Slashdot Mirror
Apple Kicks HDD Marketing Debate Into High Gear
quacking duck writes "With the release of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Apple has updated a support document describing how their new operating system reports capacities of hard drives and other media. It has sided with hard drive makers, who for years have advertised capacities as '1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes' instead of the traditional computer science definition, and in so doing has kicked the debate between marketing and computer science into high gear. Binary prefixes for binary units (e.g. GiB for 'gibibyte') have been promoted by the International Electrotechnical Commission and endorsed by IEEE and other standards organizations, but to date there's been limited acceptance (though manufacturers have wholeheartedly accepted the 'new' definitions for GB and TB). Is Apple's move the first major step in forcing computer science to adopt the more awkward binary prefixes, breaking decades of accepted (if technically inaccurate) usage of SI prefixes?"
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 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.
[
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.
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/
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.
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?
Does it make a difference though?
To the end user, it doesn't matter how many bytes are in a MB or a GB, be it 1000000 or 56125142, the end result is all they'll ever see. So the difference is going to be if they see 17MB or 16.2MB. To them, its just a number, they don't care where that number came from, all they know is that 17Mb is going to take up a certain percentage of the hard drive.
The only people it actually poses a problem for are those that actually do know the difference, the ones that prefer to adhere to one standard and have been using that standard for years.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
You want to accept inconsistancies within your own field (MHz, GHz, MB etc.) rather than havng to change things. Because it's not as if anything ever changes with computers. Some parts of computers use base 2, others do not, there has been a definitive set of standards since 1999, getting MS on board would pretty much solve the problem as that is what people would then see their computer tell them.
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.
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.
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."
...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.
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.
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.
The negative terminal of a battery supplies the electrons and they move from negative to positive when a conductor is placed between the two poles. The two popular notations for charge flow, "Conventional Flow Notation" and "Electron Flow Notation", do not dispute this. The difference is that "Electron Flow Notation" illustrates the physical movement of electrons (from "negative" to "positive") and "Conventional Flow Notation" illustrates the "movement" of the electrical charge from the "positive" terminal to the "negative" terminal. As electrons move from - to +, the "positive" side of the battery becomes less positive in relation to the "negative" side, effectively meaning that the electrical charge is moving from + to - (in "Conventional Flow Notation"). The electrons are still moving from the - battery terminal to the + battery terminal, 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.
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.
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!
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
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.
"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.
The ALU in a computer uses base 2, but that's IRRELEVANT.
Do all your spreadsheets show their answers in hexadecimal? No, because that would be moronic. I/O operations convert data into *human readable* format.
There is nothing about hard drive capacity that has anything to do with powers of 2. The number of cylinders, sectors and heads have never been constrained to a power of two. As soon as a single factor of the size is not a power of 2, it blows away any inkling of utility in using powers of two for hard drive capacities. 512-byte sectors don't help one bit. The sizes of files, partitions and other structures on a hard disk have nothing to do with powers of 2 either. Whoever started this trend of showing users invalid SI prefixes was an idiot.
The only thing that makes any sense to report in MiB and GiB is computer memory, which is about the only quantity in a computer that is typically constrained to a power of 2. Even there, the prefixes should always include the 'i' to remove the ambiguity.
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?!
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.
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
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.
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.
I've got bad news for you... while your drives no longer appear 10% smaller, all your files are now 10% larger.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
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
Call me biased. Even call me bigoted, but I will stand by this assertion: American, UK, Oz, and Kiwi scientists and engineers, who have grown up around TWO systems of measurement, Imperial and Metric, are far more adept at scale conversion and at thinking in arbitrary units than European scientists who have been coddled into laziness and complacency because they only have one.
Remember this, people: the metric system, while reasonably well thought-out, is just an arbitrary set of scales. Totally, completely arbitrary. While it might be easier to reason about 10mm vs 13mm than about 25/64" vs 1/2", there is nothing, nothing inherently superior to basing distance scales on 1cm vs 1in. It's just a scale. Degrees F is just as easy to reason about as degrees C. It's just an arbitrary scale. The more people, scientists and engineers in particular, have an ability to reason fluently in both systems, the better off we will be as a race.
Look at this this way: two engineers could just as easily have exactly the same conversation in metric as in Imperial or Sumarian units. It would be the same conversation modulo a conversion for scaling. Two GOOD engineers should be able to shift units as fluidly as two musicians shift scales.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
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.
Call me biased. Even call me bigoted, but I will stand by this assertion: American, UK, Oz, and Kiwi scientists and engineers, who have grown up around TWO systems of measurement, Imperial and Metric, are far more adept at scale conversion and at thinking in arbitrary units than European scientists who have been coddled into laziness and complacency because they only have one.
I'm not too sure where you are getting your information there. All of the countries, apart from the USA, that you mention are metric countries for just about everything, especially Australia and New Zealand. I've lived with people from Oz and NZ and most of them have no concept of any imperial measurement.
The UK and Ireland (I'm Irish) are slightly different. Most people would have grown up with metric and imperial measurements. The older the person the more imperial units they would have grown up with.
In Ireland just about all measurements in daily use are in the metric system now. Diesel and petrol are sold by the litre, speed limits and distances are in km (changed over from miles in 2005). The only things that are commonly referred to in imperial units are a pint of beer or a pound of butter (454 g on the label) and people's height and weight. Height and weight is usually refereed to in feet and stone (strangely enough very few people know their weight in pounds). The only notable difference between Ireland and the UK in this regard would be that the UK still uses miles on road signs.
With regards to scientists and engineers, no scientist or engineer in any of those countries (apart from the US maybe), would use imperial units (unless for a very specific or unusual purpose). The very idea of using any imperial units would be laughed out of the room so there is no conversion going on. Where there are two units of measurement being used side by side (example of height and weight in the UK and Ireland) they tend to be used independently. For example most people I know in Ireland would tell you their weight and height in stone and feet respectively, but not that many would be able to tell you their weight and height in kg and metres (though more people would know their weight in kg) even though they now use kg and metres for everything else.
As to your comments on European scientists and engineers it would seem to reinforce the first two sentences of your post.
The advantage of the SI system is not in a single measurement like metres or kg but the fact that they all integrate together with grace and simplicity and most importantly consistently. You say we would be better off with more people having an ability to reason fluently in both systems but you give no good reason why this would be so.
Personally I can see no advantage to an engineer working in two units consecutively, in fact I can only see problems. The potential for miscommunication, errors in assumptions and just plain awkwardness would be very high indeed.
Independence? That's middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth. G.B Shaw