I have it worse, my band is called 1023MB, we still don't have a gig.
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
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Yes you do. That's 1.023 Gigabyte. What you don't quite have is a Gibibyte.
Top shelf pedantry
While I usually love a good neologism, this one I refuse.
That’s depends on whether we’re talking SI or JEDEC prefixes.
They don't have a gib
This is why I'm here
Giga, Mega, Kilo...these are all SI prefixes; they differ by a factor of one thousand, which is very clean in base ten.
Ten in binary systems isn't special, but two is; and two to the ten is very nearly a thousand, and a thousand separates the major SI prefixes. This is a neat coincidence, but should not IMHO change the meaning of the prefix.
Metric units are awesome in large part because of the use of prefixes; messing up the meaning of prefixes is a disservice to the SI/metric system. Giga == billion independent of the context. A light-year is close to 10 petameters, but no one would claim it's exactly 10Pm.
Now, if you want to call it an "imperial gigabyte," by all means...
I've always preferred descriptivism to prescriptivism when it comes to language, so when you say "this is what it means in other contexts so this is what it ought to mean in this context", in contrast to the way the word is actually used by computer scientists, no cap, I'm rolling my eyes. But we're not going to agree on that, so let's move on to the the interesting part of your comment:
Metric sucks. Powers of ten are arbitrary, a fluke of biology. Powers of two are the only sensible way to make a system of measurements. Bias disclosure, I am an American, and so more familiar with US Customary units than either Imperial or Metric.
But hear me out: Volume measurements. I literally never need to make ten times as much of a recipe, or a tenth as much. I need to cut a recipe in half, or double it, all the time. USC volume units, despite the stupid names, are beautiful powers of two from the tablespoon up to the gallon. And the units larger than a gallon are so close, 31 gallons to a barrel and 63 to a hogshead could easily be adjusted to 32 and 64.
I don't even need to explain 16 ounces to a pound, so let's move on to length units. Maybe this isn't the case where you are, but it's pretty standard over here to have walks studs 16 inches apart. If we accept this as a new "binary foot" or "boot", we see the world at our fingertips. A mile is damn close to 16^4 inches, so 16^3 boots. If we adjusted to mile to be exactly that number of inches, we wouldn't even need to change the road signs! And it goes almost without saying that we'd keep the furlong as an eighth of a mile and size city blocks accordingly.
Metric is irredeemable, but US Customary is so close to being actually good. Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Prescriptive vs. descriptive is different in colloquial language than in science.
If my data logger captures 1kB/km, how many bytes/meter is that? In every other quantitative unit I can think of, the k should cancel out; but if you want computers to be special, that's your preference.
Metric sucks. Powers of ten are arbitrary, a fluke of biology. Powers of two are the only sensible way to make a system of measurements.
Then why are you trying to shoehorn binary into decimal? As in: why are you using decimal prefixes in the first place? Answer is probably that most people have intuition behind powers of ten. You can easily express in log2-bytes instead (a GiB is 30, a TiB is 33...etc.). Be the change you want to see!
I'm born and raised in the USA, and while imperial units can be handy for a few every day tasks, there's a reason why the sciences in the US tend to use metric.
Regarding cooking, I'll stick to metric, measured by weight. I can double, halve, or multiply my recipe by pi, and all I have to do is look for a different number on my scale.
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