It's too late. Powers-of-two won. I'm the sort of person who uses "whom" in English, but even I acknowledge that using "KB" to mean 1,000, not 1,024, can only breed confusion. The purpose of language is to communicate. I'm all for pedantry when it's compatible with clarity, but we can't reconcile the two goals here.

▲ eviks 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

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

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NetMageSCW a day ago | parent [-]

And what is the common meaning of K? K was used to mean 1024 before SI was standard.

	▲	eviks a day ago \| parent [-]
		You know the meaning very well, that's why it's common. Though your SI reference isn't that relevant: first, common doesn't need to follow SI even though it does in this case. Second, kilo is more ancient than SI.

▲ digiown 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

▲ 1718627440 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I do not know what "Linux" you are using.

    user@machine:~$ python3
    >>> with open('/tmp/a', 'wb') as f:
    ...     f.write (b'a'*1000);
    ... 
    1000
    >>> with open('/tmp/b', 'wb') as f:
    ...     f.write (b'a'*1024);
    ... 
    1024

    $ ll /tmp -h
    -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 1000 Feb  5 10:40 a
    -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 1.0K Feb  5 10:40 b

▲ none_to_remain 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

KiB is a an abbreviation for "kilobyte" which emphasizes that it means 1024.

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hnlmorg 2 days ago | parent [-]

No it’s not. KiB is an abbreviation for kibibyte

Eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobyte

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none_to_remain 2 days ago | parent [-]

Those silly words only come up in discussions like this. I have never heard them uttered in real life. I don't think my experience is bizarre here - actual usage is what matters in my book.

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quotemstr 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

To be honest, I think the power-ten SI people might have won the war against the power-two people if they'd just chosen a prefix that sounded slightly less ridiculous than "kibibyte".

What the hell is a "kibibyte"? Sounds like a brand of dog food.

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kstrauser 2 days ago | parent [-]

I genuinely believe you're right. It comes across like "the people who are right can use the disputed word, and the people who are wrong can use this infantile one".

I don't know what the better alternative would have been, but this certainly wasn't it.

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quotemstr 2 days ago | parent [-]

Thinking about it a bit, I think I'd have

1. defined traditional suffixes and abbreviations to mean powers of two, not ten, aligning with most existing usages, but...

2. deprecated their use, especially in formal settings...

3. defined new spelled-out vocabulary for both pow10 and pow2 units, e.g. in English "two megabytes" becomes "two binary megabytes" or "two decimal megabytes", and...

4. defined new unambiguous abbreviations for both decimal and binary units, e.g. "5MB" (traditional) becomes "5bMB" (simplified, binary) or "5dMB" (simplified, decimal)

This way, most people most of the time could keep using the traditional units and be understood just fine, but in formal contexts in which precision is paramount, you'd have a standard way of spelling out exactly what you meant.

I'd have gone one step further too and stipulate that truth in advertising would require storage makers to use "5dMB" or "5 decimal megabytes" or whatever in advertising and specifications if that's what they meant. No cheating using traditional units.

(We could also split bits versus bytes using similar principles, e.g. "bi" vs "by".)

I mean consider UK, which still uses pounds, stone, and miles. In contexts where you'd use those units, writing "10KB" or "one megabyte" would be fine too.

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kstrauser 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

That seems like a better approach, and one that would've won me over.

It's leagues better than "kibibyte".

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hnlmorg 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s basically what Kibi et al is though. It’s Ki(lo) bi(nary) — kibi.

Yeah it sounds dumb, but it’s really not that different from your suggestion.

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account42 a day ago | parent [-]

It's very different from the solution proposed by gp.

	▲	hnlmorg a day ago \| parent [-]
		I disagree. They’re both inserting Bi as the distinction. The difference is the GP focused more on the abbreviation, but the implementation logic is similar.

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2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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