Apple Kicks HDD Marketing Debate Into High Gear 711
quacking duck writes "With the release of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Apple has updated a support document describing how their new operating system reports capacities of hard drives and other media. It has sided with hard drive makers, who for years have advertised capacities as '1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes' instead of the traditional computer science definition, and in so doing has kicked the debate between marketing and computer science into high gear. Binary prefixes for binary units (e.g. GiB for 'gibibyte') have been promoted by the International Electrotechnical Commission and endorsed by IEEE and other standards organizations, but to date there's been limited acceptance (though manufacturers have wholeheartedly accepted the 'new' definitions for GB and TB). Is Apple's move the first major step in forcing computer science to adopt the more awkward binary prefixes, breaking decades of accepted (if technically inaccurate) usage of SI prefixes?"
Its been done for years already (Score:5, Interesting)
Is Apple's move the first major step in forcing computer science to adopt the more awkward binary prefixes, breaking decades of accepted (if technically inaccurate) usage of SI prefixes?
No, its not any first major step. HDD makers already went there years ago, its established and people know better what it means. And even if I'm quite a nerd myself, I never think that 1 terabytes = 1 048 576 megabytes. Yeah it would be great if I remembered that or as many decimals in PI as possible, but no one really cares. It's a lot easier to remember and think that 1 terabyte is 1 000 000 megabytes, even if its not technically so because of binary system and even if I know that - I still think so just for the easy of it.
And its a mac. What did you think? It's as far from a nerdy computer as possible. Obviously they are going to use terms and units that non-geeky people understand.
Re:Its been done for years already (Score:5, Insightful)
What's more, Apple's been sued a couple of times over the definition of a gigabyte by angry idiots who didn't understand that 10^9 != 2^30. Possibly they're doing this in part to minimize their future liability.
Re:Its been done for years already (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm quite a nerd myself, I never think that 1 terabytes = 1 048 576 megabytes
Well of course not; why the fuck would you want to? That's like wondering how many hours there are in a week - who cares? 1 terabyte is 1024 gigbytes. Converting it into megabytes is pointless for the purposes of most people.
Hey let's have a 10 bit byte as well to make conversions that nobody ever does, easier.
Re:Its been done for years already (Score:5, Interesting)
Your example is bad because its the default one. 1 terabyte to 1024 gigabytes is easy. How quickly you calculate that to 4TB? 15TB? 492TB? Or for more better example, 405GB to MB's? Its just a lot easier to think 405GB = 405 000MB than start calculating it, while its kinda close anyway.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
> 1 terabyte to 1024 gigabytes is easy. How quickly you calculate that to 4TB? 15TB? 492TB? Or for more better example, 405GB to MB's?
It's a COMPUTER, why not let it do the calculation for you? This is why we use the machines in the first place.
The interface should give you the option of reporting bytes in SI or traditional CS units.
A bigger issue, for me, is why the stupid Finder reports file sizes based on blocks! This makes no sense. I can plug in a flash drive, and the Finder will report that a 12KB
Re:Its been done for years already (Score:5, Informative)
Because as far as disk space occupation goes, that file may as well be 16KB.
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Because as far as disk space occupation goes, that file may as well be 16KB.
OS X reports disk space better than Windows, Finder reports a 2.5MB file as taking 2,572,834 bytes of disk space. And it depends on what file system the disk uses and the size of the clusters. The smaller cluster, the minimum file sizes can be, the less space is wasted.
At least OS X used to report disk space better, but with this change to Snow Leopard it's no longer true.
Falcon
Re:Its been done for years already (Score:4, Informative)
OS X reports disk space better than Windows, Finder reports a 2.5MB file as taking 2,572,834 bytes of disk space.
Which version of Windows are you talking about? There would seem to be a "Size on disk" field in the properties dialog of at least XP and 7, and I'm pretty sure it's been there in several older versions.
Re:I honestly don't care much whether I'm getting (Score:5, Insightful)
I've got bad news for you... while your drives no longer appear 10% smaller, all your files are now 10% larger.
Re:Its been done for years already (Score:5, Informative)
A bigger issue, for me, is why the stupid Finder reports file sizes based on blocks! This makes no sense. I can plug in a flash drive, and the Finder will report that a 12KB file, copied to the desktop, is now a 16KB file. This isn't rocket science, FIX IT already, Apple!!
Well, given an 8k or 16k block size, a 12k file *DOES* consume 16k of usable disk space. Plus 600-700 bytes for the inode and directory entry. Plus more if there's any magic Apple-y metadata associated with the file.
For what reason do you expect any filesystem browser to report the exact number of bytes in a file? I'm almost always more interested in knowing how much disk space is used by the file - 16k in your example. In a filesystem like JFS that dynamically allocates inodes, I might even expect it to report the space used by the inode. FWIW, 'du' will report 16k in your example as well. Is 'du' wrong too?
Also, what should it report for directories? Taking a directory of the source of GHC 6.10.4 on my computer as an example (lots and lots of smallish source code files):
$ find . -type f -exec cat {} \; | wc -c
29776950
$ du -sk .
35036 .
Those numbers don't match (taking into account the conversion between bytes in the first case and kb in the second), but I can't see a reason ever to care about the first one. It's not even a very good indicator of what size an uncompressed tar file would be.
Finally, I just went and took a look at a small file on the desktop of my mac. "Get Info" tells me:
Size: 8 KB on disk (782 bytes)
So it *does* report the number of bytes in the file, as well as the disk usage, clearly labeled. Now I really don't exactly know what you're whining about.
Re:Its been done for years already (Score:4, Informative)
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Isn't the physical size what it takes up on the physical media it is stored on (i.e., the same as "disk use"); I think what you mean is the logical size.
Re:Its been done for years already (Score:5, Insightful)
>> Now I really don't exactly know what you're whining about.
> Because it's Apple. Are you new here?
Actually, you're kind of right there. Apple was at the forefront of making computers usable for the average person, and their Human Interface Guidelines specifically recommend that the computer be made to work the way people do, rather than making people work the way the computer does! :)
OSX does this too... (Score:5, Funny)
If you right click a file in Windows and go to Properties you see:
Size: 2.47 KB (2,539 bytes)
Size on disk: 4.00 KB (4,096 bytes)
I thought Mac OS X was supposed to be easy?
Mac OS X does this as well.
... ergo, they are mac users.
The problem is that mac users don't know how to use a computer
Really nice broad brush you've painted us with... (Score:3)
The problem is that mac (sic) users don't know how to use a computer ... ergo, they are mac (sic) users.
Well, at least you didn't capitalize: shows you know the diff between a Macintosh and the Media Access Control sub-layer of Ethernet. ^_^
I know enough highly technical Mac users, most of them OSX-era converts, who use Mac because they DO know how to use a computer. A lot of the time they do things through the command line, something that physically could not be done in the days of the "Classic" Mac OS. Ma
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I do know that I'd prefer to be Patrick Warburton over Justin Long any day.
Re:Its been done for years already (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, did you ever need to? I've been in IT since 1998 and I cannot remember ONE situation where I thought "This is so inconvenient, I need a calculator for this shit. Couldn't they just make a Gigabyte 1000'000'000 Bytes?"
So we've had a defined standard that was, arguably, not the easiest to understand. THEN harddrive manufacturers started their fraud. And THEN people started complaining. So what, and please think about this, would be the right decision here?
As to being complicated: If that is your argument, then all the English speaking countries should switch to metric according to your logic. Obviously, a lot of people don't like that. So why is it okay here and not okay there?
Re:Its been done for years already (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem isn't the definition, it's that OS's and hardware manufacturers have been using different definitions. If both of them would stick to factors of 1000, there would be no problem. If they all stick to 1024, there would be no problem. The problem is that both definitions are used.
Personally I'd vote for 1000, since it's just easier for most people. That way they could easily know that 1001 1MB files do not fit on a 1GB USB stick and all the world would be consistent.
Re:Its been done for years already (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is precisely the definition, or rather that computer people think messing with "mega", "kilo", etc is okay because it's their own niche. Mega is understood as 1,000,000 and kilo as 1,000. I got a CS degree, and I always thought it was stupid how we subverted the meaning. 2^10 aka 1,024 is arbitrary, is in no way 1000 and was chosen purely because it was the closest power of 2 close to 1,000. What if every niche started subverting commonly understood scientific measurements for their own convenience?
We defined bit and byte and the like. Great. We could do that. But we should have left mega and all the prefixes alone. If we weren't happy wit that, go with our own, like 'mebi' series of prefixes has attempted.
Re:Its been done for years already (Score:5, Insightful)
> 1024 is NOT arbitrary. ...
>
> Because computers work in powers of 2.
What he means is, it's an arbitrary choice of *grouping* - there's nothing in the base 2 or base 10 systems that puts 1024 on a digit boundary.
1024 is 2^10 - to be self-consistent, they should have chosen 2^8 or 2^16 for grouping, since 8 = 2^3 and 16 = 2^4, but they chose 2^10 because it happened to be "close to 1000"
They took the "kilo" prefix out of convenience and wedged it into a system not suited for it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
1024 is 2^10 - to be self-consistent, they should have chosen 2^8 or 2^16 for grouping, since 8 = 2^3 and 16 = 2^4, but they chose 2^10 because it happened to be "close to 1000"
Why is it significant what size the bit grouping is w.r.t. the base?
Why would it not be OK to have a grouping of 10 bits, but would it be OK to take a grouping size 2^3? 3 isn't a power of 2. The decimal system (base 10) is grouped in 3 digits, and 3 is nothing significant base 10. To make it self-consisteny by your logic, it should be grouped in 10 or 100 digits. 3 is just to make it easy to read by humans; it's a good number of significant digits most of the time, when writing down numbers in dec
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There is, each power of 10 has it's own name. Kilo just happens to be one of the names that gets more used because it's convenient.
10^1 = deca-
10^2 = hecto-
10^3 = kilo-
After that naming is in steps of power of 3 to make things easier. Now if 2^ system had special naming scheme it would be fine to use whatever power of 2 that is appropriate, but unfortunately it has mixed up commonly used prefixes with totally new meanings. Using kilobytes meaning 1024 bytes makes as much sense as having megafeet to mean a m
Re:Its been done for years already (Score:5, Insightful)
Because computers work in powers of 2.
Except when they don't, like floppies, CDs, DVDs, BluRays, HDDs, dial-ups speeds, networks or any of the many other places where they don't. Eventually you run into issues where there's a GigE (1,000,000,000) network adapter running a 3GHz (3,000,000) processor which is processed in 512 MB (512*1024*1024) RAM before being stored over a 3 Gbit (3,000,000,000) SATAII connection to a 1TB (1,000,000,000,000) hard disk. Every time you run into other sciences like "we need to process 1000 samples/second at 16 bits, that's 16 kbits right?" you run into trouble.
On the other hand, I can go into the details and say that in order to fit the CPU L1 cache it's 64 kB (64*1024) and textures can be maximum 2048*2048 pixels and there are exactly 512 stream processors to work with, you can handle 2^32 bits in an integer and so on and so forth. We're never going to get to where we can ditch base 2 sizes either, they're vital on almost every level once you get into the details.
Everytime you say "this is not a problem, because computers don't interact with the rest of the world and/or it's always trivial to tell" you are seriously deluding yourself. All the people saying "you should all use kB = 1000 and forget the rest" or "you should all use kB = 1024 and forget the rest" are both deluding themselves. We need both and we need clearly defined units for both. That's why I now say use kB = 1000 where it's correct. "Losing" the battle over kB is the only way we'll have kB and KiB, because clearly it's impossible to change the meaning of kilo = 1000 in everything else.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well...
Since we are talking about number values meant for human consumption, the selection of SI versus IEC units is arbitrary. Since most human beings tend to think in powers of 10, the SI units could be thought of as the more appropriate for the task.
Now technically, when it comes to media, the actual number of storage available doesn't necessarily need to be a power of 2. Yes the maximum capacity for a given random access media is limited by the largest value that
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The prefixes (which is what the arguments concern) are.
You lose. (Score:3, Insightful)
Th
Re:Its been done for years already (Score:5, Insightful)
then all the English speaking countries should switch to metric according to your logic.
Yes. Yes they should all switch to metric.
I WISH we would use Metric! (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, according to this [wikipedia.org], the US is one of three backwards countries that are not using the metric system.
According to the US CIA World Factbook in 2006, the International System of Units is the official system of measurement for all nations except for Burma, Liberia, and the United States.
I hate our system and I use metric on my own. My car is all metric. I just have to go back to the old system when communicating with others.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
My car is all metric. I just have to go back to the old system when communicating with others.
I have and use both imperial English and metric and don't have a problem with either. I've even used 16p and 8p but no metric nails.
Falcon
Call me biased. Even call me bigoted, but I will stand by this assertion: American, UK, Oz, and Kiwi scientists and engineers, who have grown up around TWO systems of measurement, Imperial and Metric, are far more adept at scale conversion and at thinking in arbitrary units than European scientists who have been coddled into laziness and complacency because they only have one.
Remember this, people: the metric system, while reasonably well thought-out, is just an arbitrary set of scales. Totally, completely
Re:I hate our system and I use metric on my own. (Score:4, Insightful)
Call me biased. Even call me bigoted, but I will stand by this assertion: American, UK, Oz, and Kiwi scientists and engineers, who have grown up around TWO systems of measurement, Imperial and Metric, are far more adept at scale conversion and at thinking in arbitrary units than European scientists who have been coddled into laziness and complacency because they only have one.
I'm not too sure where you are getting your information there. All of the countries, apart from the USA, that you mention are metric countries for just about everything, especially Australia and New Zealand. I've lived with people from Oz and NZ and most of them have no concept of any imperial measurement.
The UK and Ireland (I'm Irish) are slightly different. Most people would have grown up with metric and imperial measurements. The older the person the more imperial units they would have grown up with.
In Ireland just about all measurements in daily use are in the metric system now. Diesel and petrol are sold by the litre, speed limits and distances are in km (changed over from miles in 2005). The only things that are commonly referred to in imperial units are a pint of beer or a pound of butter (454 g on the label) and people's height and weight. Height and weight is usually refereed to in feet and stone (strangely enough very few people know their weight in pounds). The only notable difference between Ireland and the UK in this regard would be that the UK still uses miles on road signs.
With regards to scientists and engineers, no scientist or engineer in any of those countries (apart from the US maybe), would use imperial units (unless for a very specific or unusual purpose). The very idea of using any imperial units would be laughed out of the room so there is no conversion going on. Where there are two units of measurement being used side by side (example of height and weight in the UK and Ireland) they tend to be used independently. For example most people I know in Ireland would tell you their weight and height in stone and feet respectively, but not that many would be able to tell you their weight and height in kg and metres (though more people would know their weight in kg) even though they now use kg and metres for everything else.
As to your comments on European scientists and engineers it would seem to reinforce the first two sentences of your post.
The advantage of the SI system is not in a single measurement like metres or kg but the fact that they all integrate together with grace and simplicity and most importantly consistently. You say we would be better off with more people having an ability to reason fluently in both systems but you give no good reason why this would be so.
Personally I can see no advantage to an engineer working in two units consecutively, in fact I can only see problems. The potential for miscommunication, errors in assumptions and just plain awkwardness would be very high indeed.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So we've had a defined standard that was, arguably, not the easiest to understand. THEN harddrive manufacturers started their fraud. And THEN people started complaining. So what, and please think about this, would be the right decision here?
The "right" solution is that things dependent on the number of address lines (cache size, RAM size) are in units measured in 2^10, and things not dependent on the number address lines (network bandwidth, HDD/SSD size) are in units measured in 10^3. Files are interesting in that the base unit is a 512 byte sector but they don't depend on address lines, so they should be measured like floppy disks where 1kB is 1024 bytes, 1MB is 1000kB ,and 1GB is 1000MB etc -- but this is confusing, so they'll probably just
Re:Its been done for years already (Score:5, Informative)
This is revisionist at best and really just wrong. Despite all "wisdom" to the contrary, there has never been a universal acceptance of 1 MB = 2^20 bytes on computers. For instance, all of IBMs mainframe hard drives from the 60s and 70s were sold using base-10 prefixes. Early desktop hard drives from the 80s used both. I think the ST506 used base-2, but some other models used base-10. All networking and communications standards (ethernet, modems, PCI, SATA...) use base 10 prefixes for MB/s and Mbit/s. 3.5" floppy disks used NASA-style units where 1 MB = 10^3*2^10. Even while RAM is still almost always measured in base-2 units (due to manufacturing issues making it much easier to produce in power-of-2 sizes -- something which is not true for hard drives) the speed of the memory bus on your CPU is still measured in base-10 units.
It is a *good* idea to have K and M mean the same thing everywhere. A system where a 1 GB/s link transfers 0.93 GB every second is stupid. This is especially important as computers are being used in more and more environments. Should a 1 megapixel camera mean 2^20 pixels? What about CDs with a 44.1 KHz sampling rate?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
> So we've had a defined standard that was, arguably, not the easiest to understand.
> THEN harddrive manufacturers started their fraud. And THEN people started complaining.
> So what, and please think about this, would be the right decision here?
As far back as I know, and this goes back before the 1970s, C.Sci boffins picked up a defined pseudostandard (that 1024 was close though to 1000 to use K, etc) for concepts that required *only* direct binary addressibility like RAM and CPU registers/cache
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Gigabyte does mean 1,000,000,000 bytes. Giga means billion. It doesn't not mean 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bytes. Mega means million, kilo means thousand.
I can't understand why people are actually arguing that doing it wrong is right.
There are even proper units for the 1024 units. Kibi-, mebi-, gibi-, and so on.
People keep harping on about these "proper" units, but the reality is that there's no way in hell you'll ever get anyone but obsessive geeks (the kind that develop OSS software) to adopt prefixes that sound like something you feed your cat. Seriously, those "proper prefixes" suck.
Re:Its been done for years already (Score:5, Insightful)
And BTW, the answer is 168.
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I don't know about that. Cause in my nerd world, this is how many bytes are in a terabyte:
0x10000000000, or
020000000000000, or
10000000000000000000000000000000000000000b
Hmm, that wasn't very hard at all! Maybe there is a reason computer science types use powers of two...
It appears that the difficulty people are encountering is that they don't actually know why kilobytes, megabytes, etc. have the values t
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I think the problem is going to get worse over time, as small differences in KB/KiB and MB/MiB get compounded.
I recently purchased a 1TB drive. After making one large partition and formatting it, df tells me the size is 917G (aka GiB). In my mind, that's a loss of 83 GiB, which is larger than hard drives I got just 7 years ago.
Yes, the normal home user won't notice the difference, but it's still there. I think drive manufacturers are doing a disservice to their customers, but at least they're correct in
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5% of 917 is 45.85. You seem to have calculated 0.5%. So it is actually a lot more than you said.
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You can specify a number of blocks instead of percent with -r
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And its a mac. What did you think? It's as far from a nerdy computer as possible.
Ah.. ignorance.. I've always found computers that provides mystical commands to find out if your EFI is 32 or 64 bit to be nerdy :
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I actually have a great experience from these weird suffixes myself. iftop seems to report traffic amount like 39.6Kb. After years I've still never understood what it means exactly. I think its equivalent to kbit/s. But maybe its equivalent to KB/s. I've always just taken guess about the possibility at what it could mean. Other people also say iftop's reporting is retarted. Anyone know what Kb etc on it *actually* mean?
This is why its bad to have so many different close to each other suffixes.
Is that why (Score:5, Funny)
snow leopard frees 7gigs? Because it can't do the math? #8^)
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Re:Is that why (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Is that why (Score:5, Informative)
how did this get modded up? this is misinformation.
du(1) man page (snow leopard):
-H Symbolic links on the command line are followed, symbolic links
in file hierarchies are not followed.
-h "Human-readable" output. Use unit suffixes: Byte, Kilobyte,
Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte and Petabyte.
df(1) man page (snow leopard):
-H "Human-readable" output. Use unit suffixes: Byte, Kilobyte,
Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte and Petabyte in order to reduce the
number of digits to three or less using base 10 for sizes.
-h "Human-readable" output. Use unit suffixes: Byte, Kilobyte,
Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte and Petabyte in order to reduce the
number of digits to three or less using base 2 for sizes.
this is exactly same output as man pages fro those two in FreeBSD 6.1
this is man page from debian linux:
-h, --human-readable
print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)
-H, --si
likewise, but use powers of 1000 not 1024
so it seems to me that behavior of darwin is exactly same as gnu tools.
Re:Is that why (Score:4, Informative)
Tilting at windmills (Score:5, Informative)
The SI prefixes have been around for nearly 5 decades, and have a specific meaning used by everybody. Every scientist uses them in one way or another, and for every last one of of them, they have the same meaning.
Why can't we, the C.S. people, accept that?
Giga is 10^9. It has been 10^9 since it was created. It was never, ever meant to be anything but 10^9.
If you want to talk about 1024^3, then it's Gibi. Gibi is 2^30 since it was created. It was never, ever meant to be anything but 2^30.
Get over it.
(and yes, I try to always use GiB whenever it's appropriate).
customer enlightenment and its drawbacks (Score:2, Insightful)
The SI prefixes have been around for nearly 5 decades, and have a specific meaning used by everybody. Every scientist uses them in one way or another, and for every last one of of them, they have the same meaning.
Why can't we, the C.S. people, accept that?
The lasting ambiguity for hard drives has perhaps been less a matter of computer science than one of marketing. (The pervasiveness of inch measurements is a heavy hint at uninterest in SI.)
It used to be that companies were happy if there was a general impression that the drives were bigger than they actually were, because hard drive storage costs weren't negligible and people actually risked running out of space. What incentive would Northgate and Zeos have had for prominently pointing out that their Minisc
Re:customer enlightenment and its drawbacks (Score:4, Informative)
Uh.. the inch is technically an SI unit. It is defined as exactly 2.54 cm.
No, it's not. SI uses the metre for length measurement, and nothing else. You can alter it with the various prefixes, and there's is only one thousand meters in a kilometre, not twenty-four more.
The "inch" from the United States customary units is defined as 2.54 centimetres, but it doesn't make it part of the SI..
I agree with HD manufacturers too. (Score:5, Insightful)
For things where there's a clear "address bus" that consists of all possible permutations of a binary bit field, it makes sense to use the powers of two. The 2^10 kilo-, 2^20- mega, 2^30 giga- is just a convenience in terminology due to their approximate equivalence to 10^3, 10^6, 10^9, respectively; however, the bigger you go, obviously they diverge quite a bit.
For things addressed by a system of arbitrary track/cylinder numbers, say, 336 tracks or 1435 tracks, and arbitrary platter/head numbers, it's ridiculous to say that they should follow the "convenience" of the powers of two scheme.
So, how should flash drives be measured and marketed? While the components are physically based on an address bus, they present themselves to the host with sector numbers just like the spinning drives do. They can also reserve some "spare" cells in their internal mapping, for wear-leveling or error correction. I'd say they could easily make the case for marketing under SI/IEEE powers of ten.
Re:I DO NOT agree with HD manufacturers too. (Score:3, Informative)
Because they make the disk with a sector size of 512 bytes (likely 4096 bytes inside the drive)
With modern drives and most especially flash drives, the CHS values normally are physically meaningless.
Except, with a flash drive the erase block size is likely to be 2^19 or 2^20 bytes. It's easy to set the drive so that the cylinders are 1048576 bytes, just set the heads to 64 and the sectors to 32. Each cylinder is then 1Mbyte, one real megabyte and one or two erase blocks.
Then 2^20 bytes is a reasonabl
1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes (Score:5, Informative)
These IEEE recomendations seam like common sense to me.
1 KB = 1,000 bytes
1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes
1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes
And for you droids and androids out there:
1 KiB = 1,024 bytes
1 MiB = 1,048,576 bytes
1 GiB = 1,073,741,824 bytes
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
1 KB = 0x3E8 bytes
1 MB = 0xF4240 bytes
1 GB = 0x3B9ACA00 bytes
I might be able to remember 0x3E8 but the rest would difficult.
1 KiB = 0x400 bytes
1 MiB = 0x10000 bytes
1 GiB = 0x40000000 bytes
Nice and clean.
Re:1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes (Score:5, Insightful)
If it is more convenient to use KiB, MiB, and GiB, then use them. Just don't call them KB, MB, and GB.
I don't understand why the hell this is so difficult.
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I don't understand why the hell this is so difficult.
Young padawan, there's about 30-40 years' worth of computer literature / documentation / discussions(Usenet) out there with no mention of Mibigibitibibytes anywhere, as well as thousands of applications that use the traditional MB/GB/TB interpretation.
There's a debate? Don't think so (Score:2, Insightful)
If it were a debate, there would be discussion and consensus building. This is a case of marketing trumping computer science.
We see it all over. When facts, figures or even units of measure are are hard to adjust to, just spin it into something that makes more sense.
I wonder, though. If they decided to call these "metric memory units" would I feel any better about it? Perhaps I would. But the fact remains that there is still 8 bits to a byte and not 10. That's where the problem starts and addressing t
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But the same thing is happening with milk and other food producers seeking to change the definition of "organic" so they can sell more food without actually being organic.
That's probably not the best example given that "organic" has several much older definitions [reference.com] which happen to include almost all food, while the newer marketing term has given us such gross violations of language as "organic table salt".
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Wait.. organic table salt??? That doesn't even make sense from the new-agery definition. What do they do, extract it from the sweat of organically fed livestock?
Re:There's a debate? Don't think so (Score:5, Insightful)
"This is a case of marketing trumping computer science."
No, this is a case of standards trumping common (mis)usage. Metric prefixes have been in use for centuries, and they are powers of ten. That's how the national and international standards have ALWAYS used them.
Those prefixes are convenient, and have been used for powers of two in casual, informal usage. But powers of two were never part of any official standard until recently, when NEW and DIFFERENT prefixes were added.
Scientists and engineers have always used powers of ten. Manufacturers used to be careful to distinguish between the formal definition (powers of ten) and the casual usage (powers of two). For example, Intel lists the exact number of bytes in parentheses whenever they use the casual meaning of the prefixes, showing that they were aware of the potential for confusion.
But many reporters and hobbyists were not trained in engineering or science, and missed the distinction. So you ended up with what I think of as "AOL prefixes". Microsoft ignored the standards, as they so often do. They may have been confused by earlier systems, such as UNIX and RT-11, which reported space in numbers of disk blocks, rather than bytes. In early UNIX, the ls command lists the number of bytes without prefixes, and the du and df commands list the number of disk blocks, not the number of bytes.
I don't expect hobbyists or journalists to get the prefixes right. I can live with the misuse of the prefixes. But it really bothers me when someone complains when the prefixes are used correctly, in compliance to published international standards.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's be clear on this situation: HDD makers, instead of making larger HDDs would rather spin the numbers to make them appear larger instead of actually being larger.
No that's not clear at all. All the facts say otherwise. HDD makers have consistently made their disks larger and larger in capacity every year, more quickly than any other consumer device ever made, while the price has stayed the same or dropped.
Let me be clear on the situation: HDD manufacturers use round decimal SI-prefix numbers first and
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No, you missed my point, which is that the MB/MiB controversy is irrelevant.
Imagine that in two adjacent countries, two electronics industries with the same exact level of expertise both produce HDDs. Country A mandates the use of MB and country B mandates MiB.
In Country A the 1 TB drives comes out as soon as the first manufacturer is able to bring them to market. In Country B, the technology is not *quite* ready yet for the slightly increased density of TiB drives, so they come out a month later. A mon
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"And to do this, they have changed a standard unit of measure."
Bullocks. What they did was *revert back* to the standard unit of measure. What when bytes where 7 or 9 bits? Were you complaining back then? Shouldn't we be calling it an octet?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte [wikipedia.org]
Yeah, sure, maybe they did it because it was commercially advantageous. But this really makes more sense.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You do know that 'byte' is defined as the smallest addressable unit in a system, and is not always 8 bits? There have been computers that used 6, 7, 8, and 9 bit bytes.
Once computers started using integrated circuits, there was motivation to standardize on 8 bit bytes in order to use commodity parts. But byte is ambiguous enough that communications standards use the term octet instead.
If a computer is built with bit-wide parts (tubes, transistors, diodes, early ICs), a byte might not be eight bits. If it is
Benchmarks (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Benchmarks (Score:5, Informative)
No they won't. Network speeds use the same terminology that RF engineers use: base-10 prefixes.
FFS (Score:2)
Okay, so technically, (Score:3, Insightful)
Kilo = 10^3
Mega = 10^6
Giga = 10^9
Tera = 10^12
and so forth.
Rewriting these to go by the tens digit in the exponent attached to 2 (2^10 = 1024, 2^20 = 1048576, etc.) is kinda... stupid, actually, since it strips the meaning of the prefixes. I know that hardware manufacturers heart binary, but this is one of those cases where doing so would be defacing the English language and all languages which use these prefixes.
Re:Okay, so technically, (Score:4, Informative)
Mega = 1<<20
Giga = 1<<30
Tera = 1<<40
Goes by ten!
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The prefixes are different already, there is no centibyte for millibyte, it's not really a scientific measurement to begin with.
So there is no problem with using them in the original context (2^10....)
And no logical reason whatsoever for the terms (KiB,MiB,GiB) to have been created in the first place
Should have been binary from the start... (Score:2, Interesting)
... truth is BASE 10 should have never been used for computers from the start. The storage hardware manufacturers just wanted to lie to make their products look better then they are (as per usual in business).
Hardware manufacturers being close to computer sciences really should have known better. By keeping the standard and just publishing both BASE2 and BASE10 just like how where I live we have english AND french words on packaging.
Debate? (Score:3, Informative)
I always thought it was just clueless marketing morons who couldn't do math. The same group of people responsible for marketing CRT-based monitor sizes (the TUBE is 17", including behind the 2" bezel), tape drive storage capacities (assuming 2:1 compression ratio!) and all electronics battery life measurements (examples too numerous to list).
I can't count the number of times I had to explain to people who bought an extra hard drive where 3% of it disappeared when they checked the size in Windows Explorer.
While Apple is certainly rules by the marketing drones, they aren't morons by any stretch of the imagination. I think the engineering people finally just gave in when their grandmother called and asked why her new 500 GB drive was only showing 482 GB when installed. I can hear them crying with frustration all the way over on the other coast.
The ripoff scales non-linearly with size (Score:5, Informative)
For 1KB the difference is 24 bytes.
For 1MB, 2**20 - 10**6 = 48576, 48KB difference or 4.6% less than the larger of the two.
For 1GB, 2**30 - 10**9 = 73741824 (73MB), 6.9%.
For a 1TB hard disk you're being short-changed by 9%: 94 gigabytes!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Personally, it would be nice if this was configurable (it may very well be in some config file somewhere). Geeks in the know would set it to binary
Wait 8 weeks (Score:3, Interesting)
The difference between 2^30 and 10^9 is about 7.4%. Disc drive capacity has been growing at least as fast as CPU power, doubling every 18 month, for as long as I can remember. This means that it takes about 8 weeks for drive capacity to grow by 7.4%. This should mean that by the time the marketing literature has made it through the bureaucratic process of being reviewed for release it will probably be correct!
What about memory manufacturers? (Score:2)
Use the standard terms in the standard way (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as techies complain about people using technical terms inaccurately, we should use the SI prefixes in ways that mean what they mean. The fact that 2^10 is close to 1000 doesn't mean we get to hijack K/M/G to mean 2^10/2^20/2^30.
And mentally we're using them to mean powers of 1000 anyway. How often do you _really_ mean 1024 when you say 1K? Personally, I'm always thinking 1000-ish.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"How often do you _really_ mean 1024 when you say 1K?"
Every day. But then again I've been at this for over two decades, so it's rather hard-wired into my brain.
Clarifying the confusion (Score:2)
The desktop support dude knows what's going on. He knows that GB values, as printed on the box, is always optimistic from the marketers vantage point.
The computer science dude already thinks in hexadecimal, so the casual mention of a number like 12 GB is intrinsically confusing. Is the "12" base-10? Is the "10" in "base-10" decimal? Or is it "base 0F+1"?
Everyone else just gives $127.39 to the GeekSquad weenie for installation. They think in dollars, and want to know how many pictures will fit.
SI units vs. binary units (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm happy Apple is doing this. The use of SI unit names for base 2 values was convenient and gave relatively small errors for low numbers. But up above a gigabyte, and certainly in the terabyte range it's just plain wrong. And certainly nobody who's not a CS person is going to think "Oh, yeah, I divide the base 10 exponent by 3 and multiply by 10 to get the base 2 exponent because this is a piece of computer equipment!".
The binary SI prefixes aren't that hard to use when they really make sense. Computer science should get with the rest of the world in how things are measured and quanitifed and stop doing so with its own special language understood by those well versed in the field unless that language uses words and terms clearly different from the standard ones.
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And certainly nobody who's not a CS person is going to think "Oh, yeah, I divide the base 10 exponent by 3 and multiply by 10 to get the base 2 exponent because this is a piece of computer equipment!".
Computer science people use the current units because they fit cleanly together and they do not have a direct relation to other normal SI units. It's not like you are going to be trying to divide a gigabyte by a kilogram. It also not like the bits can be made a different size as are bolts to fit into the SI units more naturally.
"Oh, yeah, I divide the base 10 exponent by 3 and multiply by 10 to get the base 2 exponent because this is a piece of computer equipment!
So you think programmers are going to be such much happier thinking that their program will run in 1.048576MB instead of 1MB (Mibibyte for you). How are things going to get when p
Let's see them be consistant. (Score:3, Funny)
I guess their marketing will now talk about the MacBook Pro with 3.75GB memory?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
But only under the pie chart. Free+Total still adds up to 4GB (3.81GB + 199MB at the moment)
So yeah, someone probably added the new math in the wrong place.
Tebi, Zebi, and Pebi? (Score:4, Insightful)
When using prefixes that end in 'a' or 'o', I feel macho. Megabyes! Teraflops! Yottapwnage! Yeah, baby!
From my cold, dead hands, Apple.
BTW, who thought of the cutsey name "Apple" anyway? Nice name. Pfft.
Silly names (Score:4, Interesting)
Binary prefixes for binary units (e.g. GiB for 'gibibyte') have been promoted by the International Electrotechnical Commission and endorsed by IEEE and other standards organizations, but to date there's been limited acceptance
Nobody's going to use an annoyingly cutesy word like "gibibyte", which seems just as silly now as it did ten years ago [slashdot.org]. Using the abbreviated prefixes might be a good idea, though.
Just for reference (since some people are freaking out about how much space they're "losing") here's the percentage difference between the SI and binary sizes:
Kilobyte: 2.3%
Megabyte: 4.6%
Gigabyte: 6.9%
Terabyte: 9.1%
Petabyte: 11.2%
Exabyte: 13.3%
So for the foreseeable future your hard drive will be about 10% smaller than advertised. Not a big deal, IMHO (it's not like you're paying for the missing bits), but still worth pointing out.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see what's inherently sillier about "gibibyte" than "gigabyte." If you are complaining about being cutesy, why not complain about "byte" [wikipedia.org] which was derived from "bite." BTW, "byte" doesn't even have a standard definition (though I've never encountered a confusing usage), so to most correct and precise, you'd have to say "gibioctet."
If "gibibyte" sounds sillier to you than "gigabyte," just give it some time. Many words sound silly when they're first introduced.
No. (Score:3, Insightful)
Is Apple's move the first major step in forcing computer science to adopt [...]
No, it's not. Disc drive makers have been doing it for years, and it's the right thing to do for a multitude of human factors reasons. Humans use base ten innately, and it is easier to rationalize disc space in base ten units. (The same goes for file sizes, by the way.)
The fact that computers use binary deep down inside them is a pretty flimsy argument for insisting that we do the same, merely because some peripheral device is attached to said computer.
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First of all, a byte has never been inherently 8 bits (and thus never has been inherently base 2), see for instance the *first* line on Wikipedia. It's just a convention that got adopted. But generally, no matter which base, a computer will always understand and calculate sizes, no matter if they are base 2 or base 10. How many people can really calculate in base 2? And why should we?
Hey, lets invent a machine, decide that base 2 is easiest to implement and hey, just let the entire human race try to do calc
People use base 10 (Score:3, Insightful)
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Computers have used base 2 since the 40s/50s, therefore base 2 is the standard.
You design a computer that works entirely in base 10 and you can define the standard. In this case, due to the nature of computers, they use base 2. If people can't deal with that, they probably shouldn't be using a computer in the first place.
Re:computers user base 2 (Score:4, Interesting)
that "standard"? (Score:5, Informative)
The "standard"? All of the standards associations recommend using G/M/K as prefixes with the base-10 meanings, and using the unambiguous Gi/Mi/Ki (gibi/mebi/kibi) for base-2 measurements. One standards organization was willing to allow the deprecated use of G/M/K as base-2 for measuring semiconductor memory (i.e., RAM) only.
Do you also recommend that we will suddenly measure disk drive capacity in a different unit if/when we all move to using quantum computers or computers based on some other new currently unfamiliar technology?
Oh, and BTW, at least one of the technologies which has a small chance of replacing current RAM technologies, phase-change memory, could theoretically store 3 or 5 states per unit cell instead of 2 or 4, given the right material undergoing the phase change. One of the reasons not to do it is because it would be a pain to convert to and from base-2 to interface with the computer, so in the long run it is possible (but not necessarily likely, because there is a large initial development cost) that some computing devices will be designed to work in base-3 or base-5 if only to better utilize the abilities of PCM.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The ALU in a computer uses base 2, but that's IRRELEVANT.
Do all your spreadsheets show their answers in hexadecimal? No, because that would be moronic. I/O operations convert data into *human readable* format.
There is nothing about hard drive capacity that has anything to do with powers of 2. The number of cylinders, sectors and heads have never been constrained to a power of two. As soon as a single factor of the size is not a power of 2, it blows away any inkling of utility in using powers of two for hard
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I have a better idea... (Score:4, Informative)
The negative terminal of a battery supplies the electrons and they move from negative to positive when a conductor is placed between the two poles. The two popular notations for charge flow, "Conventional Flow Notation" and "Electron Flow Notation", do not dispute this. The difference is that "Electron Flow Notation" illustrates the physical movement of electrons (from "negative" to "positive") and "Conventional Flow Notation" illustrates the "movement" of the electrical charge from the "positive" terminal to the "negative" terminal. As electrons move from - to +, the "positive" side of the battery becomes less positive in relation to the "negative" side, effectively meaning that the electrical charge is moving from + to - (in "Conventional Flow Notation"). The electrons are still moving from the - battery terminal to the + battery terminal, though.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:bug (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that's a big reason why people have a problem with "KiBi," "MeBi," "GiBi" etc. - they just sound silly.
Since "bit" is a contraction of "binary digit" anyway, I would prefer something like "bi-kilobyte," "bi-megabyte," etc., written "KB(sub)2"
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Does it make a difference though?
To the end user, it doesn't matter how many bytes are in a MB or a GB, be it 1000000 or 56125142, the end result is all they'll ever see. So the difference is going to be if they see 17MB or 16.2MB. To them, its just a number, they don't care where that number came from, all they know is that 17Mb is going to take up a certain percentage of the hard drive.
The only people it actually poses a problem for are those that actually do know the difference, the ones that prefer to a
Naw, not even those who know the difference care (Score:3, Interesting)
It is kind of like the rated speed of a network card. Sure I've got a gigibit ethernet card. But unlike I assume most non-nerds, I *know* it doesn't move a giga*byte* per second--it moves a giga*bit* per second. So how many seconds does it take to move a giga*byte*? Well, I amost always convert GB to Gb by just multiplying by ten. Yeah there are 8 bits in a byte and I should be using 8, but there is all kinds of error correction and stuff that get shoved down the pipe too that I should be accounting fo