Are there secret gamer units that I'm too much of a noob to have been let in on?

One kibibyte, or KiB, is 1024 bytes, while a kilobyte, or KB, is 1000 bytes. In the same way, one mebibyte (MiB) is 1024^2 bytes and one megabyte is 1000^2 bytes. In most cases, the difference between the 1024 multiple and the 1000 multiple version of a data value is rather negligible.

Source: Wikipedia

Bob has the right idea... but isn't strictly right. KB, MB, etc. was initially meant to be in measures of 1024, and most people and operating systems/programs will take it to mean that. HDD companies, however, decided to measure in multiples of 1000. That's why when you buy a 1 TB HDD, you'll probably be told it's something like 931 GB by your OS.

The KiB, GiB, etc. system recently came into widespread use to unambiguously mean measures of 1024.

Blaizer wrote:
Bob has the right idea... but isn't strictly right. KB, MB, etc. was initially meant to be in measures of 1024, and most people and operating systems/programs will take it to mean that. HDD companies, however, decided to measure in multiples of 1000. That's why when you buy a 1 TB HDD, you'll probably be told it's something like 931 GB by your OS.

The KiB, GiB, etc. system recently came into widespread use to unambiguously mean measures of 1024.

Um, no... Bob was right. 1 MiB is 1024 KiB. 1 MB is 1000 KB. Ok? But there is no difference between them. 1 MiB is EXACTLY equal to 1 MB. Don't believe me, look it up. They only have the two different measurements to differenciate between the SI 1024 and the non-SI 1000. Although it is still acceptable to call 1024KB 1MB and not 1.024MB because 24KB these days is so trivial it doesn't even matter, but of course when the storage gets bigger you will start to see differences as previously mentioned.

It is kinda of difficult to explain so you might want to do so google aided research yourself.

Windows calls 1 MB 1024 KB; Macintosh and hard drive companies call 1 MB 1000 KB, to keep consistent with other metric scales. MiB and KiB were invented to resolve the dispute (but Windows still messes it up).

And no, iWork, I don't believe they are the same, otherwise hard drives you buy WOULD show up as the size listed on their box when you connect them to a Windows computer. A single byte in the "__bibyte" system isn't any smaller than any other byte, so naturally more of them makes a larger figure.

So the convention of using lower k = 1000 and upper K = 1024 that I was taught 30 years ago just wasn't good enough. I remember the argument against that convention was that lower m = 1/1000 in other units. I never thought that was a problem because a miilibyte is a meaningless unit.

Before I die, I predict storage will be measured in inverse femtobarns.

K stands for Kelvin... On the other hand... the convention that B means byte and b means bit does exist... but also isn't followed well.

Oh God, don't get me started on that. Downloading a file shows speed in kb/s, meaning kilobytes per second, but the bit rate of an audio file in kbps means kilobits per second. But hey, why should technical data be consistent?