Comment on What the Hell is this Bull shit ?
basxto@discuss.tchncs.de 6 days agoThis has nothing to do with metric. There was just a tradition to use the SI prefixes in binary and with k/K it worked. With MB it doesn’t work that well anymore, which is why they came up with MiB at some point, but MB can still be interpreted binary like it always was. Software can often display both binary and decimal prefixes. There are also different standards how to handle these units for different kinds of storage.
1kB is clearly 1000B and 1KB is clearly 1024B
black0ut@pawb.social 6 days ago
All software has always interpreted it in binary as far as I know. There never was a good standard, and the most common way to differentiate in my experience was using KB as metric (decimal, SI) and K as binary. It’s easy to confuse with the already convoluted standard of KB being a kilobyte and Kb being a kilobit.
The reason for the added “i” is that in every other system, kilo means 1000. Someone at the SI realized that it didn’t make any sense to have it mean something different in software so they invented the Ki prefix (instead of K) to mean 1024. That is now the standard, and it’s part of the SI (coloquially metric). As a consequence of this, you can technically use the Ki prefix with any other SI unit, so you can also use the KiM (kibimeter), which is 1024 meters. Idk why you’d use it, but it’s funny that the option exists.
basxto@discuss.tchncs.de 5 days ago
Kilo has to be lower case, so it should be kB for decimal kilobyte. All SI prefixes are case sensitive. Kilo, hecto and deca are weird outliers since they are all written lower case, otherwise SI uses uppercase for prefixes larger than factor one and lower case for those smaller. I know people often don’t pay that much attention to that for bytes since there is nothing smaller than a bit.
There is a huge difference between 5mm and 5Mm. 5Mm = 5000000000mm
With other prefixes it gets even more extreme: