Comments on: Much ado about 24 bytes

By: elmimmo

elmimmo — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 17:25:05 +0000

Why was the rationale “what is expected vs. what do standard bodies claim”, and not the obvious “what does every single machine and OS out there report to the user”?

Your conversor now effectively claims a different figure than what the user will see in any possible scenario.

By: stensi

stensi — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:55:18 +0000

I second Jon’s comment that converting by a factor of 1000 is straight forward for anyone, but for the less capable that can’t do it in their head, they can just use a calculator instead. No need for a dedicated converter.

It makes much more sense to me to have a converter for 1024.

By: Douglas Neiner

Douglas Neiner — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 01:59:17 +0000

A preference for would helpful. KiB and MiB looks wrong to me ;) For now, I disabled the Kilo, Mega, Giga and enabled the others.

By: Rob

Rob — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 04:20:12 +0000

Kilo, Mega, Giga, etc. have all meant powers of two, until the hard drive manufacturers decided to pull the wool over our eyes and inflate the capacity of the drives by “cleverly” hijacking kilo, mega, giga, etc. to mean powers of 10. It’s just the usual marketing hucksterism.

By: kc!

kc! — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 16:37:08 +0000

Please add my vote to at least have an option to enable a 1024-sized unit of measurement for data. If for nothing more than the fact that adding by multiples of 1000 can be done in my head whereas units of 1024 seem to be a bit more difficult for me.

By: Jon

Jon — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 13:47:56 +0000

I also support the user preference of kibibyte vs. kilobyte calculation, because converting by a factor of 1000 is neither hard to do in the head – nor is it something I would need, since I (and most of the people out there) am not in the hardware/storage manufacturing business.
But give us a preference please, so that we have the choice of going the correct or the incorrect way!

By: Jasper

Jasper — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 00:23:36 +0000

This is something that really annoys me – mainly because you (and, in my experience, the OS) expect 1024 blocks, but you get 1000 so your drive always looks small.

I’ve never heard of a kibibyte – thanks for the reading material!

Love your apps, too :)

By: Chris H

Chris H — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 08:21:13 +0000

I now understand the thinking – as pointed here by @tapbots – but I disagree. I expect 1024 and the 1000 seems wrong, but I do follow your decision process.

I doubt I’ll use it much as converting bytes to kilo-, meta-, giga- or terra- isn’t a common thing for me. Or if it is it’s using 1024 …

By: ian

ian — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 02:07:28 +0000

I still say you should let the user choose how they want their kilobytes calculated. This should be fairly easy to implement.

By: Apfhex

Apfhex — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 17:42:08 +0000

I disagree with the decision, because nearly everyone and everything uses kilobyte = 1024 and that IS what’s expected, regardless of the so-called standards. But I understand the reasoning behind the decision. Unfortunately, I didn’t know this was how it worked until I read this blog and would have been very confused at Convertbot’s conversions otherwise. A note somewhere would have been cool.