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^)

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!

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.