this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
360 points (97.6% liked)

TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

4074 readers
1044 users here now

/c/TenFoward: Your home-away-from-home for all things Star Trek!

Re-route power to the shields, emit a tachyon pulse through the deflector, and post all the nonsense you want. Within reason of course.

~ 1. No bigotry. This is a Star Trek community. Remember that diversity and coexistence are Star Trek values. Any post/comments that are racist, anti-LGBT, or generally "othering" of a group will result in removal/ban.

~ 2. Keep it civil. Disagreements will happen both on lore and preferences. That's okay! Just don't let it make you forget that the person you are talking to is also a person.

~ 3. Use spoiler tags. This applies to any episodes that have dropped within 3 months prior of your posting. After that it's free game.

~ 4. Keep it Trek related. This one is kind of a gimme but keep as on topic as possible.

~ 5. Keep posts to a limit. We all love Star Trek stuff but 3-4 posts in an hour is plenty enough.

~ 6. Try to not repost. Mistakes happen, we get it! But try to not repost anything from within the past 1-2 months.

~ 7. No General AI Art. Posts of simple AI art do not 'inspire jamaharon'

~ 8. No Political Upheaval. Political commentary is allowed, but please keep discussions civil. Read here for our community's expectations.

Fun will now commence.


Sister Communities:

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

Want your community to be added to the sidebar? Just ask one of our mods!


Honorary Badbitch:

@[email protected] for realizing that the line used to be "want to be added to the sidebar?" and capitalized on it. Congratulations and welcome to the sidebar. Stamets is both ashamed and proud.


Creator Resources:

Looking for a Star Trek screencap? (TrekCore)

Looking for the right Star Trek typeface/font for your meme? (Thank you @kellyaster for putting this together!)


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
all 33 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] nemanin 58 points 1 day ago (5 children)
[–] TheGrandNagus 29 points 1 day ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (4 children)

This is up for debate, with computer prefixes now officially aligned with the standard SI prefixes.

You'll often see a GB meaning 1000MB, and a GiB (gibibyte) meaning 1024MB.

The ISQ (International System of Quantities) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) refer to it that way, and so do many others.

But then again, some keep the more traditional 1024MB is a GB system, and maintain that the SI prefixes shouldn't count in computing because the base 2 1024 is close enough and it's the way we traditionally did it. I think Microsoft still does, for example.

In the past, that system was close enough. After all, an additional 24 bytes or kilobytes is a tiny amount. But now that we're getting into super huge data sizes, the gap is significant. 8 terabytes by the official scale is 8 trillion bytes, but by the "traditional" scale it's 8.8 trillion bytes, a pretty sizable difference!

In a way, 999 and 1023 are both correct. But 999 is technically the standard, and has been for a while.

[–] nemanin 2 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

I’m old and did not know this. Huh.

Still 1024 in my heart.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Programmers like 1024, because that's how binary works when you keep doubling bits, and it's cleaner and more intuitive when you're working with low level code. Normies like 1000.

[–] Valmond 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

But they stole our beloved kB, MB, GB etc and we have to live with the stupid kiB, MiB etc.

[–] marcos -5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Hum... I have some news for you.

Those words never actually meant what you think they meant, and we have to live with stuff like k(ki)B and M(ki)B. Nobody actually uses MiB or GiB.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I have no idea wtf you're trying to say here. "M(ki)B"?

"Nobody actually uses" the actual correct terms?

"Those words" - you didn't even clarify which words you're talking about.

[–] marcos 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Nobody uses memory sized in GiB, and while people use MiB in a few contexts, that's almost completely outdated by now too.

People use "millions of kibibytes" and "thousands of kibibytes" a lot. But thinking of that again, people also use "thousands of mibibytes" and "millions of mibibytes" too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

"Nobody" uses memory marketed as GiB maybe. But it IS sized in GiB. And why are you distinguishing between units here in this context anyway? What does "use" even mean here? Are you talking what people actually say, or physically use? Because they physically use all of these terms everyday.

People may not say the correct terms in everyday speech, but even today, regular, non computer people kinda think any word ending in some version of "byte" is more like a magic spell used to invoke the meaning they're intending.

People only use any of the "iB" words/abbreviations for conversations between computer enthusiasts. In general, they're still just now learning the difference between a bye and gigabyte. They know some sound bigger than others, but that's about all they know typically.

I'm not even sure when these words started tbh. I knew the difference between what they meant in different contexts, but I had literally never heard of any of the iBs until about 4 years ago or so, even being a nerd who used the one term in different contexts. It was such a relief to come across a word that meant what I was trying to say.

Either way, using the "ibi"s (there's gotta be a catchier word for the collective term in not thinking of) is anything but outdated. Being correct will never be outdated.

[–] marcos -1 points 21 hours ago

Take a look in the actual size of the memory you have around.

[–] TheGrandNagus 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

Those measurements still exist, they've just been renamed into the somewhat more awkward KiB, MiB, GiB, etc. I'm aware changing the terminology – while resolving the inconsistency with other things that get measured with SI-prefixes – creates issues, though.

Well, I say they've been renamed, it's actually a bit of a shit show.

Take a USB drive and plug it into a Windows PC and everything appears a different size compared to on Mac, because they define MB/GB/TB/etc differently to one another.

Linux of course depends on your distro and desktop environment, but virtually all of them pick either GB or GiB and actually mean what they say they mean.

[–] frigidaphelion 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

how dare you go against the nagus!

[–] EmpathicVagrant 2 points 5 hours ago

It’s just Rom getting used to throwing his weight around, too polite to be any other.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago

It's because decimal is a terrible number system. If we had gone with dozenal numbers instead everything would be perfect. Instead we have a shitty counting system that leaves tons of headaches.

[–] HexesofVexes 3 points 1 day ago

So, to my limited knowledge, all digital storage is still based on the idea of a switch indicating a 0 or a 1. So, in terms of data storage, you're using those switches and base 2 is imposed.

You technically cannot build 1000MB of storage because your entire storage system is based 2. Being off by 24 isn't great, but manageable. However....

Let's call a KB 1000 bytes, and 1MB 1000 KB: we end up 1MB as 1,000,000 bytes, and 1GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes rather than 1,073,741,824 bytes, ~7.4% off! This error compounds as we go up in units, and quickly leaves one so far from physical hardware as to question one's sanity!

The real reason for the change is likely to be a little darker - 1.1TB sounds better than 1TB when trying to sell storage ("we give 10% more!").

[–] one_knight_scripting 5 points 22 hours ago

Only professionals use GiB. 👍

[–] [email protected] 2 points 23 hours ago

GB, not GiB

[–] Thebeardedsinglemalt 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago

1,073,741,824 moments so big

1,073,741,824 bytes

How do you measure, measure a gig?

[–] vala 1 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

Hard drive manufactures would beg to differ lmao.

"One TB? You mean 657GB?"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

1 TB (tera, si prefix 10^3*4^) is 0.9095TiB (tebi, 2^10*4^) or 931.3 GiB

[–] satans_methpipe 2 points 19 hours ago

Storage is measured in base 2. I don't give shit what salesperson sold courses to which moron.