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A kilobyte is 1024 bytes. Yes, I know "kilo" means 1000 - I don't care since it's obvious from context.
Back in the day, using base-10 prefixes for base-2 stuff was considered fine. 1024 is close enough to 1000, after all. It only changed when some dickhead realised that, by insisting that a kilobyte (and the bigger units) was 1000 bytes, they could sell you less hard drive space without lowering the number on the box.
If you don't believe me, look at your RAM. Nobody's ever sold RAM by the "gibibyte".
Keep spreading the good word, brother. Amen.
ty this always struck me as odd but yeah that makes prefect sense now that I see it written that way. Obviously it's a marketing thing. Obviously!
Numerical marketing is nonsense all around.
Video, which was always counted by vertical resolution (lines on analog TV), suddenly became horizontal with 4K, 8K, and it's not even close, 4K usually referring to 3840x2160.
There are three entirely different things that "5G" can refer to: the mobile network standard, 5GHz WiFi standard, or 5Gbps network connection.
If you want to be upset, look at internet speeds, they sell you mbps (megabits per second), but the standard measurement is mbps (megabytes per second), so they sell you a number 8 times bigger than the one you get.
You've actually got that a bit twisted. Not saying the bigger number doesn't benifit the ISPs, but it actually is the industry standard to use bits per second when measuring throughput. This is because data transfer is a continuous stream, whereas data at rest is chunked so when talking about storage we use bytes. It's a bit weird but you get used to it.
thanks for the answer, it would be nice if we just used a single unit, and it is annoying that both are mbps.
Ah, I see the confusion, and it's understandable. Look for if the "B" is capitalized or not.
Mb, Gb, etc = bits
MB, GB, etc = bytes
Think the larger letter is the larger size.
yhea, once you know you know, like the difference between pyrex and PYREX.
however, is still bullshit and designed to confuse people.
See that's where I think you're still missing it. These are technical terms used by technical people. They were not designed to confuse people, they were designed to clarify the units IT people use in their work.
You might say this is confusing to the general public, and you may be right, but the people making this stuff weren't thinking about average people at all. The idea these numbers would be plastered all over ISPs and SSDs weren't even a consideration.
So it's not bullshit, it's not designed to confuse, it's just a technical unit that is not well understood by most people, yet we live in a time when tech-specs are marketed by companies to average people.
i think we both agree but differently.
my point is that if a unit is used for public facing specs. it shouldn't be confusing. doing so is confusing. experts in their field area one thing, but we can't expect the general public to know mbps and MBps are different things.
I see what you mean, but what do you propose? The units already exist and they are the industry standard. Should new units of measure be made up just for consumers, or should all numbers but on consumer devices be locked to using only one of them? Who decides what's consumer packaging and what's not?
It's a sticky situation. I think while it may be confusing, the vast majority of people aren't paying much attention and it's probably not a big enough deal to do anything about it. The units are most often used correctly as in I can't imagine an ISP or a router advertising their speeds in Bytes, likewise I don't see any RAM or storage advertised in bits, so it's usually an apples to apples comparison anyway.
just to change the convention, and as a rule of thumb, not have units that are spelled the same. so maybe the most common expected one by the public should remind mbps, and the other one should be spelled out "mbytes/second" at least in public facing specs, if it is an academic or technical paper that is fine.
Same way we avoid homophonics in a sentence otherwise we end up with Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
I don't think you can say there is a "most common" unit for the general public. People probably shop for storage more than they do service providers, so I guess MB?
However I don't think spelling it makes it any easier. If people aren't noticing a capital B or a lowercase b, will they notice or understand bytes vs bits when spelled?
I think it's a case of it just kinda sucks we have similar sounding and spelled words, but the general public is not getting too caught up on it because they're largely oblivious. So long as manufacturers and sales use the appropriate term on the appropriate product, everything should work out. I've never seen a hard drive marketed in bit capacity, so I think this is really a non issue.
Just chalk it up to something you now understand better.
Right, and it's sort of a historical quirk, as well. You always need to compare your speed to what came before. That logic stretches back to computers that did not use 8 bits per byte, but still communicated over various channels to other computers.
And then there's just plain marketing. Not just that it makes the number 8 times higher, but that any one ISP that chose to advertise in MBps rather than Mbps would suddenly look like they're slower. It needs to be mandated for everyone as a regulatory rule or it just won't work at all.
That ones actually fine IMO because they advertise Mbps which is fairly clearly different from MBps (b vs B, bit vs byte), and very easy to convert between.
yhea, we can assume that the vast majority of the public don't know the difference