Hmm, the forum name says 'opinions' so here we go... Uhm, am I the only one annoyed to the very bone every time he reads the bloody word 'kibibyte'?!? What the fuck is a kibibyte?!? Who the heck can even get a word like that out of their throat?!? We've been calling the darn things kilobytes long before we were even able to get a kilo of bytes together, and 'now' some moron comes up with the idea to flush decades of 'tradition' down the drain, forget about a word which we've been using for ages, rename that word, only to re dub something which isn't a kilobyte at all so we can call that a kilobyte. WTF?!? Couldn't we have forced the con men who insisted on naming 1000 bytes to use the word dekibyte or something?!? Worse still, is that there appear to be plenty of people willing to start renaming the good-old kilobyte to kibibyte. So, are myself and the fine people who made the spell checker of FireFox the only ones who believe the word kibibyte doesn't exist and it should be sent back to the dark void it once came from?

Arfness...

~t00b

ohwell, as long as you write 'kb' (don't nail me on caps) no one sees any diff..

I suppose kibi is 1024. Quite often when you talk about kilo in computers you mean 1024 not 1000.
I don't particularly like kibi (whatever that is) but there is a difference between kilo and 1024. The only computer related measurement that actually is real kilo, Mega, or Giga is hard disk space. They typically (at least used to) mean 1000.000 bytes when they wrote 1MB versus 1MB RAM would be 1048576 bytes.

I also seen the prefix K (capital K) when the meaning of K is 1024 as oppsed to lower case k which is the prefix for kilo (1000). I don't think that the capital K is actaully standardized but I've seen it being used to mean 1024.

and as if that is nothing....

B = byte (normally an octect (IIRC), but can't be sometimes, some times is 7 bits or 9 bits .... (in comunications))
b = bit

so

all convinations is valid Kb KB kB kb.... jejejeej be care writing documents......

for me, the invention of KILO = 1000 is just a way to write big numbers on the lavels of HDDs.

Flyguile

considering that 8bits are one byte we can see the problem.We do not create bytes decimaly,example a byte does not have 10 bits but only 8 and we use power of 2.The same thing goes to the hard disks.When you say that you have 150gigabytes decimally then in windows it may appear less than 150 gigabytes.That thing happens because a kilobyte is NOT 1000 bytes but 1024.It's the same storage.

I can't understand why hard disk manufacturers use decimal way of saying that one hard disk has n bytes of data.

2^10=
1
2
4
8
16
32
64
128
256
512
1024

If now we make the common mistake of saying that kilobytes are 1000 then we seem to have more data but this is not true.

In Decimal number 21 becomes 15 in hexadecimal.15 may seem less decimally but since we are in another system that does not have 1,10,100 but instead 1,16,256,4096,65536 and etc we know that 15$=21Decimal

Now kibi is not correct.We should send to the fire all those that make such mistakes.

There was a thread on slashdot about this recently and some folks argued rightly that kilo- means 1000 in every context except computing, so we would be the oddballs.

Personally, I won't stand for it though. 1024 bytes is a kilobyte and one thousand bytes doesn't even need a name because I don't give a crap about one thousand bytes One thousand bytes is of no interest in base 2 or base 16

The prefix kilo was defined to mean 1000 in 1795, and in use even before that.
Only a relatively short time ago it has become practice to use kilo for 1000 or 1024, depending on the unit that is qualified.
This usage gives strange results like: To send 1 kbit with a speed of 1 kbit/s takes 1.024 s.
Extending this practice to mega, giga only makes the ambiguity worse.
Therefore it is best to have distinct prefixes for powers of 1000 and powers of 1024.
To use anything else than kilo for 1000 would flush centuries of tradition down the drain, so a new prefix for 1024 had to be invented, and the IEC came up with kibi (symbol Ki). See also wikipedia page for kibibyte.
It's not pretty, but at least it is unambiguous.

So 1 MegaByte should be translated to 1 MaybeByte euh?
(Mebibyte, try to announce that without questioning)

I think it stinks, emotionally. But hell, 1 kilo is NOT 1024 historically.
Well, whatever. That's why we use 1 KB, so it's clear that we're talking bits'n bytes here.

And while we are at it: we, should call the C=64 the C=65,536 in the future, and scratch out all the 64/128/256 kbyte logo's from all our computers and replace it with "the right numbers". We should also replace the MSX2 boot secuence in BIOS, so it gives the right numbers.... NOT!!!

Thank God it's only a bunch of nitwit-nerds that do this, and that "the rest of the world" never ever heard of it or really isn't interested in this bull. As long as these nerds stay confined to their Wikipedia and sourceforge communities, it shouldn't become a real problem

It's a bit like the Green Booklet then.., some 1337 group deciding that our spelling, which we've used for ages, should be different.

Quote:

and that "the rest of the world" never ever heard of it or really isn't interested in this bull

Agreed, in fact it's the first time I've ever heard about those "kiwibytes". Looking for more info on the web I've found the following quote:

Quote:

I fully support this great idea and will from now use it as often and much as possible, until I find something better to waste my time with. It greatly enhances the cluelessness of newbies and adds to the general geekness of the world.

That's exactly what I think...

Agree. kibi is just a lot of bs from people that doesn't have enough real things todo. I'm happy with kilo. I'm open to use capital K or Ki as prefix but I don't really like the word kibi and it seems like its not part of any standard.

It's the first time (and hope last) that I read or heard this word

Also, in Spain, when we are talking (speaking) about KB (Kilobytes), we refer them as "KA". But only as a speaking term, never a written word.

It gets more serious if you buy a 1TB harddisc, which appears to be able to hold only 931GB, just because of the diff between 1000 and 1024. So, it is not total bs. The problem is that it does not make things very clear yet either.