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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?"
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.
snow leopard frees 7gigs? Because it can't do the math? #8^)
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
And people who manufacture things for computers should adhere to that standard.
Next up: Astronomists convert to the 100-day year.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
I have always hated conventional electric polarity. The + of a battery or circuit is always the one supplying the electrons and confuses anyone who understands something about electron flow. This needs to change first, then we can worry about prefixes.
This makes perfect sense to me. We're getting to the point where the OS reports filesizes back to the user as 17MB or 1.3GB or whatever. It makes sense that they would settle on one easy to remember method of expressing those values. Sure, the geeks among us understand the difference between a GiB and a GB, but we shouldn't expect the average layperson to have to know that 1GiB really is 1,073,741,824 bytes. Let the basic Explorer or Finder views report the filesize back in simplistic, rounded values that most people will understand, so long as the actual real filesize values are available in the Get Info windows, Explorer properties, command line or wherever.
And people who manufacture things for people should adhere to that standard. Computers are the means, not the end.
Write Only Memory: Another pointless blog.
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).
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.
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It is relatively simple, if you have the small amount like 1 quilobyte, that the octet is with 1024, but to measure to him is to the end of the multiplied difference, so of such way possibly the hour for a modification.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1541
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
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 things further down the pipe makes the solution inconsistent. Perhaps the best solution is to take everyone off of the decimal counting system and either cut a finger off of the hands and a toe off of the feet of every newborn or bio-engineer everyone to have 8 fingers and toes on each hand and foot would reduce confusion a bit.
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. And to do this, they have changed a standard unit of measure. 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. The same thing is happening in other computer hardware makers where laptop battery life is exaggerated. (Yeah, I can get two weeks of batter life out of my laptop ... if I don't use it!) It is past time that consumer advocacy and government agencies step in to regulate the false advertising.
This mean the downloads will seem faster on a Mac. What about benchmarks? Does this mean we are going to see tons of amateur reviews with inaccurate results? I hope Apple gives us a way to switch back to GiB mode in any case.
This is going to be extremely annoying when downloading files on the internets. They'll be larger than they appear.
the prefixes "kilo," "mega," "giga," "tera," etc. all go by tens.
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.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
... 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.
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.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
No, it's not a bug, it's an instance of computer scientists not thinking through their measurements carefully when assigning prefixes. Mega is normally 1 million and Giga is normally 1 billion, reassigning them to be defined based upon base two for one type of measurement was a serious mistake.
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!
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!
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Are memory manufacturers following the same practice? Or do hard drive manufacturers and memory manufactures use the same unit of measurement differently in their two products?
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 Miniscribe and Micropolis (?) 65MB drives really were what they said they were, rather than what customers optimistically presumed they'd be?
Now, by contrast, even my laptop has 500 gig-somethings -- I never bothered to see which, as I don't suppose I'll ever use more than one fifth of the space; and if by chance I ever do come close to filling it up I'll replace it with a 4TB drive or whatever's the ludicrous norm by that time.
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.
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.
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.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Yeah, but the alternative Mebi and Gibi sounds like something out yaoi. So I'd rather stick with 1 Gigabyte = 1024 Megabytes.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
I guess their marketing will now talk about the MacBook Pro with 3.75GB memory?
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Because they sound fucking ridiculous.
Seriously? These sound like next generation Valley Girl names, not self-respecting geek prefixes.
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.
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. 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.
Visit the
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.
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 which happen to include almost all food, while the newer marketing term has given us such gross violations of language as "organic table salt".
Visit the
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"
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
> The 2^10 kilo-, 2^20- mega, 2^30 giga- is just a convenience in terminology
and I've decided, long ago, to use kibi, mebi, and gibi instead even if it means I have to explain myself more. Less convenient, more accurate.
I don't pretend to know what is best for anyone else, however. Unlike a lot of people on both sides of this flamewar. (Of course, I would prefer that more people would use the binary prefixes, as then I would eventually have less explaining to do.)
...then all the English speaking countries should switch to metric according to your logic..
Actually, according to this, 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.
When the term "organic food" was first coined, it meant something very specific -- that it not contain things that are not natural and that means that are not naturally based were not used in growing it. You're picking too low for a term that hasn't existed that long.
It is even more confusing for flash storage and SDD, where some people will expect capacities to be powers of 2 (because of a simplistic view of these devices), but manufacturers treat them like HDDs (1 GB = 1 billion bytes).
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Yes, from now on all system calls on OS X will report sizes in 10 bit decimal bytes instead of the confusing and nonstandard 8 bit bytes in current usage.
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 reasonable size for an allocation unit too.
The smallest power of 10 that has 512 as a factor is 10^9. That is far too large for a cylinder or an allocation unit, even on a terabyte drive.
To put it bluntly, they use powers of two unless it's needed to con the consumer.
Funny how they 'fixed' this just in time for SSDs to start catching on, so now hard drives will be 'correct' and SSD capacity will be misreported.
Allyn Malventano
Storage Editor, PC Perspective
this sig was brought to you by the letter
Electrons always flow from negative to positive, not vice-versa. That's basic electronics 101 stuff.
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.
Everyone will be confused what you really mean. Everyone else will just *sound* sound like they have a lisp.
The functional programming/lambda calculus guys should be right at home though. . .
This is a case of marketing trumping computer science.
Actually, it's a case of human factors trumping computer science, which is a good thing, since few computer users are computer scientists. At least 5, if not 10 standard deviations of hard disc sales go to human beings who are not computer scientists . Human beings use base 10 innately, and there is absolutely no reason to force them to think in base two, just because they've attached something to a computer.
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!
Erm...this table salt was grown without fertilisers or pesticides?
I used to work in a supermarket. It was so much fun watching people trying to work out how to ask for the non-'organic'-certified products.
"Excuse me, where are the inorganic apples?"
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
This doesn't have much to do with computer science and more to do with computer engineering. Being a computer scientist myself, I'm perfectly happy with a kilobyte being defined as 1000 bytes, while still using the word "kilobyte" when speaking of "approximately 1000 bytes". The reason powers of two are so common in computing is because it has been easier to build computer systems around them. It makes for "cleaner" and more "natural" engineering, when you're working with binary systems.
However, while RAM chips most often have capacities in powers of 2, because of the way addressing is done, this is not true of mechanical hard drives... It just seems strange to try to redefine SI prefixes because they have come to be incorrectly used in the field. Hard drive manufacturers are using them properly, because it makes sense in their domain (their drive capacities are not linked to powers of two). On that note, I'm pretty sure most SSD makers use 1 KB = 1024 bytes, because it's more convenient for them.
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
this should be
1 kB = 1,000 bytes
there is no such thing as Kelvin Bytes
That just feels like bad english at first. I knew it threw me for a loop.
I guess if you were teaching high school electronics (and you know, lived in a country that cared about such things) you'd try to sink it in by saying something like "The electrons want to get a positive attitude, so they move away from the negative". It isn't accurate, but it does help sink the flow direction home.
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.
'Organic' means carbon based.
"I sprinkled some anthrax onto your salad. It's organic!"
As far as I understand it, anyone can slap the label "organic food" onto ANYTHING. There has never been a real 'food' definition. Governments give certification, so you can use the a label like "USDA certified organic". But it's not illegal to simply put 'organic' on any food.
I agree with all your other points though.
"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.
"will that 40 GB really just be gobbled up by the OS?"
Give them about four or five more years, your answer will be a resounding 'yes.'
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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.
I don't think disk drive makers are avoiding making larger disks, they just want to promote the disks in the best light possible. And when it comes down to it, changing units doesn't change the number of sectors on the platter.
So long as we're all clear on which units are being used, either one is fine. Since most humans don't know the binary units, and there's no natural reason why the number of sectors on a disk should match power of two boundaries, I'm find with using the more common decimal prefixes.
How long until they try to change file sizes to go along with this scheme?
While this trick might make the HDDs seem larger it won't let them store more files.
Can you imagine tech support having to deal with someone who can't understand why their 1 TB HDD says it's full when they've only used approximately %90 of it.
So lets pretend that we've just completed writing this code, as opposed to having just completed sabotaging it -Altera
...we should just define hard drive size by how many minutes of pr0n can be stored.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Well of course not; why the fuck would you want to?
You mean, like 12 inches in a foot, and how many feet in a yard? And yards in a mile?
American tech articles crack me up when they talk about standards like this. They're more than willing to fight for a 'proper' definition for computer tech... but couldn't care less if their outdated imperial system is far inferior to metric.
I'm incline to believe that the only reason people stick to outdated nomenclature is because they are lazy and couldn't be bothered to change, even if it is in their best interest.
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 for. Thus I figure 10 is good enough and plus the math is easy. With WiFi, I'd probably use 11 or 12 bits per byte. Basically, I dont care about the *exact* number, I just want an estimate.
Same with how big a file is. Unless I'm writing code and need to verify I'm writing out the *exact* number of bytes, I figure the numbers I see either are rounded to the hard drives block size, or they account for other stuff. Heck, even Explorer gives you like two file sizes on its property panel. Unless you add that cute little -h to df, most implementations will show you a number based on block size and *that* number depends on an environment variable.
In short, there are multiple standards and more most use cases we are looking for estimates to filesize or transfer speed. There are always hidden assumptions in most cases.
That all said, if I've got a file that contains the hex dump below, I better get back 6 bytes from my OS. ls -l shows the right number.
coryking@localhost ~ $ hexdump -C testing
74 65 73 74 2e 0a |test..|
PS: Those weren't "junk" characters slashcode! When are you going to get a better editor--steal the one used by stackoverflow. You use a `` around something and it interprets it as code.
PPS: Just learned learned there was a hexdump utility. Cool!
The only requirement is that all references to whatever particular measurable quantity is consistent.
The whole 1k = 1024 bits - for consumers - just because 1024 = 2^10 thing was foolish from the beginning.
- real hackers don't have sigs -
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
Mod parent "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 foremost for convenience because that is how people count and think, in decimal. It's a minor secondary consideration that the decimal "looks" larger than the binary. The largest drive in wide consumer release now is 2Tb, roughly 10% short of some imaginary 2^41 drive that you seem to think consumers are getting cheated out of. Manufacturers could certainly, unquestionably market a 2.2TB drive/2TiB drive if they wanted to. But nothing is free in this world. Even naively assuming the price would stay the same, it would take them an additional few weeks of development time to put the increased areal density on the platters. Which means the higher capacity drives would be released a little bit later. Higher capacity drives being released over time at the same price point. Hmm, sound familiar? It should -- that's the situation as it currently exists.
Hence, my contention is that after all the sturm und drang of it all, switching to TiB would in fact be a complete wash.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
This is such a typical american response. Nevermind that the american are the ones that have been using an incorrect system of measurement for 5+ decades, it's everyone else who should adapt!
Fixed that for ya.
The SI prefixes have been around for nearly 5 decades
The SI binary prefixes have been around since 1999. Binary prefix
The units aren't in common - ordinary - use.
What the user needs to know are answers to simple, practical, questions: How many movies at HD resolution can I store on a drive of this size?
A ballpark estimate will do.
Calculating inches is easy. ... uh ... nevermind. You might need to use 1/6th.
1 inch = 1/7th of the size of my
It's probably best to do this measurement alone.
"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
Yeah, sure, maybe they did it because it was commercially advantageous. But this really makes more sense.
No, the summary used those correctly. You have the SI prefixes and the SI binary prefixes, which incidentally weren't approved until 1998, decades after computers started using the standard SI prefixes for binary numbers.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
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?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
"Organic" is poorly defined in relation to food if the test is "natural things and natural methods." All farming is unnatural: plants don't naturally grow in convenient rows, and livestock don't conveniently choose to mate only the tastiest specimens.
So it only really makes sense to apply the term on a case by case basis according to someone's arbitrary whim. "Organic" on the label doesn't mean anything to you unless you know the specific regulations regarding that specific food product bearing it.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The government needs to be consistent. Either hold computer manufacturers accountable or else let every other industry use the same "marketing" (i.e. lying) techniques to dupe consumers.
Because computer manufacturers aren't underdelivering. Harddrive and network manufacturers delivers exactly what they promise.
And as for the memory manufacturers. They overdeliver. If I ordered a computer with 4,000,000,000 bytes of RAM, but for some reason I got 4,294,967,296 bytes instead. Why would I complain?
The sooner everything reports in the correct units, the better. Using one definition here, and another there, THAT's been getting on my nerves. Funny though, this reminds me of the switch to the metric system here in Canada. You have a lot of old people who have one set of units ingrained in their skulls who's number one argument is that they get ripped off at the fuel pump or for a jug of milk now. ("Look Martha, these cans of soup are smaller now too!")
People like to make responses like this, but "Wii" sounded kinda silly for about a few hours. In comparison, "mebibyte" has managed to continue to sound absurd for a solid decade now, and not just to some tiny, immature minority, and to the extent that it has quite seriously harmed usage of it. Even GIMP hasn't been affected nearly this much by its name. At this point it should be obvious that the binary prefixes aren't like other well-established names that sounded kinda funny a bit at first, but rather are terrible to an extent that few other names these days can match.
"Now with Bonus Memory Free for the same price!"
Please, one of you smart fellas tell us on a "new style" 1 Terabyte drive what's the "Bonus %" if they included the classic/correct amount of memory?
Then at least the correct amount of memory will be there despite the shrinkwrap packaging. And we can spread the word that the "Bonus Memory (TM)" label is the one with the Old School amount, and without the label is the silly new base 10 amount.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
My favorite example of the base-10 vs base-2 thing is the size of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. CD-Rs are ~702 MiB. DVD-R's are something like 4477 MiB. CD-Rs are said to be 700 MB and DVD-R's are said to be 4.7GB. Clearly, CDs use base-2 and DVDs use base-10. Such a pain in the ass trying to burn a DVD and forgetting how much it can store :/
-SaNo
How quickly you calculate that to 4TB? 15TB? 492TB?
When I buy, er bought, a 1.5TB drive I wanted it to be 1.5TB not 1.36TB. I lost 10% of my storage capacity. I buy big drives because capacity is important to me, if it didn't I'd buy smaller ones.
I was thinking of upgrading to Snow Leopard, paying $30 to upgrade sounded good to gain disk space and speed. Snow Leopard doesn't need as much disk space and is faster, but now I'm not sure. Especially as I'm planning to dualboot OS X with Ubuntu Studio.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
So why are RAM sizes still based on powers of 2? Why are disk sectors still a power of 2? Drive manufacturers are hypocrites. Thanks Apple, now files will be "different" sizes depending on what OS someone is using. This doesn't make anything easier, it makes it harder! Now people will have to figure out why the 1GB of pictures their friend sent won't fit in the 1GB of free space they had on their memory card. Mega, Giga, etc, when used with Bytes (not bits per second, which is a rate measurement), are 1024-based. Why is that so hard for people to understand? I just explained it in one sentence! mebi/gibi/etc - these prefixes are retarded. 1000-base units should be called metric MB, metric GB, etc. I mean, we already have ton and metric ton, so why not? "Oh, noes, they've subverted the SI Rules!" - shut up, pansy. I'm the go-to guy for computer issues in my family, and no one has EVER asked me about this. If your parents can figure out facebook, they can certainly figure this out, if they even care. So, Apple, fix this, someone slap the drive manufacturers, and then we can all move on to something that actually matters.
non-xkcd comic of what Apple just did: http://www.mnftiu.cc/2002/11/26/filing-004/
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. Mac OS X became officially designated a full fledged distribution of UNIX with Leopard.
Certainly you can use X without darkening the doors of Terminal. Most Mac users don't futz with the command line. But once you do, often times there is no going back. It's just easier to dash off a command line incantation sometimes than to wait for the graphical program which does the same thing to launch...bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce.
Linux and FreeBSD have the advantage over Mac OS X of being 100% free, and they don't play silly marketing games with their users like creating arbitrary software "switches" for 64-bitness or installer behavior that does not allow the installation of high-end programs like Final Cut Studio on low-end computers like the MacBook and the Mac mini, both perfectly capable of running the program yet prevented from doing so because Apple wants to up-sell the MacBook Pro and the Mac Pro to students and indie filmmakers instead of letting them run Studio on low-end hardware more in budget for such markets. Any modern Mac can have their disk wiped and Mac OS X replaced with 64-bit Intel architecture Linux or FreeBSD. And believe me, that Mac will sprout wings and FLY. (metaphorically speaking) I am tempted, once all my apps are patched for Snow Leopard, to partition the hard drive to be able to dual boot Mac OS X and Debian GNU/Linux. My BF did that with a dual-proc G4 Mac minitower for me, and the contrast between Tiger and Debian is startling.
Apple is not perfect, and Snow Leopard is not the Second Coming of Jeebus(tm). However, give some Mac users more credit, kthxbai.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
The fact that HDD manufacturers want to use the biggest numbers they can for marketing doesn't change the fact that they are also technically correct. Defining kilobyte as 1024 bytes is simply a misuse of the SI prefix and conflicts with every other use of kilo- in units. That definition was chosen because it was a round binary number that happened to be very close to 1000. But, as typical data sizes get bigger, the two systems diverge more and more so you can't ignore the difference between a real TB and a "binary TB" like you can for kilobyte.
So, this is not a case of marketing trumping computer science, but rather a case of marketing choosing to be technically correct because it gave them an advantage, a rare occurrence.
If you want to talk about the term "organic" you'll have to give an example of a food you've eaten that wasn't derived from a plant, animal or other living organism. The definition you're referring to is not a scientific one and is relatively recent development. It's way down at sense #11 at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/organic. IMHO "organic food" is better described as "organically grown food."
"Organic" food is just as much about marketing as the units HDD manufacturers use. "Organic" is presented as inherently more tasty, healthy and more sustainable than non "organic" but reality is much more complex.
Because our computers, almost since their earliest inception, work in base-2 arithmetic.
I'm all for standardisation, and when I work in units, I choose SI units or derived units almost exclusively. No Gaussian units or other such nonsense for me. I'm all about making sure my work can be understood by a wide range of people without having to know esoteric sub-field jargon or secrets.
But I don't know if forcing standard SI prefixes onto computers is such a good idea. Computers work in base-2 on a fundamental and practical level. The SI prefixes have always worked in a base-10 number system since their inception; since their prehistory! Requiring computers to structure themselves around a base 10 framework is unnatural and will lead to inefficiencies. This isn't like choose a new, arbitrary, unit of measurement. This is about a fundamental difference in how computers and people handle numbers.
A kilobyte/kibibyte is not 1024 bytes. It's 10000000000 bytes, in base-2. 2^10. That's a round number on any computer anyone runs today. It's a natural marker.
The proposed kilobyte will not be 1000 bytes. It will be 1111101000 bytes, in base-2. Are you honestly asking the computer industry to structure itself around such a standard? That would be like asking people using the SI system to go back to pounds and gallons and all the nonsense that comes with manipulating them. It doesn't make sense.
I remind you that the kilobyte is in fact 2^10 bytes. A byte is 8-bits. Where's the logic in that? Should we standardise that unit to? Should a byte be 10 bits? log(10) bits? What definition make the most sense?
Some things should be decimalised and standardised. Length, time, weight, magnetic field strength. But some things have never, and will never fit into this scheme. Days, months and years are the best example of a system that defies our attempt to decimalise it. Computers, working as they do in base-2, not only defy our attempts; they outright refute them. You cannot wear a left show on your right foot, and you cannot make computers work in base-10 without making them walk lopsided.
May the Maths Be with you!
Seem like you could have it both ways (for instance, report both GB and GiB?). However, I am still waiting for my $50 for all the Seagate drives I bought! NewEgg had all my old invoices online, so I just filed those, but years later, it's still not settled (even if it's a stupid suit). See: http://www.harddrive-settlement.com/notice.htm
"And its a mac. What did you think? It's as far from a nerdy computer as possible."
Be sure to tell all the geeks at JPL that. Macs are very popular there.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Excuse my ignorance here but: if a bit is 2^1 and a byte is 2^3 then doesn't the whole kilobit kilobytes thing get even more borked up?
Since a kilobit = 2^10 bits while a kilobyte is 2^10 in base 2^3?
When you buy 1 meg of memory I guess it should be called 1 MiB of memory.
I am fine with that.
Coming from the digital video world, I'm entirely opposed to standardizing on using GB instead of GiB in any context. Because lots of other industries, like telecommunications and digital media, have long used the correct ^10 numbers. Come to think of it, Apple was the last company to use KB/sec for compression bitrates, and even they dropped it as of QuickTime 6 back in 2003.
When you get provisioned bandwith, you're getting ^10 numbers. And when you compress video, you're using ^10 values (so, 20 Mbps is really 20,000,000 bits per second, not 20,971,520)
It's a big pain to have to always convert between the real values and the erroneous ^2 values when figuring out how much video we can put on a disc/drive.
It will be a horrible thing to have GB mean different things in different contexts and to have to know when to do or not do the conversions.
My video compression blog
1,000,000,000,0000 bytes, or
1,099,511,627,776 bytes.
You may not care but I do. The 1.5TB drive I thought I bought shrunk to 1.36TB once I installed it. I lost 10% of the capacity I thought I bought.
Either number is "big enough that I won't be filling this thing up anytime soon".
You may not but pro photographers and I can. The DSLR camera I want to get, the Canon prosumer model EOS 5D Mark II has a 21.1 Megapixel sensor than can put out a 60MB raw file. Process it and edit in Photoshop and the file could be 500MB.
Here's an article, "Sizing for Alamy", Alamy is a microstock photography website, for photographers that brings up the issue of whether 1MB equals 1024KBs or 1,000,000 bytes.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
This is stored in hardware.slashdot.org, not apple.slashdot.org. So the very idea that this would be the first major step in forcing computer science to adopt the more awkward binary prefixes is just silly. This isn't the little corner of Slashdot for the Apple enthusiasts. This is the big part.
It's a big issue for nerds, almost a variant on metric system trolling. But I wonder how it wandered out into the hardware section of Slashdot.... Seems almost like a topic inspired by yet another variant of MacOS. shrug.
(for those tempted to rise up in fury and mark this Troll--- this isn't apple.slashdot.org. Go there if you want to feel safe with your mac.)
I meant developers, but I got it backwards in my head as I was commenting, so you're right.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
Are you saying that if this wasn't better for marketing, it would have still have happened?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Obligatory and good overview of all perve^H^Hmutations of [Kk] and [Bb] and friends: http://xkcd.com/394/ :-)
That way everybody would be happy.
No sig today...
I am tempted, once all my apps are patched for Snow Leopard, to partition the hard drive to be able to dual boot Mac OS X and Debian GNU/Linux.
Yea I'm running Leopard on my MacBook Pro now, and may install Snow Leopard, and I'm thinking about installing Ubuntu Studio. I already have the harddisk partitioned into 3 partitions, one for OS X, one for Ubuntu Studio, and one for the user home.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
> 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
Actually, it's the "organic food" people who have subverted the meaning of the word. Every time I hear someone talk about "organic" food, I immediately think, "What, as opposed to inorganic food? What are you eating, silicate rocks and metal ores?" As a rule, inorganic compounds have no significant nutritional value, i.e., no calories. You can eat sand if you want I guess, but it's not generally considered to be food.
Chemically speaking, practically everything you would consider to be food is organic. Sugar, for instance, is organic. What's more, the more refined it is, the higher the percentage of organic content -- the purity, if you think of inorganic trace substances as impurities. So raw sugar is if anything LESS organic than the highly-processed stuff you buy at the supermarket. High fructose corn syrup is organic. Monosodium glutamate is organic. Aspartame (best known under the trade name Nutrasweet) is organic. Mix all that stuff up in a bowl together, and what you've got there is organic food. Wouldn't be very *healthy*, but it would be comprised of 100% organic content.
The most notable inorganic substance commonly found in food is table salt.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Why don't they just make one byte be 4 bits, as the word byte is 4 characters. That would make a gigabyte an effective 536,870,912 bytes , or 512 megabytes / .5 gigabytes. It's just as arbitrary as effectively shaving 70 megabytes off every gigabyte.
Or maybe they could measure gigabytes in base-twenty, as we have twenty fingers and toes combined.
Bits, bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes can all easily be transparent to the user. Who cares if a gigabyte isn't a nice, clean, base ten number?
4 bits, or half a byte, is already called a nybble
Here I sit, all broken hearted.
Came to poop, but only farted.
It's entirely arbitrary. If you would take the time to understand what is written, you'd see that he's not claiming that 2^10=1024 is arbitrary, but that choosing to inappropriately apply an SI prefix to that value is. It could have been called 1 kibibyte from the start, or the choice could have been made to base multiples on some power which makes more sense in a binary system, such as calling 2^8=256 by some suitably created name (bioct?) and the next multiple (2^16=65536) by some other (bihexd?), etc.
The SI prefixes have well defined meanings, based on powers of 10, and these existed long before computers. This discussion wouldn't exist if those prefixes hadn't been inappropriately usurped for a different purpose.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The "k", "M", and "G" prefixes are defined as international standards to be powers of ten. The standard binary prefixes are "ki", "Mi", and "Gi".
People should start using the consistently. And for anybody not performing address calculations, the power-of-ten prefixes are the more useful.
(Maybe adoption would be faster if we ensured that any computer scientist continuing to misuse the SI units for binary receives a digitectomy, so that their use of power-of-two units is backed up by having power-of-two digits.)
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.
All versions of Windows that I know of report file size as the amount of space used on the disk, if a file is 1 byte over the cluster size it reports the whole cluster. OS X does the same but I think HFS+ uses smaller cluster sizes. I know when I transferred my files from my Windows PC to, first my Linux PC then my Mac, the actual disk space used shrunk.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
There is no "lying" involved; the SI prefixes have well-defined meanings and they are the power-of-ten meanings. Most hardware manufacturers have always been using the power-of-ten meanings. The confusion was caused by programmers on some operating systems that used power-of-two units because it simplified address calculations.
(As for "gallon" and other non-metric units, there are multiple of them in use. The US versions are pretty consistently smaller than the UK versions. I wonder why that is...)
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.
The fact that there are 8 bits to a byte should have been a clue for the creators of computer technology to avoid abusing an established set of standard naming prefixes to mean something they can't possibly mean. The only reason you are mad at hard drive manufacturers is because by converting to the established standard metric system definitions of K/M/G/T/P, they just happen to now be able to sell slightly smaller hard drive capacities at each level. If the original byte was 12 bits instead of 8 bits*, they would be losing ground and would now have to create larger hard drive capacities in order to market using the world-wide standard base-10 meanings of kilo/mega/giga/tera/peta. Sure, they like the fact that they can sell new drives as terabyte drives when they are slightly smaller than tebibyte drives, but that doesn't make them wrong for conforming to the standard base-10 metric definition of "tera".
It isn't some brand new marketing ploy, either. They've all been doing it for years. The time to get mad about this was about a decade ago, or more. If you want them to be forced to market using base-2 notation so you know the 2TiB drive you're formatting is actually going to hold close to 2TiB worth of files, that's different, and maybe that's a good idea. Just don't pretend that you're in the right when you want them to stick with the incorrect meaning of TB just so that you don't end up with a 1.5TiB capacity drive after formatting a 2TB drive.
Conforming to the actual established standard meaning of those base-10 metric prefixes is what every computer device that deals with bits instead of bytes should have been doing for decades, rather than clinging to the ridiculous warping of those standard prefixes into base-2 meanings that never actually made sense in the first place. I dare say that the original problem was created by marketing, the very people you are ranting about, so they could sell computer stuff with simple KB/MB sizes on the tag even though everything was in unfriendly binary sizes. There is no reason whatsoever to allow the computer industry to continue abusing the base-10 prefixes for all time just because it became a standard abuse for a few decades. The reason metric sizing and naming is technically superior to other measurement systems for so many technical purposes is that there is a set-in-stone standard meaning for every size and prefix that ALWAYS means the same thing no matter what you are measuring. Computer science is not special enough to warrant the abuse and confusion of those meanings in the long term.
Mods, please note that, although parent rant is rather disjointed and confusing, it is arguing for keeping the improper definition of the metric prefixes just because it is the common usage. Parent contains nothing that would justify an "insightful" mod. Please re-read parent and mod appropriately.
* Yes, I know a 12-bit byte makes no sense, it's just a thought experiment to illustrate a point.
I'm the same way. I'm a UNIX admin but use a Mac laptop. Apple's not perfect but having a UNIX like backend while still being able to get versions of commercial software for the most part or just dual boot is good for me. Some UI features are just more polished and useful on the Mac than on Win or Linux IMHO. That said I think OS X also simplifies away some of the features I'd like exposed in the GUI. Mhh, nothings perfect, arguing about OSs sometimes is as rational as arguing about which sports car or candy bar is the best, its just a matter of opinion for the most part no one is right they just like something better.
I just updated from 10.5 to 10.6. Suddenly I have 15GB more free disk space. So is this not because 10.6 takes less place but just because it measures the size of the hard-disk differently? That would be cheating! Is there a way to check the true free space? Cheers, ecbpro
Let me be clear on the situation: HDD manufacturers use round decimal SI-prefix numbers first and foremost for convenience because that is how people count and think, in decimal.
Bullshit.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
No, this is a case of standards trumping common (mis)usage.
No, this is marketing trying to oversimplify the correct measurement system as it applies to computers to something that is familiar to more people, thus changing the standards to maximize revenue. Computers are base-2 systems, and all calculations within computers are done in base 2. 1024 = 1K = 1 Kilo within a base 2 system. It mirrors 1K in a base-10 system with the exact same mechanism that base-10 uses to represent Kilo, which is the value of the number when the first significant digit of its number system is in the Kilo position. For a base 10 system, that value is 1000. For a base-2 system, that value is 1024. Within a base-2 system, it is completely and utterly wrong to think of Kilo as 1000, just as Kilo in other number systems will be something other than 1000.
Since magnetic storage media use a binary system to record data ("on" and "off", "1" and "0", "High" and "Low", etc.), using the base-2 prefix names are correct, and using the base-10 prefix names are incorrect (but more profitable). Using Kilo=1000 is only correct if you are using a base-10 number system, which is not the case for computing technology.
I think you meant to say: "Your logic and reasoning be damned, there's a perfectly good conspiracy theory to cling to here"
> Nobody broke any standards because they never
> agreed to play by them in the first place.
I don't know anout the rest of the planet. but kilo/mega/giga/etc are powers of 10 according to the "Weights and Measures Act" in Canada. See "Part V PREFIXES FOR MULTIPLES AND SUBMULTIPLES OF BASIC, SUPPLEMENTARY AND DERIVED UNITS OF MEASUREMENT" http://laws.justice.gc.ca/PDF/Statute/W/W-6.pdf Anybody else have pointers to equivalant legislation elsewhere?
These prefixes have been powers of 10 ever since France invented the metric system 1791. Powers of 2 as kilo/mega/etc are plain wrong.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
> 1024 = 1K = 1 Kilo within a base 2 system.
You're begging the question. This is exactly the point being contested - the prefix "kilo" ALWAYS meant 1000 until it was applied to computer memory, there was no other base 2 system that used "kilo" before that. Even the CS guys only picked it because 1024 was CLOSE to 1000.
Look, I don't care what you call it. Call 1024 bytes a "SUSHIBYTE" for all I care, just stop calling it "KILO"!
THAT's where the lie is, not in hard drive ads.
Canon or Nikon? The Canon I linked to shoots up to 29 seconds of HD, 1080p, video. But I'd rather have the EOS-1Ds Mark III because it's built more like a tank, it can take abuse and being dropped.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
What is a "Kibibyte"?
Well, I think a kibibit is what I feed puppies. Or was that kibblebit.
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
Should there be a Law?
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 month thereafter, 1.25 TB drives come out in Country A. A month later, 1,25(lol) TiB drives come out in Country B. And so on. Thanks to technological advances, all of these drives come out at the same price point as the original 1 TB drive.
Over time you plot out the GB per unit currency in each country and you get the same exact smooth curve. Nobody saved any money, nobody got ripped off by using one designation over another. Even the loss of capacity is offset by the fact that the next level upgrade comes sooner.
Drive capacity is not like gold coinage where the company can make money by sneakily shaving off bits and bytes. The only advantage to the companies in Country A is being able to release earlier at a certain size point, which, since consumer HDDs are a commodity item and generally not a fashion accessory, counts for very little.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Does that mean dividing by 8 is a bug too? Shouldn't bytes be defined as 10 bits not 8?
If not you're not being consistent.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Perhaps the best solution is to take everyone off of the decimal counting system and either cut a finger off of the hands and a toe off of the feet of every newborn or bio-engineer everyone to have 8 fingers and toes on each hand and foot would reduce confusion a bit.
You mean like in Three Fingers?
Technically a 1MP camera has a 1152*864 or 1280*800 resolution.
But even THAT isn't accurate -- it takes 4 of those to generate one full piece of information.
More accurately, in 4 pixels, red and blue are sampled once, and green is sampled twice. Then, you have 4 color values sampled, and 8 color values interpolated.
So that should be advertised as a "1 million quarter-pixel" camera.
And yes, there are separate designs that give full color information at each point.
Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveon_X3_sensor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter
One nice touch about file size oreporting in OSX is the way it handles related files. I mean when you have an image there is a very good change there is also a hidden file containing a thumbnail for the file. The size of this hidden file is added to the size of the normal file in the finder.
Thanks for that, I didn't know. I can empty trash then delete 1 photo and empty trash again and it will tell me more than one file is being emptied. Thing is that happens with other files too such as html files. So perhaps the extras are hidden files I didn't know about.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I know a 12-bit byte makes no sense
It makes perfect sense on a 36-bit architecture, giving three bytes per word. I would imagine that some sort of UTF-12 could ride on top of this.
At least the Unix bits are still doing it the right way.
~% ls -l vec-20060930.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 orange orange 5742458 Sep 30 2006 vec-20060930.zip
~% ls -lh vec-20060930.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 orange orange 5.5M Sep 30 2006 vec-20060930.zip
~% sw_vers
ProductName: Mac OS X
ProductVersion: 10.6
BuildVersion: 10A432
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
anything
That was just the title, if you had read the post I linked to you would have seen it was about more than just jpegs. The person asking the question wants to know what file format photos should be stored in.
Oh, and jpg as well as jpeg are short for jpeg2000. Heck, people including myself abbreviate slashdot as "/.".
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I already stated that it "would be a pain to convert to and from base-2" but you, while seeming to agree with me, make me understand where you are perhaps overlooking some things:
> every load and store operation
PCM wouldn't be used for the level-1 or probably even for the level-2 caches, so we are actually talking about loads and stores of cache lines which are many bytes long, said loads/stores already requiring something like 100-200 clock cycles on the last system for which I did low-level optimization (but I admit, that was quite a while ago). So it's not totally clear that its impossible to build some kind of pipelined asynchronous base converter which could convert fast enough (at small enough geometries) to make it worthwhile.
Whether that's a good thing, or a bad thing, I don't know.
I consider it good as I got sick and tired of Windows crashing, freezing, and other bugs. Once in a while I've have a problem with my Mac, occasionally Finder will freeze, but it's nothing like the trouble I had with Windows. Months go by without my Mac troubling me but I had trouble monthly if not weekly and weekly if not daily with 3 out of 4 Windows PCs I've had.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
How does the Apple Graphics system draw a circle?
The old NeXT display postscript system used a 72-gon to approximate a circle. A 72-gon has a circumference to diameter ratio that is rational with a fixed value; does any one know how to calculate that?
Based on all the comments that I've read so far, it sounds like the Slashdot community thinks this shifting in prefix meaning is a good idea.
In the long term I also agree that shifting away from writing binary-prefixes as if they were decimal-prefixes is a good idea. In the short term though, there are a lot of programs (especially downloaders) that still use the prefixes in the old informal way, which may confuse users initially.
There are whole branches of CS that ahve never accepted the broken binary "definition", for example the networking community. Stop whining and use the standards. That means either binary prefixes or correct, legal (yes, also in the US) unit prefixes. This will also finally stop those that have no clue and cry that thay are betrayed because their disks are too small.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
Perhaps, but most importantly, it was never, ever meant to be used by anybody with the slightest remaining shred of self-respect. "'Gibi'? You actually want me to use the prefix 'Gibi'? In company communications? That somebody might actually read?" There are three types of people who use the prefix "Gibi" (and any of the other "ibi"'s):
1. Members of the high-school computer club who feel that they aren't getting their fair share of wedgies, beatings, and general abuse.
2. The insufferable know-it-all coworker that even the other insufferable know-it-all coworkers can't suffer.
2a. People like the NASA tools who name Mars rocks "Scooby Doo" and "Yogi Bear" instead of "Rock #567-93" or "Rock Which Cost You-The-Taxpayer A Bajillion Dollars So We Could Name It 'Scooby Doo'".
3. NOBODY ELSE EVER.
The problem here is all too clear: Using the "ibi" prefixes makes you and/or your company look ridiculous, and will get your kids beaten by other kids. Hence, these prefixes will never be adoped by any serious individual or company.
The secondary problem is that inventing new prefixes, regardless of how silly they sound, is the wrongest possible way of solving this non-issue. Let's take a look at how similar issues have been solved throughout the ages in a much more non-controversial and sensical manner:
Distance:
Joe Blow: "miles".
Pirate Joe Blowbeard: "nautical miles"
Joe McBlow of the Clan McBlow: "kilometers"
Astrophysicist Dr. Joespeh Blow, PhD: "AUs"
Weight:
Joe Blow: "pounds"
Physicist Joe Blow: "pounds-force"
John Smith-upon-Avon: "kilograms"
Mass:
Joe Blow: "pounds"
Physicist Joe Blow: "pounds-mass"
Joe Blow, precious metal dealer: "troy ounces"
See the pattern? It wasn't the prefix changing in efforts to rationalize the needs of different users for conceptually-similar-but-not-the-same units, it was the units themselves.
So, if you haven't already beaten me to the punch, let me tell you how this tragedy of modern unitology should have been solved: Yep, define a new unit, the "k". Spell it however you want (like "Kay" maybe, but don't get cute with something like "Kai") if you're worried about conflicts with "K" (Kelvin) or "k" (prefix for one thousand). Problem solved:
1. It's already in common use, so there'd literally be no change required in day-to-day conversation: "Yeah boss, I don't know if this 128k SRAM chip in our product is going to be enough, I think we'll need to go to a 512k part."
2. The normal and non-silly SI prefixes still work the base-10 way they always did: "I just got a new 5 terabyte HDD! Yeah baby, that's 5,000,000,000,000 bytes! What, how many k is that? Um... well, I don't know why you'd care, but it's about 4,882,812,500 k, or approximately 4,882,812 kk, or 4,882 Mk! Yeah, I rule."
3. The "Gibi" and other "ibis" which have caused so many so much pain can be expunged from the SI's records permanently.
Let's solve problems instead of simply creating more while making ourselves look like fools for once, huh?
The SI prefixes have been around for nearly 5 decades [...] Why can't we, the C.S. people, accept that?
Because like the man said, "London calling, yeah, I was there, too / And you know what they said? Well, some of it was true.". CompSci is a very immature field, for every definition of "immature". I frankly believe that this "ibi" nonsense was just made up by the SI to give the field an official wedgie.
Computer scientists defined matters this way, because computers operate on discrete units, there is no such thing as having 5.3 bytes, for example. The units used aren't true units of measure, they're not like other SI units; a bit is a mathematical structure, a binary digit.
Perhaps what's confusing is a "byte" is not a measure of storage at all; anymore than "this book has 500 pages" is a measure of the book's length, size, or number of words (it could in fact be a very short book). Bits or "number of addressable units" of a pre-defined size measure storage, bytes don't. The same stick of memory represents half as many units of addressable storage on a 64-bit platform as on a 32-bit platform.
A bit is by definition a 'binary digit' that can be one of 2^1 possible values; it is a discrete mathematical structure, not a physical one.
There is no mathematical definition of a byte; in the past, some people have used 7-bit bytes, others used 8-bit or larger bytes. 8-bits is common nowadays.
In any case, a byte represents a value that have 2^n possible values, where n is the number of bits per byte. When n=8, 256.
Now this leaves the size of the other units "inherently" vague.
one kilobyte = the number of bytes you would have when representing n+2 bits as one byte.
one megabyte = the number of kilobytes you would have when representing n+2 bits as one byte.
...
You make very good points, don't get me wrong, but there's only one appropiate response to your whole post:
WHOOSH!
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Yes, that was a problem with windows ME. Have you tried anything recent? (Including new fanboy arguments?)
The size of a byte is arbitrary (yet binary) to begin with: 2^3 bits. SI prefixes are generally applied to fundamental units, and the byte is not the fundamental unit of storage. It makes no sense to use SI prefixes on units which are fundamentally of a different base, like minutes or dozens.
Storage is addressed in binary, wether memory or disk, tape or optical. The conventional binary units are simply more appropriate. Networks and busses are measured by frequency, so it is only natural that they use the SI units on bits.
Using the iB prefixes would be fine. However, the binary prefixes should be used for storage--especially since every other operating system already does so. This only makes the Mac have non-portable sizes; people transferring data from other operating systems to their Mac will now discover that the size is different. Sometimes it may not even fit, when it looks like it should.
....they should use use iKB, iMB, and iGB, rather than KiB, MiB, and GiB or KB, MB, and GB
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
Electronic computers use base-2, hence why early computer engineers decided that a kilobyte should be a power of two at 1024 bytes. They probably should not have picked "kilo", but they did and we're stuck with it. They may well have been wrong in this, but this was all decided half a century ago.
This notion to rename a kilobyte to be a "kibibyte" is a relatively new one - I've only been aware of "kibibytes" for at most two years.
The source of this whole discussion is Apple's decision to report disk and file sizes in their Finder using the notion that 1KB = 1000 bytes. The absurd part of this though is that Apple are not consistent. Whilst the Finder reports based on 1KB = 1000 bytes, Mail and iTunes do not, and report their file sizes based on 1KB = 1024 bytes. This means when you copy a file out from iTunes, or save an email attachment, they magically grow in apparent size. System Profiler tells me my Mac has 2GB of RAM, and a 160GB hard disc, although those GB's mean different things...
Standards are based on common use. The argument that a kilobyte should be 1000 bytes should have happened at least 40 years ago. We are only having it now because only one segment of the IT industry, disc manufacturers, has insisted that a kilobyte should be 1000 bytes, whilst the rest insist it's 1024.
I just noticed that on Ubuntu (and I guess every recent Gnome) the file's size/hard drive occupancy are indicated as "KiB", "MiB", "GiB" while XP displays in KB, MB & GB (but using the base 2 of course).
How long has it been that gnome (and the others ?) displays the "iB" instead of the "B" (or was it always that way) ?
less than 0.1% of computer buyers care, 99.9% of buyers associate GB with 10^9 or 1,000,000,000 because that's what GB actually means. Computer people have altered the spelling of dozens of words and abbreviations for decades, great!, but DON'T pick on people who do it the correct way.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
SSDs are chips that use address lines and 2^ sizes dude.
They can always have optimizations that use that difference and return to the user exactly 16,000,000 KiB.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Are they going to break compatibility with every other version of UNIX and change the way "df", "du", "ls", and other utilities report disk space?
Networks do not deal with blocks, they deal with bits. There's no natural power of two in networking, you can put bits on the wire in chunks of 8, 36, or 8192. Once upon a time disks were the same way, if you were running TOPS-20 on a 36-bit DECsystem-20 your disks were formatted for sectors that stored 36 bit words. But disks have been byte and power-of-two-block oriented for years. You can only put bits on disk in chunks of 4096 or 16384 (depending on whether it's using 512 byte or 2k sectors).
There are NO disks with a storage capacity that is a multiple of exactly 1000, 1000000, or 1000000000 bytes. There never have been. There never will be. There HAVE been ones with storage that was a multiple of 2^10, 2^20, and even 2^30 bytes.
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. And to do this, they have changed a standard unit of measure.
No, they haven't. Storage manufacturers have almost always used metrics prefixes. Which, btw, is the set of prefixes that is defined in a standard. There have been specific cases where they've used binary prefixes or mixed prefixes. What's the capacity of a "1.44MB" floppy disk? 1.40MiB. But they never changed from one to the other as some sort of concerted marketing move. And note that CPU manufacturers have always reported CPU speeds with metric prefixes, and communications device manufacturers have always reported network and modem speeds using metric prefixes. This idea you seem to have that HDD manufacturers have stepped out of line with the rest of the industry is, well, erroneous.
But whenever these debates come up I feel like a freak. Am I the only one that thinks we should switch to base16 for everything?
Base 10 is arbitrary and pretty useless. Math just works better in hex. It makes things shorter by having 16 numbers taking only 1 character and having 6 more numbers to memorize is clearly NOT onerous. Saved space, better efficiency, very little learning investment.
As to this debate itself how exactly will this work... If 1GB is 1,000,000,000bytes than is a kb 1000bytes? And are bytes still 8 bits or 10? Wouldn't this introduce a horrible decimal system into computers?? There are waaaaaay more things involving space that are based on bits and bytes than multiples of 10. I kinda thought the only reason that drives were smaller than labeled was a sort of low level scam. UDP headers being 6.4bytes instead of 8bytes sounds like a giant fucking pain in the ass. Is a 'word' going to be 1.6/3.2bytes now?...
Something tells me the only reason Apple wants to do this is so they can say that you get more storage capacity in OSX than you would in Windows.
"LOOK, ON A 2TB DRIVE, YOU GET TO UTILIZE YOUR FULL 2 TERABYTES! IN WINDOWS, YOU ONLY GET ACCESS TO 1.8TB!"
You have it backwards. I've looked at early data sheets and technical documents, and engineers were always careful to distinguish between casual use for powers of two and formal use for powers of ten. The distinction was dropped in marketing literature, not engineering documents. Let me repeat that: marketing used powers of two exclusively, engineers used more precise language.
Powers of two are natural for semiconductor memory, where bus widths are limited by package pin count. I first saw the misuse of prefixes for powers of two in marketing for semiconductor memory. Yes, I am old enough to remember when 1K chips came out. Note that marketing used 1K for 1024, and not the lower case k that SI uses for 1000. But I'm never surprised when marketing mangles or misuses technical terms.
The size of hard drives derives from the number of blocks per track, which is rarely a power of two. Using powers of two for hard drives makes no sense, unlike semiconductor memory.
My research shows that Bell Labs and DEC avoided using prefixes for file sizes or disk space. Either the number of bytes was given, or the number of blocks or records was given, without any prefix. Blocks, of course, are usually powers of two, but it is the number of blocks that is shown. The earliest use of powers of two with prefixes that I've found is in CP/M.
My conclusion is that the use of SI prefixes for powers of two came from semiconductor marketing and personal computer hobbyists, but that older, larger institutions were more careful about using prefixes.
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 built with parts wider than one bit, it's safe to assume eight bit bytes.
I actually agree with the hard-disk manufacturers. It was wrong to define kilobyte to equal 2^10 bytes, because kilo by definition of SI standards = 10^3. I like the terms Ki and Mi, because they are different and hence, have no confusion. They are not awkward at all. I think all OS to adopt the standard in their user interfaces to use K for 10^3 and Ki for 2^10. Which they use by default is up to the OS manufacturer.
Loban Amaan Rahman ==> Anagram of ==> Aha! An Abnormal Man!
Those wonderfully sane and rational folks on the committee in charge of the SCSI protocol once upon a time defined a media sector as 512 bytes, and the capacity of a media device as the number of addressable sectors (LBAs) it supported. So yes, lets totally shiat upon the legacy of some fine engineers whose standardization efforts we have all benefitted from for the sake of appeasing the marketing droids of the world.
Agreed, but it's more about use than about opinion, so those most arguing over what is "best" between mac or windows don't know what is going on behind the GUI - nor do they need nor want to know, in many cases. GUI-level people are happy if it just works.
I went the other way around - Mac to *nix - but once I did and began understanding the "under the hood" workings of the Mac OS, my discovery of how outdated some of the *nix system distributions Leopard used (the SSH protocol for example - four years out of date until 10.5.4) kind of lowered my overall opinion of mac. I could create an equally-functioning (if not better-functioning) OS using Debian (for example), with even more functionality (access to ALL each program's commands) but without the GUI.
Mac's forte is the user experience - they do have talent for discerning/providing for what a modern computer user likes/needs. Yet the functionality behind the GUI is at the total discretion of the mac OS creators. If the user wants to do/know more within a certain system application, he has to go under the hood; at least he can.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
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.
But if all HDD manufacturers are using the same units, then what competitive advantage would there be to making smaller units? People shop for hard drives on a comparison basis, not by a mathematical calculation of the number of bytes.
In fact, because Windows and Mac OS (up until now) have reported these units differently, the wouldn't the hard drive makers be more at risk of customer dissatisfaction when their new HD doesn't show the same number printed on the box? If this is supposed to be some kind of industry conspiracy for more sales, then it's a damned stupid and counterproductive one.
However, since there's never really been any evidence for such a conspiracy, why is this even an issue?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Whoops, that's not so great Google! Good find!
The impact on me from this is ZERO. Yes if you are trying to jam the last tiny bit on a DVD this could bite you but for day to day use anyone here that cares needs to get over themselves. There is so much more to size as others have stated. The Get Info is just a close estimate due to other related data anyways. This is a discussion for Lawyers and the perpetually victimized slime of the world.
I can count to numbers higher than five with one hand by using a natural positional representation. With two hands, I can count from 0 to 1023. The "thumbian issues" had to be resolved via an agreed upon convention very early on. Alas, my toes are insufficiently agile to permit me to easily reach 1,048,575. (Incidentally, the fox at the next table just caused my sign bit to become set.) FWIW, that is not a gesture of disrespect that I am displaying. It is unambiguously the number FOUR. On the other hand, it would be 128, and together they would represent 132 (the number of columns on a page of greenbar paper).
Context is everything. Some words have been overloaded. Learn what they are and move on. Consider "moment". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment
Ambiguity is as intolerable as intolerance itself, and disambiguation comes in many guises. In some situations, the type of a variable is not known until "execution time". Dismiss my diatribe if you will. I'm just an aging manipulator of symbols that switched to using Macs when Apple switched to using BSD.
Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm sixty-four? ...|. .....
Perhaps the perfect answer to both is that we switch to binary. Thus the answer to your question is simply 100000000000000000000000000000000.
I see it now: OS X 10.7 "Tabby Cat" edition will hail a breaththrough in the debate, by reporting all memory sizes, and in fact all numbers altogether, for consistency, in binary.
"There's no need for all these complicated extra digits, which our research has shown just confuses new users", said Jobs, "The average user will have no need for any keys except '0' and '1'". This will also allow newly designed Apple keyboards that do away with the unnecessary buttons.
... 500 gigabytes, instead of 465 or so.
That's what pisses me off, why sell a 1 terabyte drive and then when I install it it has almost 100gigabytes missing?
I don't care how you count disk space, as long as what's in the box is consistent with what my file explorer says.
storage. If you honestly -fill- that 1.5TB that you purchased in such a short amount of time that you do not have the budget to purchase another 1TB, 1.5TB, 2TB drive (etc.) at the end of that time, then you need to reconsider either..
- what you store (do you -really- need to save all the pictures you're saving now?) - how you store it (do you -really- need them in RAW/TIFF format?)
I save all my film and all I have scanned so far is low res images, when I've turned in my film for development I ordered a CD of the photos as well. However I plan on rescanning my film with the scanner I got, which scans at higher resolutions than most film developers offer.
The 5D Mark II 21.1MP is NOT 21,100,000 pixels. It's only 21,026,304. Did you know that?
Complain to Canon then, the specs say "Total pixels: Approx. 22.0 megapixels" and "Effective pixels: Approx. 21.1 megapixels". However medium format cameras, I'd like to get a 645 with a film back to use until I can afford a digital back for it, use larger film for larger digitized images. Doing quick calculations a 6mm X 4.5mm film, which my scanner can scan, is 2.4" X 1.6". My scanner optically scans 6400 dpi so a frame of 645 film would generate a file bigger than 150MB. And that's not counting colour depth, my scanner can scan 48 bit colour depths.
Of course by the tyme I'd need space to store those digitized images I should be able to afford multi-terabyte raid storage. However going back to my original reply, just because some people can't imagine needing terabytes of storage doesn't mean it won't be used by anyone.
There's 8 bits in a byte, so... 1,009,262,592 bits / 8 bits = bytes. That's the RAW data in bytes. That's nowhere near 500MB.
That depends on how "near" is defined. 126,157,824 divided by 1024, 1 Megabyte = 1 Kilobyte X 1024, equals 123,201 MBs. That tymes 4 equals 492.804 MBs. That raw file is more than 100 MBs and 4 of them use almost 500 MBs.
That's not even counting compression
And if you don't want to lose details you don't compress. Especially if you're opening, editing, and resaving the photos. Every time a jpeg is opened, edited, and resaved the photo degrades.
Honestly, that article brings up a heck of a lot more issues about Alamy than just the MB vs MiB thing;
The only reason I provided the link to the article was to highlight the issue, because it is an issue, of whether a megabyte is 1 Kilobyte X 1024, 1 Kilobyte X 1000, or 1 byte X 1,000,000 and the same with terabytes. There was no other purpose of posting the link, whether you agree or disagree with those in the thread.
P.S. Love that you do film;
I grew up on film, I don't even have a cheap point-and-shoot digicam. I thought of getting one that's easy to modify to shoot infrared though. "Make" zine had a good article on converting cameras to shoot IR.
I like the dynamic range of film much better than digital
Although not the best, the Epson V500 scanner I have has a DMax of 3.4.
if you already have the film rolls it doesn't burn money so much anyway (developing still costs, of course).
Yeap, I have film. I have some C41 negatives but I shoot mostly E6 slides now. As for costs of developing, there's a local organization, IFP, I plan to join that has darkrooms members can use. I've got that Epson scanner so I can digitize my film so when I join IFP I'll have access to a darkroom as well. I'll need to learn to develop slides though, all I've developed so far is B&W and C41 film. That is if IFP has the chemicals for E6. If not I'll have to pay someone else to develop my film or use C41 negatives again.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The phrase 'over two decades' implies more than 20 years.
Who's the idiot, again?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
bzip2 "is known to be quite slow at compressing".
And professional photographers, with their asinine practice of archiving RAW files, are some of the most pitiful wasters of disk space on the planet.
First, what's one person's waste is not to another person. Do you complain about the mpg of SUVs? Or about those who use 75 watt light bulbs when a 15 watt CFL puts out just as much light? Then, I and many others still shoot film.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
And slow at compression.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Forgive me if I have little sympathy for holding up standardization because you don't like new words (see: your sig), but you'll get used to it. Suck it up.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Yeah, but the alternative Mebi and Gibi sounds like something out yaoi. So I'd rather stick with 1 Gigabyte = 1024 Megabytes.
That's the only qualm I have as well. I want to use correct language, it's just that if I ever used the term "Mebibyte", I'm afraid everyone would think I either had a terrible lisp or I was just generally a bit slow. It sounds ridiculous.
We need some better names here.
Kilo, mega and giga would sound silly too if they were unfamiliar words.
http://xkcd.com/394/
Really, guys, why didn't anyone post this yet?
Invita Invidia
Cut the crap. Even MS Windows can handle giving me two different numbers for a file's size: one number tells me how much data is actually in the file, and the other number tells me how much space the file occupies on disk (or whatever storage device it's currently on). Both numbers are useful, both numbers are relevant, so why not include both when it is trivial to do so?
The thing is, HDD manufacturers are correct... for HDDs. And humans. The SI definitions for kilo, Mega, Giga, etc. existed long before computers came along, and for anything not based on memory address lines, the power-of-10 definitions make perfect sense...at least as long as most humans have 10 digits.
The power-of-2 definitions make it easy to think in terms of memory addresses... the problem was, computers had memory before other kinds of storage, and the folks at the time just got lazy about 10^3 vs. 2^10 and all -- natural units for memory, not for anything else. There was no consensus about using power-of-2 even back in those days on non-memory things... a kilobaud was and is still 1000 Bd/s, not 1024, for example. But then discs came along, and most formats complicated things further by matching disc sectors to memory sizes.
But that's all history... as ugly as some folks might think the units are, there are actual standards now for both power-of-2 and power-of-10 multipliers. Plain old users don't much care about what they're called, they just want consistency. We ought to be smart enough to deal with MiB and MB alike.
-Dave Haynie
Are the numbers correct? For HDDs, yes, but what does Snow Leopard say about SSDs? As far as I know, those are actually measured in *iB. Telling people that their 500 GB HDD has a capacity of 500 GB might deflect lawsuits form idiots - but what about idiots who complain that they can't store 274 "gigabytes" on their 256 GiB SSD even though OS X told them they could? If OS X accounts for this, how does it determine which scale to use in which scenario?
I think that using both numbers (*B and *iB) would be more correct than giving people a base-ten GB number, whether that's appropriate or not.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
"Mega" and "Giga" sound like baby talk. You can't exactly argue their coolness.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Forgive me if I have little sympathy if you like sounding like an idiot. I bet you use Virii also. Suck it up.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
> Kilo, mega and giga would sound silly too if they were unfamiliar words.
True - which is why it's worth looking into why they were readily accepted, and why there's so much resistance to the 'binary' versions.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
The country are different but if they trade with each other it's a time to market problem. Average Joe doesn't know the difference between TB and TiB nor does he care enough to learn. So by the time the 'standard' country comes out with it's TiB drive the consumer already has his TB drive and will not buy another (even for the small benefit that it may have). So the Tebibibibit guys will lose out constantly over time.
:).
Also, Firefox spellchecker doesn't know about TiB