Yup. Though rather than say "fruit and fruit" are two words, or focusing on "definitions" (which tend to morph over time anyway), I think the more straightforward and typical approach is to just recognize that the same word can have different meanings in different contexts.

This is such a basic and universal part of language, it is a mystery to me why something so transparently clueless as "actually, tomato is a fruit" persists.

Just because someone is wrong doesn't mean we need to reinforce their error.

> Knowledge is understanding that ketchup is tomato jelly

How is it a jelly? It lacks any defining feature of jelly.

At the TB level, the difference is closer to 10%.

Three binary terabytes i.e. 3 * 2^40 is 3298534883328, or 298534883328 more bytes than 3 decimal terabytes. The latter is 298.5 decimal gigabytes, or 278 binary gigabytes.

Indeed, early hard drives had slightly more than even the binary size --- the famous 10MB IBM disk, for example, had 10653696 bytes, which was 167936 bytes more than 10MB --- more than an entire 160KB floppy's worth of data.

Buy an SSD, and you can get both at the same time!

That is to say, all the (high-end/“gamer”) consumer SSDs that I’ve checked use 10% overprovisioning and achieve that by exposing a given number of binary TB of physical flash (e.g. a “2TB” SSD will have 2×1024⁴ bytes’ worth of flash chips) as the same number of decimal TB of logical addresses (e.g. that same SSD will appear to the OS as 2×1000⁴ bytes of storage space). And this makes sense: you want a round number on your sticker to make the marketing people happy, you aren’t going to make non-binary-sized chips, and 10% overprovisioning is OK-ish (in reality, probably too low, but consumers don’t shop based on the endurance metrics even if they should).

> I don't think of base 10 being meaningful in binary computers.

They communicate via the network, right? And telephony has always been in base 10 bits as opposed to base two eight bit bytes IIUC. So these two schemes have always been in tension.

So at some point the Ki, Mi, etc prefixes were introduced along with b vs B suffixes and that solved the issue 3+ decades ago so why is this on the HN front page?!

A better question might be, why do we privilege the 8 bit byte? Shouldn't KiB officially have a subscript 8 on the end?

>I don't think of base 10 being meaningful in binary computers.

Okay, but what do you mean by “10”?

> I don't think of base 10 being meaningful in binary computers.

First, you implicitly assumed a decimal number base in your comment.

Second: Of course its meaningful. It's also relevant since humans use binary computers and numeric input and output in text is almost always in decimal.

The International Bureau of Weights and Measures, by an agreement between 64 countries that has been in effect for 6 and a half decades by now, and currently officially used by countries representing approximately 95% of the world's population. The work itself started in 1875 with an agreement between 17 countries.

A little late to lawyer that...

Patents at work.

Before the patent on Phillips screws & tools expired, Pozidriv was launched which was different enough to be capable of a bit more torque.

Phillips was for mass-production, Posidriv for mass-production with a little more torque.

Lots of people who wanted that still waited until the Pozidriv patent expired before considering it.

The screws themselves are marked on the head with little ticks so you can tell the difference, but not necessarily the screwdrivers :\

It's good to have the right tool for the job, HP instruments used Posidriv in a number of places.

Denying the importance of...

You sly dog.

>Capital K is for Kelvin.

It should be "kelvin" here. ;)

Unit names are always lower-case[1] (watt, joule, newton, pascal, hertz), except at the start of a sentence. When referring to the scientists the names are capitalized of course, and the unit symbols are also capitalized (W, J, N, Pa, Hz).

[1] SI Brochure, Section 5.3 "Unit Names" https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/41483022/SI-Brochure-9-...