0394: "Kilobyte"

[hajrarara]

Hee! I made this few months ago... as a cheaper stupider version of the pun:

[DeadCatX2]

Actually, you only need 4 bits to represent one digit. BCD - Binary Coded Decimal - uses four bits to represent each decimal number.

So..8 bits, two digits.

[netsplit]

Actually, you only need 4 bits to represent one digit. BCD - Binary Coded Decimal - uses four bits to represent each decimal number.

So..8 bits, two digits.

What a deal!

[Dynastic]

I made the exact same point about how kibibyte/gibibyte/... all sound ridiculous and are impossible to take seriously to a friend once.

[endolith]

I made the exact same point about how kibibyte/gibibyte/... all sound ridiculous and are impossible to take seriously to a friend once.

"Killabite" and "nibble" sound much less ridiculous.

[noneuklid]

Forgive me for joining late, but I do have a question about the comic -- what happened in 1980? (Being the first year the industry dropped the size of a kilobyte, in the comic's frame)

[Amnesiasoft]

You're not getting it. Bit rates apply to serial communications; byte rates vary with usage. 100 megabit/sec Ethernet does not mean 12.5 megabyte/sec Ethernet (let alone 12.5 mebibyte/sec).

I see what you're saying, but I say you're wrong. 100 megabit/sec is the same thing as 12.5 megabyte/sec (assuming a byte is 8 bits). The problem is people who don't understand that not all of that bandwidth is dedicated to moving the data itself. And if they're really so inclined, just pretend a byte is 10 bits, usually gets a fairly accurate estimate transfer speeds for me.

[Random832]

Forgive me for joining late, but I do have a question about the comic -- what happened in 1980?

The size of the kilobyte went from 1028 bytes to 1024 - why do you ask?

[RobinEJ]

I was bored and sick so I implemented the comic.
For example, when run on a music video by Herman's Hermits, I get the following file sizes:

Code: Select all

foone@mobile:~/Desktop$ python howbig.py Movies/henry.flv
Movies/henry.flv
  4063 kB
  4015 KB
  (3968.69348078-3.87567722733j) KiB
  3965.06702992 kb
  4475 Kb
  3527 KBa

I also made a Python script for file sizes. At first you could specify 3 choices for KB size: 1024, 1000 and 1012. Later I changed it to leave it up to the user to specify KB size (unfortunately 1024J is not possible to compute with my script. The intel kilobyte is, though. 1,000,000 bytes is 976.622 kb.)

[william]

Who is "Kelly-Bootle"? Is that a real thing? It sounds like a joke, but sometimes reality is just weird enough that it can be funny just by "telling it as it is".

He's a real person.

[danix]

Oh, I really liked this discussion. As stated here, I can't take "kibibytes" seriously as they sound like "kirbybytes". Isn't that some Nintendo character?

Try sticking a 512,000,000 byte memory stick on your RAM, and experience WHY we use 1024-base.

[endolith]

As stated here, I can't take "kibibytes" seriously as they sound like "kirbybytes"

Yes, it sounds ridiculous, unlike "nibble", "killa bite", "mega bite", "giggibite", and "tear-a-bite", which are all very normal and serious-sounding units.

You can write "KiB" and read it as "kilobinary byte" or "binary kilobyte", you know.

Try sticking a 512,000,000 byte memory stick on your RAM, and experience WHY we use 1024-base.

I don't think they sell those. But even if they did, what would be wrong with it?

[DragonHawk]

Try sticking a 512,000,000 byte memory stick on your RAM, and experience WHY we use 1024-base.

Right, that's why using base ten prefixes for an inherently base two environment is confusing.

I still tend to think and say "kilobyte", "megabyte", etc., even when I mean the base two multipliers.

[netsplit]

As stated here, I can't take "kibibytes" seriously as they sound like "kirbybytes"

Yes, it sounds ridiculous, unlike "nibble", "killa bite", "mega bite", "giggibite", and "tear-a-bite", which are all very normal and serious-sounding units.

None of those sound like baby talk. Kibi does. The only time I'd be baby talking the computer is if I got a chick praggars via cybering her.

kilo 4life

[endolith]

None of those sound like baby talk. Kibi does.

Yeah, "gibbibyte" sound like baby talk, but "giggibyte" does not.

They all sound ridiculous; you're just used to some of them. Even if you coders refuse to say "kibibyte" or "kilobinary byte", and you read both "kB" and "KiB" as "kilobyte", when you're developing software, please use the correct unit symbols, for the benefit of all of us.

[Random832]

I've invented the following new prefixes:
debibyte: 10.08 bytes ("deka binary")
hebibyte: 101.59 bytes ("hecto binary")
mybibyte: 10321.27 byte ("myria binary") [myria used to be an official metric prefix]

[416365416c]

I happen to have implemented the XKCD standard for file size units in KDE (http://pastebin.ca/1482983). Thought I'd share the patch here, for those of you who are tired of the IEC standard KDE currently uses. And it's only a -7.7i KiB patch. (For best results, apply to KDE 4.3 or 4.4.)

[Quan]

I happen to have implemented the XKCD standard for file size units in KDE (http://pastebin.ca/1482983). Thought I'd share the patch here, for those of you who are tired of the IEC standard KDE currently uses. And it's only a -7.7i KiB patch. (For best results, apply to KDE 4.3 or 4.4.)

Is that Correct? Wouldn't it be iB not B?

Though it looks like you do have the correct formatting, e.g: 32 KB = -i32 KiB

[bfeist]

Wouldn't it make more sense to have the Kelly-Bootle compromise be a weighted average, since leap years are only about 1/4 of years? Approximately (3*1024 + 1000)/4 = 1018 bytes.