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Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes
(zeta.one)
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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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I was confused when I just read the headline. Should be "Why I (that would be you not me) think a kilobyte should be 1000 instead of 1024". Unpopular opinion would be a better sub for it.
You should read the blog post. It's not a matter of option.
It totally is a matter of opinion. These are arbitrary rules, made up by us. We can make up whatever rules we want to.
I agree that it's weird that only in CS kilo means 1024. It would be logical to change that, to keep consistency across different fields of science. But that does not make it any less a matter of opinion.
You can't store data in base 10, nor address memory or storage in base 10 given present computers. It's a bit more than a matter of opinion that computers are base 2
Yes computers are base 2 but we can still make up whatever rules we want about them. We could even make up rules that say that we are to consider everything a computer does to be in base 10 but it can only use the lowest 2 values of any given digit. It would be a total mess and it would make no sense whatsoever but we could define those rules.