Apple Kicks HDD Marketing Debate Into High Gear

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?"

Comments

Is that why

[MeNeXT]

snow leopard frees 7gigs? Because it can't do the math? #8^)

MAC games

[Anonymous Coward]

A friend bought a new hard drive, 500 GB. We stuck it in his MAC, and then his MAC said that it only had 460 GB! WTF? Is this another form of the Apple tax or what?

At least now they've fixed the OS to report the drive as 500 GB, but will that 40 GB really just be gobbled up by the OS?

Let's see them be consistant.

[eddy]

I guess their marketing will now talk about the MacBook Pro with 3.75GB memory?

Re:Tilting at windmills

[Anonymous Coward]

(and yes, I try to always use GiB whenever it's appropriate).

Good, then all sane, intelligent people will know who the stupid fuctards are. Whenever anyone speaks the words "Gibibyte", "mibibyte", "tebibyte", "Kibibyte", etc they sound like the fucktarded child who has an IQ of 10 and should slit their fucking wrists, not across but down to make sure they get the fucking job done. The fucking plus side to all of this is then there would be no fucktarded shitdot sheeple left to post on shitdot.

GO AHEAD FUCKING FLAME AWAY OR WASTE YOUR GODDAMNED MOD POINTS FUCKTARDED SHITDOT SHEEPLE
BETTER YET GO FUCKING KILL YOUSELVES FUCKTARDED SHITDOT SHEEPLE!

The PROBLEM is SI UNITS

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

No, the problem is those pesky SI units. You know who uses SI units? THE FRENCH DO. Americans use good ol' fashioned imperial units! Inches, instead of "centimeters"! Miles, instead of "kilometers" (is that 1000 or 1024 meters?) Pounds, instead of "kilograms" - the list is endless.

And now you expect proud imperialist americans to bow down to SI units and accept "mebibytes"? Seriously, MEBIBYTES? A MEGABYTE is one thousand and twenty four bytes. A MEBIBYTE is when you are not sure what's on that burger.

1024 is just a more natural unit than 1000. It makes calculation much easier too (just like with distances, volumes, and weights)! What is a "kibibyte"? When you say "kilobyte" it is immediately clear that you mean 7.31 twitter messages, but a kibibyte? Totally meaningless. And on the large end of the scale, one LoC ("Library of Congress" for you Canadian heathens!) is precisely 10 terabytes. In SI units, that would be 10.9951 tibibytes or some similar crap. Totally meaningless.

JOIN THE FIGHT AGAINST SOCIALIST SI UNITS TODAY! AMERICAN IMPERIALISM RULES!

OSX does this too...

[PC and Sony Fanboy]

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.

The problem is that mac users don't know how to use a computer ... ergo, they are mac users.

Re:Its been done for years already

[cheftw]

I got a CS degree

Because computers work in powers of 2

You needed to tell him that?

Either his university sucks, or you are a condescending bastard.

Re:There's a debate? Don't think so

[zippthorne]

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:Its been done for years already

[e4g4]

That would be one bite. I think it would take more than that to get through a TB disk drive.

Re:1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes

[Anonymous Coward]

There's also 30-40 years of COBOL code hanging around. Does that mean we have to cling to it too?