Comment by Flimm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Flimm | Hacker News Reader

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1000^n is used by:

- hard drive and storage manufacturers

- measurements of network speeds (1Mbps is 1000000 bits per second)

- online storage providers (Dropbox's paid plan for 2TB is 2000GB for instance)

- macOS and iOS

- Ubuntu (see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnitsPolicy )

- most modern GNOME applications and most GUI applications on desktop Linux

- hard drive manufacturers have been sued over this, and US courts have agreed with hard drive manufacturers that 1 GB = 1000 MB

- the International System of Units (SI) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) both use the decimal definitions (1 kB = 1000 B)

The last major hold-outs are Microsoft Windows and old command-line applications that want to preserve backwards compatibility with any script that might parse their output.

Personally, I don't find the XiB units confusing, as they are the only units with a consistent unambiguous definition. The XB units are much more confusing because you can't be sure whether the 1000^n definition is intended or not.

The thing is, that’s all relatively recent in computing terms. For the vast majority of computing history it’s been 1024^n because that’s how the hardware works — you can’t have 1000^n in a binary system where bytes are multiples of 8. All the 1000^n values you get are where the raw value in bytes is taken and then divided by powers of 1000 but that leads to values that are technically not accurate (eg values that are not addressable).

And here lies the problem, before HDD manufacturers decided to change things up, computer science was already standardised on using 1024^n. Sure there was some outliers in network theory but it was pretty easy because if you needed a precise value then you knew it was 1024^n and if you just wanted an approximate value you could still divide by 1000 in your head. It worked, everyone understood it and everyone was happy.

This whole “1000^n is more human friendly” only appears so because we now have multiple interpretations and people without a tech background making decisions about it. But frankly, if you can’t wrap your head around 1024^n then you’re already in the group of users who honestly don’t need to worry about the precision of getting the scaling right. Those who it does matter for honestly find 1024^n easier.

It went downhill as early as 1.44MB floppies being 1440*1024.

> And here lies the problem, before HDD manufacturers decided to change things up, computer science was already standardised on using 1024^n.

And long before that, the SI units defined K as 10^3, G as 10^6 etc.. This is how the prefix is used everywhere for every unit, with the one exception of computer scientist playing it the US way.

I personally prefer 1024 as well, but honestly, the scientific side of that argument is a lost cause.

The failure was the initial use of K=1024. Anyone should had invented KiB early.

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