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Comment by cornonthecobra | Hacker News Reader

The meaning of kilo, mega, giga, tera, etc. are unambiguous: SI prefixes defined as powers of 10, not 2. 1 TB is 10*12 bytes, not 2*40 bytes.

The misuse of those prefixes as powers of 1024, while useful as shorthand for computer memory where binary addressing means, is still exactly that: a misuse of SI prefixes.

There's now a separate set of base-2 prefixes to solve this, and people need to update their language accordingly.

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Just because an official body gives a single definition doesn't mean it's unambiguous. Real communication isn't bound by official bodies. When I say my computer has 16GB of RAM, that does not mean exactly 16 billion bytes.

I need to update my language accordingly? No thanks. I'll keep saying what I say and nothing will happen.

Real communication isn't bound by official bodies, but it also doesn't work by everyone "just saying what they say" and hoping for the best...

Right, it works by a bunch of different people all using the words in the same way to communicate. Like, say, various SI prefixes being used to mean powers of two in computing contexts by large numbers of people for longer than most of us have been alive.

The use of kilo for 1024 in computers precedes the formalization of kilo as an SI prefix. SI should have used a different prefix instead /s

Kilo (chili-/chilo-/*kʰehliyoi) is an Ancient Greek/Proto-Hellenic word literally translated as "one thousand". The word can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European, which means it's as old as any language we're aware of, though Proto-Hellenic is when the meaning was fixed to 1000.

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