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And a megabyte is depending on the context precisely 1000x1000=1,000,000 or 1024x1024=1,048,576 bytes*, except when you're talking about the classic 3.5 inch fl
by kmm 8mo ago
And a megabyte is depending on the context precisely 1000x1000=1,000,000 or 1024x1024=1,048,576 bytes*, except when you're talking about the classic 3.5 inch floppy disks, where "1.44 MB" stands for 1440x1024 bytes, or about 1.47 true MB or 1.41 MiB.
* Yeah, I read the article. Regardless of the IEC's noble attempt, in all my years of working with people and computers I've never heard anyone actually pronounce MiB (or write it out in full) as "mebibyte".
- pif 8mo ago> I've never heard It doesn't matter. "kilo" means 1000. People are free to use it wrong if they wish.
- bloppe 8mo agoIf Bob says "kilobyte" to Alice, and Bob means 5432 bytes, and Alice perceives him to mean 5432 bytes, then in that context, "kilobyte" means 5432 bytes.
- bruce343434 8mo agoWhat are the odds of Charlie meeting Bob and Alice?
- cyanydeez 8mo agoIs charlie a marketing exec?
- kazinator 8mo agoNo, in that context, kilobyte means 1024 bytes, like in every other context. :)
- tombert 8mo agoAll words are made up. They weren’t handed down from a deity, they were made up by humans to communicate ideas to other humans. “Kilo” can mean what we want in different contexts and it’s really no more or less correct as long as both parties understand and are consistent in their usage to each other.
- ablob 8mo agoI find it concerning that kilo can mean both 10^3 and 2^10 depending on context. And that the context is not if you're speaking about computery stuff, but which program you use has almost certainly lead to avoidable bugs.
- ralferoo 8mo agoThat latter part is only true since marketing people decided they knew better about computer related things than computer people. It's also stupid because it's rare than anyone outside of programming even needs to care exactly how many bytes something else. At the scales that each of kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte etc are used, the smaller values are pretty much insignificant details. If you ask for a kilogram of rice, then you probably care more about that 1kg of rice is the same as the last 1kg of rice you got, you probably wouldn't even care how many grams that is. Similarly, if you order 1 ton of rice, you do care exactly how many grams it is, or do you just care that this 1 ton is the same as that 1 ton? This whole stupidity started because hard disk manufacturers wanted to make their drives sound bigger than they actually were. At the time, everybody buying hard disks knew about this deception and just put up with it. We'd buy their 2GB drive and think to ourselves, "OK so we have 1.86 real GB". And that was the end of it. Can you just imagine if manufacturers started advertising computers as having 34.3GB of RAM? Everybody would know it was nonsense and call it 32GB anyway.
- kazinator 8mo agoThe "which program you use" confusion was instigated by the idiots insisting that we should have metric kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes (cheered on by crooked storage manufacturers). Before all that nonsense, it was crystal clear: a megabyte in storage was unambiguously 1024 x 1024 bytes --- with the exception of crooked mass storage manufacturers. There was some confusion, to be sure, but the partial success of attempt to redefine the prefixes to their power-of-ten meanings has caused more confusion.
- fc417fc802 8mo agoNow that RAM prices have spiked perhaps manufacturers should try marketing it in power of ten seven bit bytes.
- nixpulvis 8mo agoExactly. If you're talking loosely, then you can get away with it.
- lightedman 8mo agoMan let a drug dealer give me a binary 'kilo' of some drug. That's almost a free ounce included!
- AngryData 8mo agoIn North America blackmarket drugs are often sold in pounds and ounces but measured in grams so you do see some rounding.
- burnt-resistor 8mo agoSuch a myopic view when reality and marketing is messier than dramatic self-righteousness. This unnecessary bikeshedding nonsense has already been solved by using mebi, kibi, etc. to disambiguate sloppy abuse of SI units.
- NetMageSCW 8mo agoFortunately SI doesn’t get to own terms or prefixes and trying to enforce different usage by fiat fails in the real world, exactly as it should.
- superjan 8mo agoWell 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.
- okanat 8mo agoIt may "make sense" but that's actually a false equivalence. The raw disk space for a 3.5" high-density floppy disk for IBM PCs is 512 bytes per sector * 18 sectors per track * 80 tracks per side * 2 sides = 1,474,560 bytes. It is 1.47 MB or 1.40 MiB neither of which is 1440 KB or KiB. The 1440 number comes from Microsoft's FAT12 filesystem. That was the space that's left for files outside the allocation table. Sectors per track or tracks per side is subject to change. Moreover a different filesystem may have non-linear growth of the MFT/superblock that'll have a different overhead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats
- fuzzfactor 8mo agoNot my downvote, good chart actually. It is worse of a downer when there is a complete failure to make further sense like that, but I'll try to do something. Of course one chart does not an expert make, I don't understand half of it but at least I worked with 3.5 floppies since they first came out. 3.5 floppies are "soft sectored" media and usually the drives were capable of handling non-standard arrangements too. What made non-standard numbers of sectors uncommon was it would require software most people were not using. DOS and Windows simply prepared virgin magnetic media with 2880 sectors, or reformatted them that way and that was about it. PC's were already popular when 3.5 size came out, and most of the time they were not virgin magnetic media, they were purchased pre-formatted with 2880 sectors (of 512 bytes per sector) already on the entire floppy, of which fewer sectors were available for user data because a number of sectors are used up by the FAT filesystem overhead. On the chart you see the 1440kb designation since each sector is considered 1/2 "kilobyte". 512 bytes is pretty close to half a kilobyte ain't it? (The oddball 1680kb and 1720kb were slightly higher-density sectors, with more of them squeezed into the same size media, most people couldn't easily copy them without using an alternative to DOS or Windows. Sometimes used for games or installation media.) With Windows when partitioning your drive if you want a 64 GB volume you would likely choose 64000 MB in either the GUI or Diskpart. Each of these GB is exactly 2880000 sectors for some reason ;) But that's the size of the whole physical partition whether it contains only zeros or a file system. Then when you format it the NTFS filesystem has its own overhead.
- pwdisswordfishy 8mo ago> classic 3.5 inch floppy disks 90 mm floppy disks. https://jdebp.uk/FGA/floppy-discs-are-90mm-not-3-and-a-half-inches.html 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.
- skissane 8mo ago> 90 mm floppy disks. https://jdebp.uk/FGA/floppy-discs-are-90mm-not-3-and-a-half-inches.html https://jdebp.uk/FGA/floppy-discs-are-90mm-not-3-and-a-half-... That page is part right and part wrong. It is right in claiming that "3.5-inch" floppies are actually 90 mm. It is wrong in claiming that the earlier "5.25-inch" floppies weren't metric "5.25-inch" floppies are actually 130 mm as standardised in ECMA-78 [0] "8-inch" floppies are actually 200 mm as standardised in ECMA-69 [1] Actually there's a few different ECMA standards for 130 and 200 mm floppies – the physical dimensions are the same, but using different recording mechanisms (FM vs MFM–those of a certain age may remember MFM as "double density", and those even older may remember FM as "single density"), and single-sided versus double-sided. [0] ECMA-78: Data interchange on 130 mm flexible disk cartridges using MFM recording at 7 958 ftprad on 80 tracks on each side), June 1986: https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-78/ https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st... [1] ECMA-69: Data interchange on 200 mm flexible disk cartridges using MFM recording at 13 262 ftprad on both sides, January 1981: https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-69/ https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st...
- whichquestion 8mo agoI 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
- fc417fc802 8mo agoSpeaking of significant Pib vs PiB is 8x. I assume you meant the latter.
- nixpulvis 8mo agoThey should be more precise if they are talking about KiB in a context where the difference matters... luckily those contexts are usually written down.
- burnt-resistor 8mo agoInterestingly, 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.