Talk:Kibibyte

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Discussion about centralization took place at Talk:Binary prefix.

How do you pronounce "kibibyte"? Is it "Kee Bee Bite" or "Kib Bee Bite" or something else? Perhaps a pronounciation guide is advised.

154.20.205.22 05:04, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

KiBi stands for Kilo Binary, that may help. It's probably not really meant to pronounced in its abbreviated form. There will be a difference anyway depending on what's your native tongue. "Euro" is pronounced differently in different states of Europe as well. The same applies to Kilo, Mega, Giga etc. which are pronounced quite different by English and German speakers. --82.141.58.95 23:56, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure the standard says that you pronounce the first syllable how you would if it where kilo (&c), and the next syllable as be. Therefore, kibi would be /kiːbiː/ (or /kibi/ in the US). That's the way I'd naturally pronounce it anyway.

Also, FTR, it isn't an abbreviated form. We may know it is derived from kilo binary, but the standard just says kibi (and talking about kilo-binary-bytes would doubtless cause more confusion than already exists).

--Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley _{talk contrib} 00:23, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

I really gotta learn how to read those IPA symbols. For the record, I'm from the midwestern U.S. and I would pronounce it like... well like how you'd expect "kibby" to be pronounced. Kind of like a girl's nickname or something. Vid the Kid - Does this font make me look fat? 16:29, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

If KiBi means kilo binary, shouldn't it stand for 1000 bits?

No, you should understand "kilo binary" as "a binary number that is close to kilo" ;-)

Wouldn't that be a kilobit? WalrusMan118 18:22, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

In SI, kilo is abbreviated to a mere k. Isn't kibi abbreviated to "ki" rather than "Ki"?

Well. I stand corrected from the references on Binary prefix. Shame though.

Regarding the gigabyte vs gibibyte, that is a substantial difference, which quite disappointed a friend of mine once. I have noticed that it seems to be common practice to advertize hard disk capacity in a unit called GB with a footnote defining it as "Billion Bytes". Maybe this should be noted in the article. Personally, I think if you say "gigabyte" or any other -byte unit, the 2ⁿ interpretation should be assumed, meaning separate -bibyte units shouldn't be necessary. Vid the Kid - Does this font make me look fat? 16:29, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Contents 1 Need for Kibibyte 1.1 Never heard of it 2 Toyabyte 3 Weasel byte? 4 Merge

[edit] Need for Kibibyte

I cannot conceive of any reason for special consideration in the computer realm for changing the meaning of the kilo prefix to mean 1,024 versus 1,000. Just because memory comes in quantities of powers of two does NOT mean this special dispensation for marketers is justified. A company I once was employed by sensibly took the decimal number of kilowords (in that context, it was words rather than bytes) and divided by 1,000. Thus 524,288 words was quoted as 524K words. Simple, easy, everybody did it and understood it.--72.75.86.192 08:38, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Personally, I think this word is silly. The only place where "kilobyte" means anything OTHER than "1024 bytes" (and megabyte meaning 1048576 bytes and so on) is in quoting storage capacity, and (IMO) disk marketers just did that to inflate their numbers. I resist using this unnatural word to overcome a language flaw created by a marketing department to inflate perceived hard disk capacity. 24.6.224.12

And wot a rip off a kilogram is! I'm only gettin' a fousand grams.

[edit] Never heard of it

25 years heavily involved in computers and electronics, widely read, and a degree in Electronic Engineering, and I've never come across this term before. Kilo, Mega, and Giga bytes always referred to the tenth, twentieth, and thirtieth powers of 2, because anything else is impossible to work with when you are using binary addressing. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 192.118.76.130 (talk) 18:06, 20 January 2007 (UTC).

The reason it was established is largely that manufacuturers of memory and storage realized they could better market their drives in decimal kilobytes (now gigabytes). Kibibytes, gibibytes, etc are entirely unambiguous and can't be fudged. For an example, see the page for the Mac Pro where the fine print says "(1) 1GB = 1 billion bytes" http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wa/RSLID?mco=2CB5E8C0&nclm=MacPro 142.157.192.86 07:11, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

I have never heard of it either, I think it makes pages such as the page for the Macintosh unnecessarily confusing. Darwin16 16:12, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

The only place I've ever seen "kibibyte"/etc used has been on Wikipedia. It's true that HD manufacturers use powers-of-ten for advertising reasons - ok, why does that mean we have to change (and it is a change) all of our terminology? The two meanings can co-exist, or pressure can be put on them to change. Even memory manufacturers don't play this game. All "kibibyte" does is confuse people. 23 years professional experience here, ~20 years of reading EETimes.

Wikipedia is supposed to document topics, not be a vehicle for changing terminology. This strikes me as a crusade. — jesup 04:29, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. Regardless of whether anyone thinks that "kibibytes" are a good idea or not, they are not conventional in any context, anywhere on earth. The convention in deceptive advertising is to refer to thousands of bytes as kilobytes. The convention everywhere else (academically, professionally, journalistically) is to refer to powers of two under those SI prefix names. Of those two, the latter (standardising on professional consensus, rather than on deceptive advertising practices) is clearly the preferable convention on Wikipedia or anywhere else. But regardless, standardising on a term which no one uses, which has been invented to emulate the terminology of deceptive advertising, is ridiculous. This is an extremely silly crusade. --Yst 21:10, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Silly or not, if you're objecting to the use of 'kibibyte' in Wikipedia articles, this is not the right place to try to change that. BTW, 'kilobyte' may be the convention, but it's also wrong — The International System of Units makes this explicit (see Binary prefix#_note-BIPM). While I appreciate what you're saying, using SI prefixes incorrectly throughout an entire encyclopedia is at least as silly. --StuartBrady (Talk) 21:46, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

This is not the place to change it: true, the place is WT:MOS - but if you try to make the argument there, the editors who make MoS issues (and the correction thereof on Wikipedia) their life will tell you it's all been discussed before and consensus is that you're wrong, and it's not open for further discussion or change because the editors who made the consensus can't deal with the continuous trickle of annoyed editors and users who've run into this coming to complain. Which in a way is true: each (talk) page on WP develops consensus on issues based on the active editors thereof and those who actively monitor the page. The problem is that guideline articles are inhabited by (and consensus is "made" by) those who make said guideline a major aspect of what they do on Wikipedia, while those articles indirectly affect many or all other articles - but the editors of all those affected articles only get involved in guideline pages when someone uses a guideline to override "consensus" of page editors. And I use "override" specifically. There are positives and negatives to this: it avoids "me and my friends like doing everything our way", but it also (in cases like this) leaves a bad taste in the mouth of serious editors. This has cropped up multiple times: this issue here; on WP:EL with youtube links and a small cadre of editors removing almost all links (often including links to videos that are not copyvios), etc — jesup 05:13, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Opinions clearly differ on this. As in other cases where people may have different approaches and opinions on what is right (e.g. spelling color or colour, or saying a person is English or British), I take the view that changing existing articles is provocative, and revert them. Notinasnaid 22:45, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

I also had never heard of kibibyte until I found somebody had edited my Notepad+ article and was about to revert the vandalism when I saw it referred to the Manual of Style. Another pointless thing which WP is trying to use to rule the world. In the context of that article (referring to a limitation in the original MS Notepad) it is totally irrelevant as the difference in bytes is trivial compared with 'unlimited'. Let's stop this nonsence Dsergeant 06:09, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

But a restriction of 64 decimal kilobytes wouldn't make much sense, would it? The fact that it's a power of two is relevant to the discussion. — Omegatron 00:03, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Nobody names 1000 bytes a kilobyte. Who and where introduced the term "Kibibyte"? I am programmer since 1991, and I never heard of it. Alone Coder

[edit] Toyabyte

Why toyabyte is named the same in both conventions if it has the higher difference ? (10^27 vs 2^90) --Kewlito 14:29, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Weasel byte?

Who has heard of a "weasel byte"? Only 4 Google hits, none of which are clearly about what is described here. Selling 1000 bytes as one KB is the weaselly thing, and 1024 bytes is fine, so if anything this is also the wrong way around.  --Lambiam^Talk 07:28, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Since I wrote the above, the section this referred to has been deleted.  --Lambiam^Talk 08:51, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merge

Merging this would be silly at this time 169.252.4.21 08:30, 29 March 2007 (UTC)