1kb _is_ 1000 bytes

Uhh, no…. 1KB is 1024 bytes in the real world

The vaunted metric system (or SI) says kilo is 1000. there’s no getting around it. Use kibibytes if you want to split hairs.

It’s the difference between kilobytes and kibibytes. It sucks, it industry shit, but – its correct.

lol macs

OSX isn’t the first. Ubuntu has used 1000-byte naming for a while too, my Seagate 1.5tb shows up as 1500gb in linux and 1.36tb in windows.

Sorry, bull.

To quote: “when laymen hear the root “kilo” they think 1000″

That’s because that’s CORRECT. The Metric prefixes are base-10 prefixes. Period. Computer Science used these prefixes because they were close enough, when we first started using them. Error didn’t accumulate that fast when you were talking about 80 meg hard drives. However, the gigabyte/terabyte/petabyte age is here, and those discrepencies are HUGE. Metric prefixes just don’t work to approximate these higher powers of 2.

However, saying that 1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes is, in point of fact, incorrect. The metric prefix “mega” means 1000. The correct term is kibibyte – KiB. 1 KiB = 1024 bytes. The fault here is not on Apple – they’re simply calculating a kilobyte as it SHOULD be calculated. The fault lies with the computer science folks for using metric prefixes incorrectly for so long.

As for the argument that the meaning of the prefixes has changed and we should keep the status quo – what if ever field did that? What if you had to remember that 1 kilogram was really 1001 grams or 1 micromole was really .000000101? Start using metric prefixes incorrectly and you set a dangerous precedent. Why should a computer be special? Why should 1 kilobyte be 1024 bytes, but one kilo-anything-else be 1000?

So good for Apple – call things what they ARE. Use standards (and that’s exactly what they are) correctly. Use KB for 1000 bytes, and KiB for 1024. (you can control-click to get file info if you REALLY want to, just like a Windows box that tells “space on disk”)

Now, are they doing this to sell “larger capacity hard drives?” Nope. Go to ANY website that sells hard drives and look at the calculation for GB. Go ahead, I’ll wait. See where it says “1 GB = 1000000 bytes”? Hard drive manufacturers have been doing this for a LONG time now. This is SOP in hard-drive land. All this update in Snow Leopard means is that when you buy a 500 gig drive, it’ll show up in Finder as 500 gigs (OK, a little less because of formatting, but you get the picture). This in no way affects ONLY Apple HDDs – ANY hard drive will be counted in base 10. How is that a competitive advantage to their hardware sales? The only think that will happen is the “actual formatted capacity may vary” footnote will refer to the fact that the disk formatting takes some space, not the fact that disks are sold in base 10 sizes then treated in the computer as base 2.

Also, what’s up with this “Real Math” crap? What is that, other than FUD? Yes, computers operate in base 2. So? That doesn’t mean all other bases are incorrect. I guess, since base 2 is the REAL math, I’ll have to go tell all the mathematicians in the world that their work is irrelevant.

To sum up:
“the term kilobyte was adopted to represent 2 to the 10th power bytes”
This was a bad move, ignored what “kilo” meant, and should never have been done.

“doesn’t Apple have a lot to gain if all the storage-containing-hardware they sell sounds bigger than it actually is?”
HDD manufacturers already do this, as stated earlier in the summary. This point is irrelavent.

“(base 2, aka real math) … (base 10, aka fake math)”
WTF?

This article is FUD, plain and simple.

Just thought I’d wade in and say kb is not a thousand bytes, its actually a thousand bits. Sadly we are reduced to using the KiB for our real measurement and let the hard drive manufacturers have the kB for a thousand bytes.
Remember:
kb = 1000 bits
kB = 1000 bytes = 8000 bits
Kib = 1024 bits
KiB = 1024 bytes = 8192 bits
And so on multiplying by 1024 for the Mebi, Gibi, etc and a 1000 for the mega, giga, etc.

Fake math is trying to use the term Kilo to represent 1024. Real math is using 1000 for kilo as that is how it is defined. Just because the computer uses base 2 does not change that.

And lets face the facts, when the numbers get so large, we all round them anyway, then look at the left 1,2 or 3 numbers and add the word megs, or Gigs, or Terabytes, or Petabytes, etc. etc. Do you really think people are going to divide it all up using base 2 to come up with some obscure number?

Kilo means 1000. It always has.

Both arguments have merit, but either way the units really to be disambiguated. OP has a point though, if not for lobbying by drive manufacturers and resellers who benefit from the confusion, we’d probably have just changed the binary unit to KiB and been done with it.

Who cares how an OS reports drive size? a 500GB drive is still only going to hold 476GB of real data, so regardless of how you report it to a user, the storage size is still the actual size. No Macs do not magically add 24GB to a drive, so either each file will now have a larger computed size (and people will think Macs are bad at storing files to disk by comparison to other OSes showing true bit size) or their 500GB drive will still be full with 476GB of real data meaning the drive is still only capable of holding 476GB of actual data regardless. I don’t care how it’s calculated, just try to come up with an industry wide standard that everyone uses. Don’t play numbers games to sell stuff.

im just writing on my Apparent 80GB external drive 74.6GB :P

took along time for this stupidity to be corrected but i knew apple would be the ones to do it if it did (which it has) YAY!

http://xkcd.com/394/

@john

Valid point – file sizes during things like FTP transfers and such would be confusing – how big was the file? It looks smaller… did it upload? that kind of thing.

Although I don’t thing applications will be affected much – all the FTP apps I use calculate filesize by looking at the # of bits in a file and doing base 2 math. I don’t think this behavior has changed (can’t say yet, my copy of Snow Leopard doesn’t ship till tomorrow). To applications and such, x bits is x bits.

The only real problem I can see is if there’s very little HDD space left and you want to download a 2 gig file, and it turns out it’s MORE than 2 gigs (assuming the server works filesizes in base 2) and won’t fit. Seems like a rare thing to me, though, and I’d gladly make that tradeoff to kill the 1 KB = 1024 B issue.

I can’t fault Apple as long as it stays consistent. According to SI, the prefix kilo denotes 10^3 so if they use that definition, they’re not in the wrong. However, I would have much preferred KiB, MiB, etc. since the actual number of bits on the drive is calculated and defined in base 2 so the resulting figure is more accurate to the numerical value it is purported to represent. It also cuts down on binary confusion when used alongside things like bitrate, which are base 10 by default.

What I mean to say is that, though their definition isn’t wrong (as in actually being a kilobyte), it is slightly ill-fitting since that term in itself is the result of poor historical precedence.

What does this Apple advertisement have to do with hacking?

Ok, I’m going to set aside the 1000 vs 1024 argument for a moment and ask: Why the hell are people bringing up “size on disk”? It has nothing to do with this. The size on disk value is the amount of physical bits it takes up on the drive, given the filesystem and the way the file is stored.
For example, the file may be extremely fragmented, and since each fragment needs to be located when reading it, there is extra data for the OS to find the next fragment — this would give the file a larger “size on disk” than the actual contents of the file. Think of a “linked list” if you’re familiar. Similarly, extremely small files (less than the allocation unit size of the filesystem) will show up as the allocation unit size, since that is the smallest chunk of data the fs can allocate.

@dans: lol, tnx a lot for the xkcd. Good one.

Since we have two committed and opposing sides, I propose a vote.

a: A kb = a kilobyte = 1024 bytes.
b: A kb = 1000 bytes.

As someone educated in computer science, I vote a. A kb is 1024 bytes. This convention trumps the (admittedly standard and well-reasoned) arguement that a kiloanything is a thousand of ‘em.

Oh and yea imperial system is SOOOO confusing for the rest of the world….15.4” monitor..how big is that?… 03/04/2009? Is the guy from USA..maybe it is March not April…

It is so stupid how we can not agree on some very simple things in the beginning before they become BIG!!…standards save money, time and headache..lot of it.

1 kilo = 1000
1 kB = 1000 B
1 kiB = 1024 B

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/kibibyte
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ieee_1541

It’s not Apples fault you all use it wrong!

The real problem is that nobody can agree on ONE standard unit for this mess… so we have a 1000 bytes to a kB in storage selling/reporting in some OSes, but what is a kB when the software writers tell you it will take this much space to install a program? Yeah, this is going to be messy in so many ways.

So are we going to just have 478 gb drives now? As long as we pick with one and stay with it.

1.024 kb = 1024 bytes

No-one has mentioned the real problem with kibibyte et al. They sound *really* stupid. They will never catch on with anyone but pedants because no-one wants to say or hear them. It just makes people cringe.

I hereby propose that we create new binary prefixes that don’t sound so stupid. Hackaday, you should clearly run a contest.

Here’s my entry:

1024: k2B, pronounced kilo2-byte
1024^2: M2B, pronounced mega2-byte
etc.

It hurts to see that not even on a site that is made for geeks people know about SI perfixes.
k = kilo = 10^3 just because it was done wrong in the past means that it is wrong to correct the mistakes know. The IEEE/ISO standard for KiB is quite old already. Nevertheless, peoople are still stupid – I have seen papers written by computer scientists that confuse the two…

At least, users will stop speaking about “formatted disk size”, which is absolute nonsense. Formatting a 500gb drive never took away 24gb, that’s ridiculous : at most a few 100′s mb for directory structure and all that stuff.

Displaying the “real” disk size will help debunking the formatted capacity myth.

In regular windows pc terms a kilobyte is 1024 bytes and a gigabyte is 1024 megabytes PERIOD!

Problem… 500,000,000 is 500 mega whatevers, not giga whatevers
5,000,000,000 is giga whatevers…

@delicious bacon

But 2^10 != 10^3. As a computer science graduate, you should know that everyone is wrong. What we call a kilobyte (2^10) isn’t a kilo (10^3) byte. It was carelessly named, and, IMO, Apple took the wrong technical stance to take the right semantic stance. We know that 2^10 is the number that matters, so to me at least, it would have made more sense to change the language than change the numerical value of the operative unit to that of one less apt. But such is Apple’s way. Binary be damned.

Here’s another thing to consider even outside of apple and HD’s: Why byte? we moved away from 8 bit computing so damn long ago, why not words or longwords? Even the cheapest low spec CPU you can get now is at least 16 bit right?
And RAM isn’t addressed in bytes or accessed in bytes and the data on HD’s isn’t written in bytes either, it’s always at least words, and mostly at least 32bit longwords.

Ok, I’m not getting involved in the argument over what math is correct.

Apple has removed a source of confusion for users. Does anyone care if their picture is 1.23MB or 1.25? No. But if they buy an 80GB hard drive and it shows up as 73.8GB, then they are confused. So, since hard drive manufacturers have refused to go to base 2 math, Apple has simplified it from their end. Result: files report slightly larger sizes, but when you plug in a 500GB hard drive, you see 500GB, not some smaller number. End user does not care about slightly larger files, just that their drive reports the same size as what they thought they were getting.

Yea, and when Gmail or Hotmail or whatever says ‘your attachment is too big, the max size is 20MB’, the mac users will be sitting there going ‘But it’s only 19.9! There must be a bug in [mail client]! Fix it!’

But hey, what can you expect. I guess they’re just like Microsoft – they do things their way, who cares about the users or the standards.

@wwhat – what? Most low-end microcontrollers (take the oh-so-popular Arudino for example, using the AVR micro) are 8bit. Also, 8bits is a byte. Period. Using anything else would be confusing, also addressing *IS* still done bytewise, man.. Yes, even on 32 and 64bit machines. Hence why 32bit machines can only directly address 4 gigabytes of memory (as in 4,294,967,296 bytes, as in 2^32, hence 32 bits).
Hard drives, too.
The strict definition of “word” is generally architecture-specific, too. Maybe there’s some strict definition floating around somewhere, but I’ve certainly seen varying size “words” out there.

>Hey, it could be worse. Vista 32-bit
>was changed so that it reports that
>you have 4GB of RAM if you install it

Because it’s reporting what the roms on the modules tell it.

> – but you can only use 3GB of it,
> possibly less. How’s that?

Because without bank switching, paging etc you can’t address more than 4GB of “memory” with 32bits worth of address. That’s not to say a “32bit” processor couldn’t have a bigger/smaller address bus, but that’s a different story. Lots of older amd64 machines have memory controllers that are only able to address 4GB of “memory” too.

So why can you only access 3GB or less.. notice that i put speech marks around “memory”, your address space contains lots of memory mapped things as well, like your expansion buses. So basically the total accessible memory is going to be 4GB – address space allocated to memory mapped peripherals. Not that any of this matters on 32bit windows though, because of the wonky memory setup for processes you’d be lucky if a single process can use more than 1.5GB of actual RAM.

@eric
>Also, 8bits is a byte. Period.

A byte is generally 8 bits. But not “Period”.. some places a byte isn’t 8 bits.

>Hence why 32bit machines can only
>directly address 4 gigabytes of
>memory (as in 4,294,967,296 bytes,
>as in 2^32, hence 32 bits).

Lots of people confuse what makes an architecture n bit. I.e. the Z80 is 8 bit… but it has 16bit addressing, so by a lot of people’s misunderstanding that addressing ability == bit’age, that would make it 16bit and most current amd64 machines 48bit.

>The strict definition of “word”
>is generally architecture-specific,

Yes, less common but bytes are the same.

>Maybe there’s some strict definition
>floating around somewhere

Word sizes are confusing because they can be sensible, the unit size the machine likes to work with, or based on what the machine has developed from.

basically, assumption is the mother of all fook ups, read your manuals.

@cantido
> Lots of people confuse what makes an architecture
> n bit. I.e. the Z80 is 8 bit… but it has 16bit
> addressing, so by a lot of people’s
> misunderstanding that addressing ability ==
> bit’age, that would make it 16bit and most
> current amd64 machines 48bit.

Absolutely right, sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that an n-bit CPU necessarily has n-bit addressing :)
I haven’t seen any alternate definitions for byte, but it wouldn’t surprise me if 8bits isn’t *always* the case!
And I agree wholeheartedly: always always always rtfm. When your code doesn’t work on the fancy new mega ultra hyper micro, it’s probably because you missed something in the datasheet (that or, in the worst of cases, the manufacturer neglected to MENTION it in the datasheet.. I hate when that happens).
Reminds me of this time with the at90usb1286, Ateml conveniently mistyped the register settings for the clock prescaler, and my code just _would_not_ run and it took me at least a month to figure out it was the prescaler.. even then it was only when I found someone else’s code containing the correct register definitions that I realized my error!

if we are just going to correct a historical error can someone quickly rewrite all these textbooks

yes, electrons are negatively charged and thus, the current goes from minus to plus

how many billions of student do we like to confuse with the differences between electrical and physical current direction ?

Yes, the way Apple is doing it with Snow Leopard is technically correct. However, I’d like to see them include a toggle so that if we liked measuring things in base 2 we could still do that.

for goodness’ sake…

we all know that technically the terms we use to describe our base 2 units are base 10 descriptors, but we all also know that these base 10 terms such as kb, mb, gb, tb, etc., have been used since the 1960′s to indicate multiples of 1024, probably because these terms were already in our language and easier for people to grasp. yes it’s technically incorrect, but it’s accepted, common practice. there are plenty of misused terms in our language, but we let it slide because we all know what we mean.

if only the powers that be had had the foresight to start out using the proper terms (mib, gib, etc.) from day one this would never have been an issue, but they didn’t so here we are.
it’s far too late to be introducing ‘new’ terms for tens of millions of computer users to get used to (i.e. mib, gib, etc.), and it’s also far too late to decide to change/correct the value of the universally used terms, mb, gb, etc.

imagine telling the world, “hey guys, you know the unit of measurement we call the ‘foot’ is made up of 12 inches? well actually it isn’t, it’s 10. all that time ago, when we told you that 1 foot = 12 inches, err, well, we lied. 1 ‘foote’ is 12 inches; 1 ‘foot’ is actually only 10 inches, so now you’re all going to have to get used to the 10 inch foot… so when you order curtains or timber or clothes or windows (anything!) it will still be measured, constructed and labelled using the 12 inch ‘foot’, but when you get it home you’ll most likely find that none of it fits because you measured up using the new improved 10″ foot. ok?” err… wtf? no!!
[sorry, i know it's not the best analogy in the world, but hopefully it conveys my point]

anyway, as we’ve all agreed to ignore the misrepresentation of mibibytes as megabytes, etc., for the last 40-odd years, let’s just carry on shall we, and get the blasted storage device manufacturers to conform to the way it’s been since modern computing began so we can have some consistency back in our wonderfully binary lives!

to illustrate why this won’t work and how it will confuse people: if i download a 200mb file, i expect my os to report that it is taking up 200mb of my storage medium, but snow leopard will tell me that it’s about 204.8mb. not confusing?

similarly, when i upload a 200mb file that i’ve created to, say, rapidshare, i want it to arrive on their servers and see a 200mb file sitting in my account, but of course a ’200mb’ file created in snow leopard will only be a 195.xmb file on the server so i’ll think the upload broke and try again, with exactly the same confusing result.

in snow leopard, every file i ever upload will appear online to be smaller than it appeared on my computer.
have apple lost the plot?!!

I suppose the implied question becomes:
“is ram measured in base 2 or base 10?”

What’s with this site not allowing capital letters? It makes me look like a lazy school kid :-/

Everything you say is true, Stuee, but you miss the point. *Apple* are doing this, so it’s automatically awesome. The entire rest of the industry just have to step into line.

Read up on your math…

Since 2004, 1kB = 1000 bytes according to the IEEE (SI Units).

I don’t like it either, but this is the way it is. Now just wait until they invalidate non-metric units like Inch and Foot… :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobyte

@moontear: Yeah we actually should dump the non-metric system and we also should dump Fahrenheit and Celcius and adopt Kelvin instead.

I hate having to convert every °F into K or °C.

Just switch everything to the SI systems. Much easier.

Kilogram however is very hard to standardize because gravity isn’t equal across the entire earth. Slugs perhaps?

In computer world KB comes from the JEDEC memory standards and means 1024 B.
Apple has decided to go SI and convince us that that damn 1GB RAM module is 1000 MB, but it’s not!

stupid site cant edit shit lol. theres supposed to be an extra 2 zeros on that 500,000,000,000 which then makes it right.

@Will, you wrote “Base 10 is fake math? Count your fingers or toes and get back to me.”

This emphasises the problem. I have 8 fingers and 2 thumbs. If you have 10 fingers then you my friend, are a freak.

Much like people say they have 10 fingers when they have 8 fingers, people say kilobyte to mean 1024 bytes when kilo-anything-else means 1000.

Well this has been a hotly contested article, for sure.

The argument seems to be the canonical definition of Kilobyte for computer types vs. the literal definition for everyone else.

I can understand why a software developer–especially one targeting the “it just works” crowd–would like make a decision like this and go with the representation that is more generally understood. I have certainly seen files that are just over 1000 bytes before show up as over 1000 bytes instead of a 1kB, and I can understand how that may be confusing.

Why not change the labels to kiB? Perhaps it is just that base ten makes sense to most people–and we as computer types are more likely to understand the change than the rest of the population.

On the other hand, I do not see many non-computer types checking file sizes very frequently; aside from the occasional look at the iPod, I doubt there is more survey of disk space than a simple “Is it full?”.

I am curious however: Will itunes report a base 10 value now? Has Apple changed to base 10 on all products?

@motoma – no, it is only in the finder that apple have chosen to make this change. All other applications such as itunes, terminal, etc., still report in base 2 making this even more confusing to the average joe.

If you’ll indulge me, i’d love to hear some responses to the last part of my previous post, which points out how this will affect people’s real world experience on a day to day basis:

“if i download a 200mb file, i expect my os to report that it is taking up 200mb of my storage medium, but snow leopard will tell me that it’s about 204.8mb. not confusing?

similarly, when i upload a 200mb file that i’ve created to, say, rapidshare, i want it to arrive on their servers and see a 200mb file sitting in my account, but of course a ‘200mb’ file created in snow leopard will only be a 195.?mb file on the server so i’ll think the upload broke and try again, with exactly the same confusing result.

so in snow leopard, every file i ever upload will appear, online, to be smaller than it appeared on my computer.”

Wait that’s 10 bit’s. WTF?
Shows how much I know.

I’m stupid I guess…

I mean two-hundredfiftyseven.
I forgot the last bit. Okay, I shouldn’t post any comments in the morning anymore.