On 3/16/2010 23:21, Erik Trimble wrote:
On 3/16/2010 8:29 PM, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
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.
Doesn't matter whether the "original" meaning of K/M/G was a
power-of-10. What matters is internal usage in the industry. And
that has been consistent with powers-of-2 for 40+ years. There has
been NO outside understanding that GB = 1 billion bytes until the
Storage Industry decided it wanted it that way. That's pretty much
the definition of distorted advertising.
That's simply not true. The first computer I programmed, an IBM 1620,
was routinely referred to as having "20K" of core. That meant 20,000
decimal digits; not 20,480. The other two memory configurations were
similarly "40K" for 40,000 and "60K" for 60,000. The first computer I
was *paid* for programming, the 1401, had "8K" of core, and that was
8,000 locations, not 8,192. This was right on 40 years ago (fall of
1969 when I started working on the 1401). Yes, neither was brand new,
but IBM was still leasing them to customers (it came in configurations
of 4k, 8k, 12k, and I think 16k; been a while!).
--
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
_______________________________________________
zfs-discuss mailing list
zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
