this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
367 points (93.6% liked)

Programmer Humor

32718 readers
380 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (2 children)

On the contrary.

KB = 1,000 bytes and MB = 1,000,000 is empirical.

KiB = 1024 bytes or 2^10^ and MiB = 1,048,576 or 2^20^ is Metric.

Remember, empirical is the miserable system the rest of the world abandoned because it made math and science difficult. KB makes storage miserable, never being clear whether your have the exact space your box claims it does. Please continue to Free^TM^ yourself from British "nonsense", while the rest of the world evolves.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Empirical means based on data. The word you are looking for is imperial.

Also, metric measurements are in base 10, so you have it backwards.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

man's actually taking the piss at OP's use of "empirical" instead of "imperial"

also, i doubt that measurements of data can be imperial or metric; even Bytes themselves are just measurements of 8 bits.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Hmmm... There are as many ounces in a cup as there are bits in a byte.
Maybe the first byte fit in a cup.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago

It's all in good fun. No need to spoil the joke.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Where did you get this from? Yeah KiB means 1024 and KB is 1000 but that's not a difference between metric and imperial, judging from the Wikipedia article it seems it was just a matter of using 1024 for technical purposes and 1000 for marketing / simplicity. If anything the article says the metric systems(SI) rule of kilo meaning 1000 means KB is metric.

If anything this shows some of the weakness of metric and it's use of base 10. Yeah it works great in science and some math when we're usually talking in base 10, but that's not the only base you can use. In base 2 some of the imperial measurements are easier to deal with and convert between then metric for example

1 liter = 1111101000 ml 1 gallon = 10000000 fl oz

1 kg = 1111101000 g 1 pound = 10000 oz

The reverse of the above metric conversions, and all base 10 negative exponents, is a repeating number in binary which has to be truncated and leads to inaccurate calculations.

Systems of measure are arbitrary, there's no superior logical one because different systems of measure work better in different systems of math.