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

Re:Its been done for years already

[Khyber]

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.

Stupidity

[ddillman]

Next thing you know Apple will be saying that pi == 3.14 because it's easier to work with than 3.1415...