortened to K seeing as metric prefixes are always lower case and we clearly aren't talking about kelvin bytes.

So should a megabyte be 1012 * 1012 = 1024144 bytes or (1000 * 1000 + 1024 * 1024) / 2 = 1024288 bytes?

Perhaps we can simplify this compromise and have a kilobyte as 1024 bytes, a megabyte as 1024000 bytes, a gigabyte as 1048576000 bytes and a terabyte as 1048576000000 bytes.

I like the binch better, it's like an inch, but its 25.6 mm instead.

Because it would be literally correct. Kilo means 1000, not 1024.

Was reading this and thought the same thing.

> Because Windows, and only Windows

ls does unless you pass --si.

Raymond Chen's blog isn't exactly official documentation, even if it's frequently better than the documentation.

I know the only other software with this kind of error: https://github.com/lsd-rs/lsd/issues/807

Windows also uses KB as measure unit which does not make sense (it's either kB or KiB)

No it didn't, look at your flash/hard drive labels. Also, there has been confusion since the beginning, and the core cause of confusion is refusing to use the common meaning of K, so insisting on that is just perpetuating said confusion

Is it? Outside of Windows, I rarely ever see KB used to mean 1024 anymore. Linux and Mac usually uses KB for 1000, and "K" or "Ki" or "KiB" for 1024.

You've got it exactly the wrong way around. And that with such great confidence!

There was always a confusion about whether a kilobyte was 1000 or 1024 bytes. Early diskettes always used 1000, only when the 8 bit home computer era started was the 1024 convention firmly established.

Before that it made no sense to talk about kilo as 1024. Earlier computers measured space in records and words, and I guess you can see how in 1960, no one would use kilo to mean 1024 for a 13 bit computer with 40 byte records. A kiloword was, naturally, 1000 words, so why would a kilobyte be 1024?

1024 bearing near ubiquitous was only the case in the 90s or so - except for drive manufacturing and signal processing. Binary prefixes didn't invent the confusion, they were a partial solution. As you point out, while it's possible to clearly indicate binary prefixes, we have no unambiguous notation for decimal bytes.

Good lord, arrogance and self-righteousness? You're blowing the article out of proportion. They don't say anything non-factual or unreasonable - why inject hostility where none is called for?

In fact, they practically say the same exact thing you have said: In a nutshell, base-10 prefixes were used for base-2 numbers, and now it's hard to undo that standard in practice. They didn't say anything about making assumptions. The only difference is that that the author wants to keep trying, and you don't think it's possible? Which is perfectly fine. It's just not as dramatic as your tone implies.

At least it's not a total bizarro unit like "Floppy Disk Megabyte", equal to 1024000 bytes.

It goes back way further than that. The first IBM harddrive was the IBM 350 for the IBM 305 RAMDAC. It was 5 million characters. Not bytes, bytes weren't "a thing" yet. 5,000,000 characters. The very first harddrive was base-10.

Here's my theory. In the beginning, everything was base10. Because humans.

Binary addressing made sense for RAM. Especially since it makes decoding address lines into chip selects (or slabs of core, or whatever) a piece of cake, having chips be a round number in binary made life easier for everyone.

Then early DOS systems (CP/M comes to mind particularly) mapped disk sectors to RAM regions, so to enable this shortcut, disk sectors became RAM-shaped. The 512-byte sector was born. File sizes can be written in bytes, but what actually matters is how many sectors they take up. So file sizing inherited this shortcut.

But these shortcuts never affected "real computers", only the hamstrung crap people were running at home.

So today we have multiple ecosystems. Some born out of real computers, some with a heavy DOS inheritance. Some of us were taught DOS's limitations as truth, and some of us weren't.

> The article presents wishful thinking. The wish is for "kilobyte" to have one meaning. For the majority of its existence, it had only one meaning - 1024 bytes. Now it has an ambiguous meaning. People wish for an unambiguous term for 1000 bits, however that word does not exist. People also might wish that others use kibibyte any time they reference 1024 bytes, but that is also wishful thinking.

> The author's wishful thinking is falsely presented as fact.

There's good reason why the meanings of SI prefixes aren't set by convention or by common usage or by immemorial tradition, but by the SI. We had several thousand years of setting weights and measures by local and trade tradition and it was a nightmare, which is how we ended up with the SI. It's not a good show for computing to come along and immediately recreate the long and short ton.

Are you talking about imperial or metric kilobyte?

> Edit: I'm wrong.

You need character to admit that. I bow to you.

> Edit: I'm wrong. Older experience has corrected me - there has always been ambiguity "And that with such great confidence!", indeed.

Kudos for getting back. (and closing the tap of "you are wrong" comments :))

At this point I just wish 2^10 didn't end up so close to 1000.

And networking - we've almost always used standard SI prefixes for, e.g., bandwidth. 1 gigabit per second == 1 * 10^9.

Which makes it really @#ing annoying when you have things like "I want to transmit 8 gigabytes (meaning gibibytes, 2*30) over a 1 gigabit/s link, how long will it take?". Welcome to every networking class in the 90s.

We should continue moving towards a world where 2*k prefixes have separate names and we use SI prefixes only for their precise base-10 meanings. The past is polluted but we hopefully have hundreds of years ahead of us to do things better.

People were using metric words for binary numbers since at least the late 1950s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_binary_prefixes#19...

Which doesn't make it more correct, of course, even through I strongly believe believe that it is (where appropriate for things like memory sizes). Just saying, it goes much further back than 1984.

> The wish is for "kilobyte" to have one meaning.

Which is the reality. "kilobyte" means "1000 bytes". There's no possible discussion over this fact.

Many people have been using it wrong for decades, but its literal value did not change.

Then of course you are free to count 1024 bytes and call that a kB. Pretending everyone else will agree on that is a different thing.

. . . it seems weird that these are reported with a lowercase 'k' but 'M' and so on remain uppercase.

For SI units, the abbreviations are defined, so a lowercase k for kilo and uppercase M for mega is correct. Lower case m is milli, c is centi, d is deci. Uppercase G is giga, T is tera and so on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units#...

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We can, but we won't. At least not any time soon. For the foreseeable future, kilobyte will remain an ambiguous term, and kibibyte will very often not be used when someone is referring to 1024 bytes.

The second half of the article is entirely about kibibyte and the other IEC units.

It's at the end, in the "What are the standards units?" section.

It honestly sounds like how a diaper-wearing baby would mispronounce kilobyte.

"I will not sacrifice my dignity. We've made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds with awkward pronunciations. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further! And I will make them pay for what they've done to the kilobyte!"

Jibbybyte!

Not sure about that, SSDs historically have followed base-2 sizes (think of it as a legacy from their memory-based origins). What does happen in SSDs is that you have overprovisioned models that hide a few % of their total size, so instead of a 128GB SSD you get a 120GB one, with 8GB "hidden" from you that the SSD uses to handle wear leveling and garbage collection algorithms to keep it performing nicely for a longer period of time.

You think the people selling RAM are somehow more virtuous than the people selling hard disks?

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

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I wonder if some day people will use {"joke": ...} instead of <joke>

How many bits per second does 10 Gb ethernet represent?

The word "octet" is absolutely the kibibyte of "bits in a byte".

From https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1977-02/page/n145/...:

“A byte was described as consisting of any number of parallel bits from one to six. Thus a byte was assumed to have a length appropriate for the occasion. Its first use was in the context of the input-output equipment of the 1950s, which handled six bits at a time.”

"byte" doesn't even remotely resemble any decimal prefix, so it's okay. The problem is that prefixes "kilo", "mega", etc. are supposed to be decimal prefixes, but are used as binary. And what's worse, they aren't used consistently, sometimes they really mean decimal magnitudes, sometimes they don't.

Nah, an imperial kilobyte is 5280 bits. That's way more plausible.

Just because an official body gives a single definition doesn't mean it's unambiguous. Real communication isn't bound by official bodies. When I say my computer has 16GB of RAM, that does not mean exactly 16 billion bytes.

I need to update my language accordingly? No thanks. I'll keep saying what I say and nothing will happen.

The use of kilo for 1024 in computers precedes the formalization of kilo as an SI prefix. SI should have used a different prefix instead /s

> "The author clearly hasn't a clue about hardware, how memory is implemented."

I'm the author. Actually I'm quite familiar how memory addressing works, including concepts related to virtual memory / memory paging. Yes, I'm not a "low-level nerd" with deep knowledge in OS, hardware or machine code / assembly, but I know enough basics. And yes, I already mentioned that binary addressing makes more sense in RAM (and most of the hardware), and yes, I would not expect 4000-byte memory pages or disk clusters.

My main points are:

1) Kilo, mega, etc. prefixes are supposed to be base 10 instead of base 2, but in tech industry they are often base 2.

2) But this isn't the worst part. While we could agree on 1024 magnitude for memory, the problem is that it's still used inconsistently. Sometimes kilobyte is 1024 bytes, sometimes it's 1000. And this causes a confusion. In some contexts, such as RAM stick or disk cluster, you can assume base 2, but in some other contexts, such as file size, it's ambiguous. For example, would it be good if Celsius meant different things? I don't think so, it would certainly complicate things.

Key elements of a successful blog post !

Because kilo- already has a meaning. And both usages of kilobyte were (and are) in use. If we are going to fix the problem, we might as well fix it right.

> Why don’t kilobyte continue to mean 1024

Because it never did!

> The computer industry abused these definitions because 1000 is close to 1024, creating endless confusion.

They didn't abuse the definitions. It's simply the result of dealing with pins, wires, and bits. For your problems, for example, you won't ever have a system with 1 "MB" of RAM where that's 1,000,000 bytes. The 8086 processor had 20 address lines, 2^20, that's 1,048,576 bytes for 1MB. SI units make no sense for computers.

The only problem is unscrupulous hardware vendors using SI units on computers to sell you less capacity but advertise more.

Thank you. I had to scroll way down to find anyone defending using SI prefixes to mean what they mean everywhere else. A decade ago, I decided to alias "du" to "du --si" and not look back. Entire countries have switched from imperial to metric units. Switching to using base 10 for RAM is really just fine.

Well, you're joking, but the entire RAM industry still lists their chips in Gb (gigaBITS) to avoid confusion.

32 Gb ram chip = 4 GiB of RAM.