Google Math Bug? 1 MB in KB | Hacker News Reader

Google Math Bug? 1 MB in KB

google.com

8 pointsaleem6 comments

Not a bug: Google distinguishes between megabytes and mebibytes, and between kilobytes and kibibytes. See the difference between that and "1 MiB in KiB" [1]

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=1+MiB+in+KiB&cad=&oq=&gs_l=

Wow, I had no idea Kilobytes was redefined to 1024 bytes until I saw your response.

> The kibibyte was designed to replace the kilobyte in some computer science contexts, where kilobyte used to mean 1024 bytes [1]

I was aware of "kB vs kb" but Google doesn't differentiate between kb, kB and now as I have learnt, KiB.

Still, it's news to me, I missed the news of kilobyte being redefined to 1000.

  [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte

Google does, well sort of. It assumes all lowercase it in bytes

kb = Kilobyte Kb = Kilobit KB = Kilobyte

Also some other nice tricks:

100MB/s in GB/2 hours 5MB/s in Mb/s

Unfortunately around '99 "the powers that be" (NIST and IEC, if memory serves) decided to stop the confusion between SI units and (the usual) power-of-two usage.

Now it's Xebibytes for power-of-two and regular SI units for the rest.

It irks me no end, I'm a power-of-two person. But that's the way it is. (Also floppy disks had it wrong too 1024 * 1000 ... sigh)

You might as well argue the usage of Crackers vs Hackers.

Marketers had already for many years been leveraging the ambiguity to sell things in powers-of-1000 scale (SI uses of prefixes) knowing that much of the market would read them in the powers-of-1024 uses of the prefixes. While standardizing the marketing use as wrong might have been better in some senses, consistency with SI and providing a standard and unambiguous (if new and less familiar) set of prefixes for the useful powers-of-1024 scale was better the status quo at the time.

Yep Its kilo and kibi notation, nothing like a bug.

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