Random Thoughts Thread

[Ziggy]

And to make people even more confused between bits and bytes, they came up with new names. Say you have 1,000 bytes. Well, that's 1 KB, right? But generally people refer to 1,024 bytes and a kilobyte or KB. Nope, that's a kebibyte or KiB. Then you have a Mebibyte, MiB, and so on. Same for bits, Mebibit which would be Mibit and so on.

[MrPopo]

And to make people even more confused between bits and bytes, they came up with new names. Say you have 1,000 bytes. Well, that's 1 KB, right? But generally people refer to 1,024 bytes and a kilobyte or KB. Nope, that's a kebibyte or KiB. Then you have a Mebibyte, MiB, and so on. Same for bits, Mebibit which would be Mibit and so on.

The KiB thing was invented because HDD manufacturers used metric measurements and everyone else used sane base 2 measurements and people kept wondering where the rest of their storage space was. So now there is an unambiguous unit that no one uses except in contracts and pricing guides to be clear exactly how much you get so no one sues.

[Ziggy]

You'd be surprised, I see a lot of people on tech forums using it. So now I find myself sometimes using it.

[marurun]

Well, technically the kilo and mega prefixes didn’t quite match base 2. So in trying to cheap out, the HD manufacturers did give pedants an in.

[RCBH928]

And to make people even more confused between bits and bytes, they came up with new names. Say you have 1,000 bytes. Well, that's 1 KB, right? But generally people refer to 1,024 bytes and a kilobyte or KB. Nope, that's a kebibyte or KiB. Then you have a Mebibyte, MiB, and so on. Same for bits, Mebibit which would be Mibit and so on.

For the sake of convenience and ease of calculation, I will accept that 0.024% difference in size as a margin of error.

But this brings me to the topic that marketers are the real master conmen. They label things in a way that they are technically right and not lying, but in the end it deceives the consumer. This is very prevalent when package food is labeled "Made from NATURAL..." , all people focus on the word "natural" no one focuses on the "made from" part.

The other one I like is "UNLIMITED internet bandwidth".... at 256kpbs.

[Ziggy]

This is very prevalent when package food is labeled "Made from NATURAL..." , all people focus on the word "natural" no one focuses on the "made from" part.

ENRICHED wheat flour!

[Ziggy]

So today is Friday the 13th and it's a full moon tonight!

[MrPopo]

And to make people even more confused between bits and bytes, they came up with new names. Say you have 1,000 bytes. Well, that's 1 KB, right? But generally people refer to 1,024 bytes and a kilobyte or KB. Nope, that's a kebibyte or KiB. Then you have a Mebibyte, MiB, and so on. Same for bits, Mebibit which would be Mibit and so on.

For the sake of convenience and ease of calculation, I will accept that 0.024% difference in size as a margin of error.

The margin of error isn't bad until you're at the gig level and above; that's the point where the two different prefixes started being pushed.

[RCBH928]

Any one has one of those "notch" phones? How annoying is it to watch videos with part of the video obscured/chipped off?

And to make people even more confused between bits and bytes, they came up with new names. Say you have 1,000 bytes. Well, that's 1 KB, right? But generally people refer to 1,024 bytes and a kilobyte or KB. Nope, that's a kebibyte or KiB. Then you have a Mebibyte, MiB, and so on. Same for bits, Mebibit which would be Mibit and so on.

For the sake of convenience and ease of calculation, I will accept that 0.024% difference in size as a margin of error.

The margin of error isn't bad until you're at the gig level and above; that's the point where the two different prefixes started being pushed.

You are right, I agree

[marurun]

And let's be honest. People are still very confused about the difference between bits and bytes. Those 8 megabit cartridges? 1 megabyte. The first 8 megabit cartridge? Ghouls and Ghosts on SuperGrafx (I think), in 1990. Floppies of the time could already easily hold that much data. There were still some Apple II clones in the market, but the standard memory allotment for them was 128k (1 megabit), but PC clones and the Amiga were a much bigger deal. The first Soundblaster came out in 1988 and 1989 was the debut of the 486, so it's probably safe to say that most computers that were new or only a year old were shipping with 1 megabyte of memory, or the size of a rare 8 megabit cartridge.