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MiB = Men in Black

ah welcome to 'bibytes', the greatest scam the hard drive industry every got away with

Just write kilobyte because that's what people understand and abbreviate it using NIST's KiB binary convention. physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/bi...

One pound equals 20 shillings or 240 pence.

call it a bakers kilobyte and give the 1025th byte for free

It kinda depends on your scale. At megabytes, it doesn't matter. At terabytes, I'd go with powers of 10 - being 10% out from what your users assume is much messier, and that's before you get into formatted capacity confusion.

A Kb is a metric klb, right?

Using kB to mean 1024 bytes is a bit of a shibboleth nowadays, imo. Anyone geek enough to think in powers of two would also know SI prefixes.

Took me forever to learn byte-math and when I thought I finally got it; they changed it 😭 KiloBytes (KB) forever!

Whichever you think your software's typical user would expect, but KB (1000) will probably surprise the fewest regular people. If for some reason you need to express a 'true' KB, I think most people who would care about that would also know what KiB means. Maybe put it in tooltip or footnote etc.

Bare bytes with scientific E notation.

Raised knitting needles while at the same time keeping my teeth in ‼️

What do users need to do _next_ with the values they see? The best answer is via knowing what they actually do then give them what is most useful, surprises them the least, and is simplest. ("Make it configurable" is the classic solution for Qs like this this, but that adds complexity)

This genuinely made me throw up in my mouth a little, 10/10

sickos_yes.jpg

A thousand thank yous 😉

I always used 1024

Or give a range, “813 to 833 KB”.

Even though I know KB is 1000 and KiB is 1024, I like to call 1000 a "metric kilobyte" and 1024 a "freedom kilobyte"

Take the rounding errors of pennies and transfer them to a savings account.

I guess around nine-eleven the standards bodies changed kilo back to 1000 and invented kibibytes. I missed it because I was busy multiplying things by 1024 all day.

I didn't get that.

TBF I think the IT industry made a huge mistake adopting a naming convention (kilo and mega) for something different to the widely recognised and scientifically defined meanings of those terms Reverting to 1000 and 1000000 fixes that mistake IT should have created new terms for address boundaries

This is the correct answer, where “correct” means “more evidence we are on the wrong timeline.”

Use tibi nibbles.

For me it's always 1024. Whenever I set up a Linux machine and I'm on the gparted program, I always calculate KB as 1024 and MB as 1024x1024.

The people who don’t know what KiB is will also not care about the difference between 1024 and 1000 bytes.

If people don't understand what's the difference between KiB and KB, that's on them. You should stick to the official definition of these units, that's why we have standards.

I remember when people were trying to make <strike>fetch</strike> KiB and MiB happen. If 1024 or 1000 makes a diff, say so at the top of the page, I guess, but 999/1000 times it struck me as about as pointless as a debate about Daylight Saving Time. <*ducks, flees the premises*>

Everyone knows MiB is the Men in Black. Unless they hit you with the flashy thingy

K is 1024 or there’ll be hell to pay

My unreasonable convention that I don't think anybody else has ever agreed with or adopted is K=1024 and lower case k=1000.

Even if people figure out what KiB & MiB mean, they’ll soon forget.

The i in MiB stands for imperial

Use powers of two when your algorithm depends on it. Use powers of ten for everything else, including measurements of bulk data.

kibibytes: finally a delicious treat for kids AND pets!

The Windows Explorer used 1024. I usually solve this in my programs to always use KiB to avoid ambiguity

It all comes down to choose base 10 multiples (KB, MB, and so on, or base 2 multiples (KiB, MiB, and so on).

Claude made the test and found they are byte-identical :D

You're a real moron—SI stands for INTERNATIONAL System of Units.

If anybody says "kibibyte" to me I reflexively punch them straight in the nose. Then I apologize and thank them for clarifying. Then I punch them again.

Stick to base 10 (1,000 bytes) for consumer UI. Non-technical users expect SI units because that matches storage marketing and OS file managers now, while engineers who care about binary multiples will look for KiB anyway.

1 kB = 1,000 B; the lower case “k” is important, because in metric “k” is the kilo- prefix, while “K” is degrees Kelvin.