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0 pointsSomeone3y ago0 comments

> For many of us a kilobyte will always be 1024 bytes

Will it? In my memory, and I think that’s common for old hands, it always has been context-dependent. A kilobyte of RAM is 1,024 bytes, a megabyte of RAM 1,048,576 bytes, but a kilobyte of disk space is 1,000 bytes, a megabyte of disk space 1,000,000 bytes.

I think USB sticks and SSDs follow the hard disk convention of decimal kilobytes, but wouldn’t know for sure. Smartphones with a flash ‘disk’ use binary ones, though.

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int_19h3y ago

Nope, storage space was always measured in binary as well, except in ads. It's network stuff that's consistently decimal.

Windows, in particular, still uses binary units for file and disk sizes pretty much everywhere (Explorer, Disk Management, all command-line tools etc). MacOS uses decimal, but it only switched sometime around 2015. I'm not sure what the story is with Linux DEs, but CLI tools usually default to binary.

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