Contents

1 Byte/bit/etc 2 1000bits vs. 1024bits 3 bps 4 My edits (June 2, 2004) 1 Kibibyte?

Byte/bit/etc

Here, we recommend B for byte and b for bit, but Binary prefix recommends b for byte and bit for bit. Standard practice (from what I've seen) seems to be k and "bit" and "bps" for bits, and K and B and B/s for bytes, while M,G,T,etc apply to both. There is no 'correct symbol', since nobody ever defined a standard ("kibibyte" is icky and really isn't a 'standard', and I don't think they defined a symbol for bit or byte anyway).

Also, bits and decimal prefixes go together, while bytes and binary prefixes go together (the only exception to this is hard disk sizes).

There is no SI unit for bit, and there's no SI unit for byte. If there was, it would be "no unit" anyway, just like a radian isn't a unit (since an angle in radians is a distance divided by another distance). So "radians per second" is just "per second", and "cycles per second" is also just "per second" (because a cycle is a unit). This is icky, because then f = 1 Hz = 1 s^-1, while ω = 2π s^-1. When I say "1 Hz = 2π rad/s", everyone knows what I mean. When I say "1 s^-1 = 2π s^-1", it loses its entire meaning.

There's also no standard size for a byte (which is presumably why POP servers call them 'octets'), but everyone uses 8-bit bytes because everyone else does.

If we did talk about bytes and bits in SI units, then I could quote my network speed as 100 Ms^-1 (100 Mbps), or 12.5 Ms^-1 (12.5 MB/s), or even use MHz. Until we have actual SI units for bits and bytes, inventing units and prefixes so we can use SI prefixes isn't a very good practice (it'd be like kmi or cin or mgal, and who's heard of a 'kilomile' or 'milligallon' anyway?).

We should just stick to common practice (which is arguably the only 'correct symbol'), or something non-ambiguous (KiB isn't ambiguous, but Kib looks like one symbol). And when we quote hard disk sizes, GB (decimal). And we shouldn't have inconsistencies around the wiki.

Thoughts? -- Elektron 13:43, 2004 May 20 (UTC)

1000bits vs. 1024bits

At http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/K/kilobyte.html the naming convention is sugested that KB means 1024 bytes and kB means 1000 bytes.

At http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/k/kibibyte.htm they define kibibyte as meaning 1024 bytes.

At http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/gDefinition/0,294236,sid7_gci499008,00.html the term kilobyte is also used to refer to 1000 bytes.

bps

In my experience, working in the telecom industry, bps normally denotes bits per second, not simply bits. It's most often used to show bandwidth or flow rate on telephony equipment. (10 Mbps - 10 megabits per second).

Steggall 15:52, 2004 May 20 (UTC)

I know, but I was referring to how you don't see b/s or bits/s in common usage, nor do you see Bps in common usage.

My edits (June 2, 2004)

• [] are brackets, not parentheses (And in any case, don't mix [] and () ).
• The SI kilo is no more 'correct' than the base-2 kilo, since byte isn't a SI unit (SI should only deal with bits, if anything, since 2&sup8; is completely arbitrary). Also, as stated in binary prefix, B is the symbol for bel.
• It's not so much that the machine language is in binary, but that you can bitshift right and bitwise AND to deal with powers of two.

There are other tweaks that should probably be done as well (the article doesn't read very well). Elektron 16:49, 2004 Jun 1 (UTC)

Hi, Elektron - let's work on this together, as you seem to be knowledgable on the subject...

• thanks for the this edit ("it becomes more apparent"), I fully agree, makes the sentence run smoother.

• Where I come from, we use to denote units by [kB] brackets (but never mind). But what did you mean with "And in any case, don't mix [] and ()"?

• 1st paragraph: I'd like to drop the mention of the 'telecommunication engineers' altogether, for when have they really used the unit kilo'byte'; I've thought they dealt with bit, kbit, Mbit, Gbit (and bit/s, kbit/s, ...).

• "describing storage capacity and memory size of computers (as it is a power of 2, making easy for computers, which work in bianary, to manipulate)" I don't see a reason to delve into details about the working of registers, and that the mere mention of computers being 'binary' machines should suffice.

• "The SI kilo is no more 'correct' than the base-2 kilo, since byte isn't a SI unit" To read "kilo" as "1,000" is the correct use of this SI prefix, that's what I meant, and it is a SI prefix, regardless whether or not the unit is SI or non-SI.

• "There are other tweaks that should probably be done as well (the article doesn't read very well)" I didn't say it was perfect (far from that) but I did make an effort; if you think it reads not well, by all means go ahead and do make suggestions... :)

--Palapala 05:59, 2004 Jun 3 (UTC)

• I was referring to "[Telecommunication engineers have used it all the way.]", which should definitely be () (especially since () is used in other parts of the article. While [units] is probably a good idea, I think most people just use italics for variables and normal text for units. Unfortunately, it's very hard to write in italics (and actually look like you meant it to be in italics).
• Certainly, G is a SI prefix, but when you call 10⁹ bytes a GB, you adhere neither to common usage (where GB is 2³⁰ bytes) or SI usage (where GB is a gigabel). It's like calling 2 million pounds a kiloton — you adhere to neither standard.
• We should also merge kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte, yottabyte, binary prefix (megabyte to yottabyte are very similar, and should never have been separate pages in the first place). I might get around to this sometime next week.
• I also should get around to fixing integral data type. PowerPC assembly uses 'byte, halfword, word, doubleword' (even for 64-bit processors). "short" and "long" are more consistently 16 and 32 bits. But that's off topic. --Elektron 08:48, 2004 Jun 5 (UTC)

Kibibyte?

I feel that this and the related pages are being used to push an agenda. I have worked in IT for about 8 years and I have been using computers for 22 years, and I have never heard of a kibibyte until I read this article. I have asked many of the people I work with and not one of them had heard the term.

I think it is misleading to present the term as if it has any currency whatsoever. If the term would confuse industry professionals, it should not be listed as an alternative, merely as a curiosity.

The reality is that 1000-byte figure is very rarely used, and only the specialisations of networking (where it doesn't matter precisely how much is pushed through, and since figures are presented to humans in decimal, dividing by 1000 is easier) and by marketing agencies who are trying to make their products sould like they can store more data.

The industry standard is kilobyte = 1024 bytes, this is what is taught in most schools and universities. That it is inconsistent with SI doesn't matter because people dealing in bytes know what they're talking about.

Ben Arnold 01:18, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

You're not the first. Go read binary prefix. It's been adopted by the IEC, IEEE, NIST, etc.

"That it is inconsistent with SI doesn't matter because people dealing in bytes know what they're talking about."

Yes it does. People who are dealing in bytes aren't the only people involved. It's inconsistent with people developing clock circuits in hertz, for instance. - Omegatron 01:21, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)

To continue this discussion. Ben, there is no agenda being pushed here. As stated by Omegatron, many engineering organizations have accepted it. Simply because people don't use the -ibi- form to mean powers of 2 is not sufficient grounds to rewrite an article stating the contrary to what IEC, IEEE, etc. have adopted. Your rewrite contradicts the table right next to it... Cburnett 01:28, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)

Those organisations are, at the end of the day, lobby groups. They have a lot of prestige, and maybe with time they will influence general usage, but on this issue, at the present time, they are in the extreme minority. The UN has a lot of prestige but Wikipedia doesn't defer to them for definitions of countries (or we wouldn't have Taiwan on the list). I'd rewrite the table if I had time, but the whole group of articles is a big "what some Wikipedia users would like the world to be like", not "what the world is like" bias... and that's utterly unencyclopedic. It brings down the standard of Wikipedia as a whole. Ben Arnold 01:42, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

How is it biased?? - Omegatron 01:56, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)

Ben is around enough to revert my deletion of {{POV}} but can't follow through, as expected when putting it on a page, with the discussion. Cburnett 04:06, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)

Sorry I have a job, I can't be every hour or even every day... I've put the places that seem "point of view" below.

Additionally, I heard about it at least a couple years ago. Even the hard drive manufacturers agree with IEC, IEEE, etc. (though I do think they have an agenda since it makes their drives seem bigger by playing on people's (incorrectly) understanding that 1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes). Cburnett 01:30, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)

A lot of people think this is some kind of marketing agenda, because hard drive manufacturers use the SI prefixes properly, which makes their storage sizes look bigger compared to the colloquial definition.

Your reversion is good. - Omegatron 01:33, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)

Areas of the article that are POV:

equal to one thousand bytes.

• this is POV Ben Arnold 06:59, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The prefix K was used, to distinguish this quantity from the SI prefix k. However, the K prefix was never formally mandated and it is not used consistently.

• the inference is that being distinct from the SI prefix and having a formal mandate are important; which is fine, but only if the counter-argument, that they don't matter, is noted Ben Arnold 06:59, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

the subtle upper-case / lower-case distinction between the SI prefix and this special use in Computing, was not available

• the counter-argument is that since computing doesn't need fractional units, the SI case distinction could be dropped in favour of binary/decimal case-distinction Ben Arnold 06:59, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

significant errors of measurement [...] (which is about 47KB or 48kB)!

• this statement isn't put into perspective (47KB out of 1024KB is 2.4%) and isn't worth an exclamation mark Ben Arnold 06:59, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
• a big reason people use the decimal measure is precisely because they don't care about precision, but this isn't noted Ben Arnold 06:59, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

This problem, together with other abiguities eventually lead to the creation of the binary prefix standard.

• calling it a standard, but not pointing out that it is very rarely used, is POV Ben Arnold 06:59, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Because [...] continuing irregularities in using the binary prefix in the definition and usage of the kilobyte, the exact number in common practice could be either one of the following:

• marginalising the most common useage as an "irregularity" is POV Ben Arnold 06:59, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• 1000 listed before 1024... even though 1024 is the more common usage Ben Arnold 06:59, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for discussing before tagging as POV this time. Some of your complaints are genuine, some are very minor, and some have not been in the article since I condensed it four days ago. Either way, you should try and deal with them yourself, instead of complaining until someone else does.

But be more careful than you were in your one substantive edit to this article, some of which still remains, but most of which was redundant discussion not specific to kilobyte. This article is supposed to be quite short. Any detailed discussion of the binary/decimal confusion, including the hard-drive size thing, should go onto binary prefix.

In the meantime, since you do not appear to be very active on Wikipedia, I will remove the POV tag. – Smyth\^talk 11:50, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Active is a relative term. I'm in almost every day. That's been active enough for every other discussion I've been involved with. The point of the POV tag is to indicate that a discussion is occuring (this one). One party to that discussion should not unilaterally remove the tag unless the discussion has died. As for "you should try and deal with them yourself", I did try to deal with them myself, but my change was reverted and I was told to discuss the issues here. As a discussion is happening here, until this discussion is resolved, the page should remain tagged as POV.

As far as I'm concerned you're trying to have it both ways: I can't change the page because I haven't discussed it here and I shouldn't discuss it here I should just change the page. Catch 22 is a form of passive aggression. Rather than discussing the issues, you're tying me up in red tape of your own invention.

I'm genuinely interested in improving Wikipedia and making it a useful resource. I've come to the opinion that this article is one of those places on Wikipedia where a group of users lobby for a particular point of view and defend it religiously. That's called POV and is not the way things work on Wikipedia. In theory eventually you will get tired of defending your fiefdom and go away. Other people will recognise that what's said on these pages is incorrect and misleading and will change it. I hope the theory's true. Ben Arnold 03:30, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Waiting for the other side to give up: sounds like a siege to me. Is this where I repeat your sentence: "That's called POV and is not the way things work on Wikipedia." <?> Cburnett 03:39, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)

I'm not waiting for anything. I want to discuss how we can bring the article in to balance right now. My point was that in the fullness of time balance will supposedly come anyway. That's the theory. Not from anything I do, or anyone else, but by the same means that water carves a river through rock. Ben Arnold 04:00, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

For goodness sake, I didn't disagree with any of the complaints you had. I invited you to try and deal with them yourself. I pointed out what the problem was with your other edit. Yet all you seem to be interested in doing is causing trouble.

I will now go and deal with your complaints myself. – Smyth\^talk 12:47, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

"In theory eventually you will get tired of defending your fiefdom and go away."

That's not the way it works. The way it works is that we edit the article together until it represents something we can both agree with. If we can't do that politely or without revert warring, we talk about it on the talk page, and if we can't reach consensus on the talk page we pettily fight about it incessantly until someone starts dispute resolution.  :-)

"I can't change the page because I haven't discussed it here and I shouldn't discuss it here I should just change the page."

Of course you can change the article. Be bold. "...but don't be reckless." If other people disagree with your edits and you are unwilling to concede, you need to talk about it here instead of editing the article.

"That's called POV and is not the way things work on Wikipedia."

Honestly, I think you need to take a good long look in the NPOV mirror before making further contributions. A kilobyte is 1000 bytes in a lot of contexts. Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean it's untrue.

"Not from anything I do, or anyone else"

Of course it's from what we do. The article's not going to edit itself. We work on it together and eventually it converges to something we can both agree with. - Omegatron 13:26, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)

Omegatron, you edited the article to say that "kilobyte per second" always has a decimal meaning. This is surely false, as experimenting with any program that downloads anything will show. – Smyth\^talk 13:49, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Oh, right. For things like modems and ethernet it is decimal, but for software it is binary, because they are referencing to file sizes. - Omegatron 14:04, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)

This discussion does not belong here but on talk:binary prefix since Ben's POV complaints are not unique to the kilobyte article. Cburnett 18:03, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)