this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
49 points (86.6% liked)
Asklemmy
43750 readers
1189 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Unless you’re a hard drive manufacturer, of course :)
Not really? They say kilo, mega, giga, tera, but they're not actually 1000s of each other... they're 1024 of each other.
No, the powers of 1024 are called "Kibibyte (KiB)", " Mebibyte (MiB) and "Gibibyte (GiB)" (those are called "binary prefixes"). Gigabyte is 1000^3. This is why hard drive manufacturers use Gb instead of Gib, because it lets them sell a smaller drive with the same number before the prefix (2 TB < 2 TiB).
Prior to 1998, it was ambiguous, and some usages of the metric prefixes to denote 1024^n persist to this day (hello Windows). But nowadays any usage of 1024^n should absolutely use the binary prefixes.
The difference between "should" and "do". Windows is a huge market share, you can't act like they're some weird exception.
I mean sure, it's true there's still ambiguous usage. But that doesn't change the fact that hard drive manufacturer use the powers of 1000, which is what the previous comment was about.
As SI prefixes, they’re all multiples of ten, technically speaking. So referring to 1,024 bytes as a kilobyte is incorrect, it’s 1.024 kilobytes or 1 kibibyte. Microsoft deciding to ignore industry and international standards is the reason for the confusion.
But either way, hard drive manufacturers will sell a 1TB drive, and Windows will see that as a 935GB drive - that’s basically the difference between 2^40 bytes vs. 10^12 bytes