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Comment by voldacar | Hacker News Reader

Can we just stop measuring data in bits? Stop making me constantly multiply or divide by 8 in my head for no reason

It's a 200tb disk

At least historically, the definition of "byte" has been "the smallest addressable unit" which on most of today's machines is 8 bits, but not all (I believe the SHARC floating point DSPs are still 32-bit bytes, and there are probably more). Using bits for things makes sense from this perspective as the number of bytes would depend on which processor it is connected to.

I know that these days people consider that a byte is 8 bits by definition, but I think that probably isn't a great linguistic move (we already have a word for that - octet)

"By eight" isn't a bad term for 8 things either. Linguistically speaking, it's often abbreviated to "byte".

History doesn't matter, the linguistic move happened long ago and you're too late to lodge complaints.

At the level they're describing things there's a continuous stream of bits with no boundaries. This is not RAM.

Some of those bits will be used to separate logical "sectors" (which will be larger than your octets), some for error correction...

I wouldn't be surprised if the capacity in units that don't hurt your head will end up more like 120 terabytes, not 200.

Terra = Capital-T

Bytes = Capital-B

200TB not 200tb

Tera

:-)

Bytes are machine-specific though. We've (mostly) settled on 8-bit bytes for a while, but there's no guarantee that this will remain the case in the future.

It will.

Perhaps - convention is a powerful thing. I am very confident that any future byte would be a power of two, but I'm not sure that 8 will remain ascendant. A 32-bit byte might be practical - even english language text is commonly no longer composed of 8-bit characters, so why bother with 8-bit addressing, especially when the majority of the world needs more than 8 bits per character? Memory is cheap, and a little bit of "wasted" space could reduce errors and simplify text handling.

> ... and simplify text handling

That ship has largely sailed. UTF-8/UTF-16 will be around for a long time to come. It's encoded into data that is archived. It's built into practically everything we use today. It's reasonably space/transmission efficient. It's standardized across many locales. Of course, you can use all the bytes in memory that you want to. Some languages even do!

My mind was blown when I found out that there are invalid utf-8 sequences. I was then impressed to find out that some exploits started out on this premise against software that didn't understand/protect against this. What a mess indeed.

You shouldn't use exclusively bytes. Use both, or just bits.

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