What exactly is a kilobyte? (or a Megabyte, or a Gigabyte)
There is a lot of confusion about this out there – some of it deliberate – as I said on the radio last week, but the usual definition is 2^10 bytes, which is 1,024 bytes. Here’s a cartoonist’s take on the whole thing – it’s funny.
Incidentally, by the definition above, a megabyte is 1,024*1,024 which is about 1.04 million, and a Gigabyte is 1,024 times bigger again at 1.07 billion.
The confusion was caused by the use of perfectly standard SI prefixes for nonstandard uses. Back when the difference was small (1024 – 1000 = 2.4%), it mattered less. Nowadays, the difference is nearly 7.5% for gigabytes, and will approach 10% for terabytes, so it is becoming a real problem.
The right solution is abandon this nonstandard usage (which was never even self-consistent anyway), and use the official SI powers-of-two prefixes: “mebi” instead of “mega”, “gibi” instead of “giga”, and so on. No more ambiguity, problem solved.
Comment by Lawrence D'Oliveiro — 13 March 2008 @ 4:51 pm
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