this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
147 points (69.6% liked)
Technology
59381 readers
2582 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Thank you for the feedback. I know that only the "first" part is the prefix and I tried to be careful to not use it wrong. I just checked all 53 instances of "prefix" and I don't see a wrong one, but to be fair there are situations that could be misunderstood easily like here:
But with prefix I only meant the "M" and "Mi" part and they are both prefixes.
I'll try to clarify that later so the difference is clear to all readers. Thank you.
Ok, I understand what you are trying to do, but I that is not how I read it at the time. Prefix to me in this context means e.g., “kilo” in “kilobyte”, and not the “k” in “kB”. I am not sure it is helpful to split the unit symbol up like that.
In terms of language you are correct. But in terms of SI usage it seems to me OP is expressing it correctly. The SI unit prefixes have a name, a symbol and a multiplier. The prefix is a concept that encompasses all three of those attributes. So "kilo" is one way of identifying the 10^3 unit prefix, but the name kilo is not the prefix itself. It's just the name we use to refer to it. And the symbol k in km is certainly the unit prefix portion of that unit of measure.
But the first part is called prefix even in the standard itself. I wanted to make that distinction because it's not important what the base unit is. By speaking about prefixes instead of the unit as a whole I wanted to make it clear that you can (at least in theory) use any base unit. So everything I said about KiB and kB is also true for Kib and kb and even for kK (kilokelvin) and KiB (kibikelvin) 🤣
While we're nitpicking, the post says multiple times that SI prefix symbols are "all uppercase except for kilo (k)".
That's just factually wrong. More than half of them are lowercase! There's centi- (c), micro- (µ), nano- (n), etc. On the positive side there's even deca- (da) and hecto- (h), though they aren't particularly common or useful. I did at least see milli- (m) and bit (b) mentioned in a brief note though.
Obviously context matters and only the positive powers from kilo upward are relevant in computer science. But I studied chemistry and physics so I guess it irked me to see the statement repeatedly ignore all the negative powers of ten.
Overall, good rant though 😅 I'll be more careful to use KiB and MiB from here out when appropriate.
❤️ Thank you for taking the time to read it. And thank you so much for pointing that out, you are completely right and I totally didn't think about that while writing the article, probably because negative exponents are pretty rare in computer science (as in milli-bytes, etc.). I'll fix that in a few days. Thanks again for pointing that out.