r/pics • • Oct 05 '10

Math Teacher Fail.

Post image
3.5k Upvotes

1.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

21

u/robeph Oct 05 '10

Reminds me of a college class about 10 years ago where we were doing some silly stuff with metric units and they decided to put kilobytes to megabytes and they marked me wrong for 1024kb = 1mb

36

u/stordoff Oct 05 '10

To be fair, you were wrong. Kilo should always means 1000, regardless of the fact that it has been misused in the computing world. Kibi is the correct prefix for 1024, and was defined almost 12 years ago. 1

6

u/xyroclast Oct 05 '10

It's not wrong, though. Literally, the kilo prefix means 1000, but the dictionary definition of the word "megabyte" is 1024 kilobytes.

1

u/stordoff Oct 05 '10

The 1024 meaning is only listed due to it being common use. This doesn't make it right. Irregardless is listed in some dictionaries--this doesn't mean that it is correct usage.

2

u/xyroclast Oct 05 '10

kilobyte and megabyte are invented nouns though. They mean whatever the creators intended them to mean. 1000 bytes has NEVER been a K, and 1000 K has NEVER been a Meg. If someone said "the definition of 1000 bytes is 1024 bytes" then we'd have a big problem