On 3/16/2010 17:45, Erik Trimble wrote:
David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
On Tue, March 16, 2010 14:59, Erik Trimble wrote:
Has there been a consideration by anyone to do a class-action lawsuit
for false advertising on this? I know they now have to include the
"1GB
= 1,000,000,000 bytes" thing in their specs and somewhere on the box,
but just because I say "1 L = 0.9 metric liters" somewhere on the box,
it shouldn't mean that I should be able to avertise in huge letters
"2 L
bottle of Coke" on the outside of the package...
I think "giga" is formally defined as a prefix meaning 10^9; that is,
the
definition the disk manufacturers are using is the standard metric
one and
very probably the one most people expect. There are international
standards for these things.
I'm well aware of the history of power-of-two block and disk sizes in
computers (the first computers I worked with pre-dated that period);
but I
think we need to recognize that this is our own weird local usage of
terminology, and that we can't expect the rest of the world to change to
our way of doing things.
That's RetConn-ing. The only reason the stupid GiB / GB thing came
around in the past couple of years is that the disk drive
manufacturers pushed SI to do it.
Up until 5 years ago (or so), GigaByte meant a power of 2 to EVERYONE,
not just us techies. I would hardly call 40+ years of using the
various giga/mega/kilo prefixes as a power of 2 in computer science
as non-authoritative. In fact, I would argue that the HD
manufacturers don't have a leg to stand on - it's not like they were
"outside" the field and used to the "standard" SI notation of powers
of 10. Nope. They're inside the industry, used the powers-of-2 for
decades, then suddenly decided to "modify" that meaning, as it served
their marketing purposes.
The SI meaning was first proposed in the 1920s, so far as I can tell.
Our entire history of special usage took place while the SI definition
was in place. We simply mis-used it. There was at the time no prefix
for what we actually wanted (not giga then, but mega), so we borrowed
and repurposed mega.
I know what you mean about the disk manufacturers changing. And I'm
sure they did it because it made their disks sound bigger for free, and
that's clearly a marketing choice, and yes, it creates the problem that
when the software reports the size it often doesn't agree with the
manufacturer size. I just can't get up a good head of steam about this
when they're using the prefix correctly and we're not, though.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, d...@dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
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