Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Isn't counting a GB as 1000000000 bytes a bug?
1024 is NOT arbitrary.
http://www.sharpened.net/helpcenter/answer.php?40
Because computers work in powers of 2.
The SI definition is made. Marketing is bullshit, always has been always will be.
You build a computer that works in base 10 instead of base 2 and then you can call it arbitrary.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Next thing you know Apple will be saying that pi == 3.14 because it's easier to work with than 3.1415...
Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse. -- L. Long
I'm sorry but you are so wrong. Macs are for PRODUCTIVE people. That's why photographers, videographers, scientists, developers, and just people who like to sit at their computer and do some work use Macs. We have UNIX level security whereas Windows has Tomy Tippee security. Actually that's not fair, Tomy Tippee computers have more security. We have a nice, well laid out interface that is uncluttered and above all functional which Windows tries to copy but keeps failing to do well. We can do more things right from opening up our computer from a blank install than Windows can dream about. We can even connect to Microsoft's Exchange Server platform without buying any extra software and yet Windows can't. It's true that Windows can play solitaire right from the word go without having to install anything but then once again it just proves that Macs are for PRODUCTIVE people. Windows is just for lazy leeches of society. Want proof? What does big business run their gear on? What do politicians generally run? What do lawyers and accountants generally run? How much benefit to society are they. NONE.
Feeding a troll but I'm sick of seeing the argument is that the sound of "gibi" is more childish than not knowing what "giga" actually means. Using such a petty argument against clear communication is itself extremely childish.