Kilobyte - The latest xkcd

[chrisbliss18]

I liked this so much, that I just had to share it with everyone. If you haven't checked out xkcd, I recommend that you do so now.

 

[Flippy the Squirrel]

You have no idea how true that is. When I used to work for Gateway, we used to have people calling in all the time, pissed that their hard drive appeared smaller than that for which they had paid. Essentially, it was because Windows considers a Kilobyte to be 1024 bytes and a Megabyte to be 1024 kilobytes. A Megabyte, therefore, is 1048576 bytes under Windows.

Hard Drive makers, however, seem content to use powers of 1000. So, a Kilobyte is 1000 bytes, and a Megabyte is 1000 Kilobytes. This means that a Megabyte is exactly one million bytes. Add to that the overhead used by partition tables (which get larger as drives get larger) and other housekeeping types of data, and it's no wonder people got upset.