That make me curious to look up the Koenigsegg's power. It would seem they are metric horsepower:

>Two common definitions used today are the mechanical horsepower (or imperial horsepower), which is about 745.7 watts and the metric horsepower, which is approximately 735.5 watts.

I guess speaking as a Brit the foreigners just didn't have proper horses.

Brits will have to concede to the French on that one. A French poncelet is 100kg raised one meter in one second, ~980W.

So you’re telling me I can’t even trust SI unit abbreviations when coming from beyond the pond? That a kW in America isn’t 1000 W as it should be?

F*ck :D

You think that's bad, try talking to computer people. They think a kilo of their bits means 1024 of them, not 1000!

This is wrong in Hard drive SSd manufacturers are very happy to give you 1000 bits per Kilobyte.

Computer people speak in Base 2 units because that's how the devices operate at a low level.

After many years and different widths the smallest common unit of exchange evolved to be a power of two: 8 bits are a byte, not 9, 10, 27, 30, etc; though Unicode might have been better off if 32 bits were the base character. However then older systems would have been at least 75% less useful.

Physical addressing units are also binary, because literal address lines (or their virtually latched equivalents on a serial bit-shift register) are used.

ROM, RAM, and correspondingly non-volatile writable storage inherit this basic premise.

So a non-sales computer person speaking 'kilo' or 'mega' or any other SI unit in relation to a computer part means it will hold or be able to transfer at least that many SI units in the quoted units. Everything gets rounded to the nearest useful neighbor. A digital kilo is not 1000, it is 2^10. A digital mega is correspondingly also 2^20. This is very similar to the exponents in SI units.

For that matter, humans have 8 fingers and 2 thumbs. Wouldn't an octal numbering system make more sense? Though for that we'd have to come up with new unit names near 2^3, 2^6, 2^9, etc that don't sound silly.

> For that matter, humans have 8 fingers and 2 thumbs. Wouldn't an octal numbering system make more sense? Though for that we'd have to come up with new unit names near 2^3, 2^6, 2^9, etc that don't sound silly.

Each of the 4 long fingers has 3 phalanges, so an interesting possibility is to use each thumb to count up to 12 on each hand. Given that many ancient units of measurement where base-12, I wonder why we didn't develop base-12 languages.

I've heard that's how merchants used to count in the Mediterranean. However much like QLC and TLC SSDs are more finicky to work and require stricter discipline than simple on/off storage, the same can be said for fingers and is it up or down.

Kilo is always 1000. Kibi is 1024.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

Kibi didn't exist until 1998 (per your link), so anything you read that was written prior to that and for a few years after still has the kilo=1000/1024 ambiguity.

I know the 'kibibytes' thing but never encountered it in a real-world context (e.g. like "the C64 had 64 kibibytes of RAM").

I personally decided to just use them always for clarity and I saw few people around me catch on. Be the change you want to see, especially when it comes to the free minor stuff.

In the verbal context of IT, it is 1024. If you're being technical, you can nitpick and say it's wrong. Has no benefit, though.

I like!

Wish we could all start understanding the difference between kilo and kibi, mega and mebu and so on for bits and bytes.

Sometimes b is for bit and B is for byte, however, just about as often b is for byte and B is for bit.

Nah, kb means kibbibytes, not kilobytes :)