5 ms·

Consistency trumps correctness. If some computer specs are in binary and not others, the result will be confusion because most people won't know what base is b

by beloch 11y ago

Consistency trumps correctness. If some computer specs are in binary and not others, the result will be confusion because most people won't know what base is being used at any given moment. There will be far less confusion if we pick one base and stick to it. Until hard-drive manufacturers started trying to deceptively market smaller drives with larger sounding base-ten capacities, everything in computer-land was base-2 and things were simple. Now I can't fully trust any number put before me without digging into the specs. How is this a step forwards? Let's draw a parallel with physics. Draw an electrical circuit. The current is measured to be traveling to the right on a wire. Which way are the electrons going? Left. When current was discovered, it was assumed charge carriers were positive. They turned out to be negative (most of the time). That was a mistake, but did we fix it? Nope. It would have caused far more confusion than it was worth. If physics can stick with current flowing the wrong way for centuries for the sake of consistency, we can stick with base 2 hard drive capacities.

Flimm 11y ago
I agree that consistency is critical. It was always confusing that "kilo" meant 1000 everwhere else but for some reason it meant 1024 when it came to storage sizes (but not bandwidth speeds). To eliminate ambiguity in one fell swoop we should use the KiB MiB units.
- kazinator 11y ago
  It was never confusing. Bandwidth speed is in bits. Storage is in bytes. When the unit is anything-bytes, it is powers of 1024. Note that the byte itself is a power of two already. This obnoxious KiB MiB nonsense is a non-solution in search of a problem. Wikipedia on MiB: The binary prefixes have been accepted by all major standards organizations and are part of the International System of Quantities. Many Linux distributions use the unit, but it is not widely acknowledged within the industry or media. Basically, we only need this type of unit in a context where dishonest and ignorant people are involved, in order to protect the latter from the former.
  - creshal 11y ago
    > Storage is in bytes. Floppy disk storage is in byte, and doesn't use 1024. CD storage is in byte, and doesn't use 1024. DVD storage dito. BluRay storage dito. Hard disk storage dito. SSD storage dito. Memory card and USB stick storage dito. The sole exception is RAM. (But not NVRAM. Because that would be silly.) > a non-solution in search of a problem Really now.
    - kazinator 11y ago
      Which floppy disk? My Apple II floppy drives had 256 byte sectors, groups of which were called a kilobyte. Wikipedia quote: An MFM-based, "high-density" format, displayed as "HD" on the disks themselves and typically advertised as "1.44 MB" was introduced in 1987; the most common formatted capacity was 1,474,560 bytes. (Why is it 1.44 MB? That's a bit of silliness: it's the result of dividing 1,474,560 by 1024, and then just moving the decimal point by three places instead of dividing by 1024 once again. The beginning of idiocy.) All the storage examples you're giving are due to dishonest mass storage manufacturers who confused things sometime in the 1990's simply by lying. All other storage uses 1024. A gigabyte of RAM is 512 megabytes times two. RAM is not the "exception"; RAM is fundamental. A computer can operate without mass storage, but not without some RAM. A good reason to use powers of two sizes whenever bytes are involved is that the byte itself is a power of two unit already: it has historically settled on 8 bits. A kilobit of data already does not correspond to a power of ten byte value. If you want metric byte storage sizes, then first redefine a byte as 10 bits. Then a bit can be a centibyte, a byte can be a decabyte. Ten megabits will be exactly a megabyte, and so forth.
      - creshal 11y ago
        > Which floppy disk? IBM 53FD, 1977. Apparently the "idiocy" started really early… > All other storage uses 1024. What "all" other? Only RAM. > A kilobit of data already does not correspond to a power of ten byte value. That's not the problem of the SI prefixes, which are used for all units. IT does not operate in a vacuum. > If you want metric byte storage sizes Bullshit, nobody wants that. That's what IEC binary prefixes are for.
- 1ace 11y ago
  > "kilo" meant 1000 everwhere else but for some reason it meant 1024 when it came to storage sizes Only when using storage. They sell storage by 1000 to inflate the number shown to customers.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
creshal 11y ago
> Consistency trumps correctness. Then why does computing need a special case and redefine standard prefixes? A kilosomething is always 1000 something. (Unless it's reported by Microsoft Windows, apparently.) > Until hard-drive manufacturers started trying to deceptively market smaller drives with larger sounding base-ten capacities, everything in computer-land was base-2 and things were simple. Ah yes, like the IBM 53FD, a "1.2 MB" floppy that had 1200x1024 byte storage? That was in 1977, by the way. All later floppies also didn't adhere to the arbitrary prefix redefinition. Nor did hard disks. Nor optical disks. Nor do USB sticks. Nor do bandwidths. Nor do SSDs. RAM incidentally does, but only because it naturally happens to have power-of-twos capacities. NVRAMs probably won't. What kind of "consistency" are you trying to defend by pretending that kilo=1024? > How is this a step forwards? Once everyone unfucks themselves and we use binary IEC and metric SI prefixes like we should, everything will be less ambiguous than at any arbitrary point in the past 50 years.
soneil 11y ago
> everything in computer-land was base-2 and things were simple This has never been true though. Processors have never been "kibihertz". Nor busses, nor modems. Just ram. The board I'm building at the moment has ram specified as 10ns. That's 10x10^-9 seconds, not 10x2^-20 seconds. Which sounds silly to have to even say, but that's how I feel every time someone wants to pretend that just because something was commonly held when they were at school, does not mean it fits today's standards. And harddrives, the one everyone obsessed about because their OS incorrectly shows them base2. No. No they weren't. The famous pictures of an IBM305 being lifted out of a plane. That's a 5Mb drive. It holds 5 million characters. 5,000,000 characters. It's embarrassing enough that this fallacy is older than half our readers. It's even more embarrassing that it was never true in the first place.

by beloch 11y ago

Flimm 11y ago

I agree that consistency is critical. It was always confusing that "kilo" meant 1000 everwhere else but for some reason it meant 1024 when it came to storage sizes (but not bandwidth speeds). To eliminate ambiguity in one fell swoop we should use the KiB MiB units.

kazinator 11y ago
It was never confusing. Bandwidth speed is in bits. Storage is in bytes. When the unit is anything-bytes, it is powers of 1024. Note that the byte itself is a power of two already. This obnoxious KiB MiB nonsense is a non-solution in search of a problem. Wikipedia on MiB: The binary prefixes have been accepted by all major standards organizations and are part of the International System of Quantities. Many Linux distributions use the unit, but it is not widely acknowledged within the industry or media. Basically, we only need this type of unit in a context where dishonest and ignorant people are involved, in order to protect the latter from the former.
- creshal 11y ago
  > Storage is in bytes. Floppy disk storage is in byte, and doesn't use 1024. CD storage is in byte, and doesn't use 1024. DVD storage dito. BluRay storage dito. Hard disk storage dito. SSD storage dito. Memory card and USB stick storage dito. The sole exception is RAM. (But not NVRAM. Because that would be silly.) > a non-solution in search of a problem Really now.
  - kazinator 11y ago
    Which floppy disk? My Apple II floppy drives had 256 byte sectors, groups of which were called a kilobyte. Wikipedia quote: An MFM-based, "high-density" format, displayed as "HD" on the disks themselves and typically advertised as "1.44 MB" was introduced in 1987; the most common formatted capacity was 1,474,560 bytes. (Why is it 1.44 MB? That's a bit of silliness: it's the result of dividing 1,474,560 by 1024, and then just moving the decimal point by three places instead of dividing by 1024 once again. The beginning of idiocy.) All the storage examples you're giving are due to dishonest mass storage manufacturers who confused things sometime in the 1990's simply by lying. All other storage uses 1024. A gigabyte of RAM is 512 megabytes times two. RAM is not the "exception"; RAM is fundamental. A computer can operate without mass storage, but not without some RAM. A good reason to use powers of two sizes whenever bytes are involved is that the byte itself is a power of two unit already: it has historically settled on 8 bits. A kilobit of data already does not correspond to a power of ten byte value. If you want metric byte storage sizes, then first redefine a byte as 10 bits. Then a bit can be a centibyte, a byte can be a decabyte. Ten megabits will be exactly a megabyte, and so forth.
    - creshal 11y ago
      > Which floppy disk? IBM 53FD, 1977. Apparently the "idiocy" started really early… > All other storage uses 1024. What "all" other? Only RAM. > A kilobit of data already does not correspond to a power of ten byte value. That's not the problem of the SI prefixes, which are used for all units. IT does not operate in a vacuum. > If you want metric byte storage sizes Bullshit, nobody wants that. That's what IEC binary prefixes are for.
1ace 11y ago
> "kilo" meant 1000 everwhere else but for some reason it meant 1024 when it came to storage sizes Only when using storage. They sell storage by 1000 to inflate the number shown to customers.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

creshal 11y ago

> Consistency trumps correctness. Then why does computing need a special case and redefine standard prefixes? A kilosomething is always 1000 something. (Unless it's reported by Microsoft Windows, apparently.) > Until hard-drive manufacturers started trying to deceptively market smaller drives with larger sounding base-ten capacities, everything in computer-land was base-2 and things were simple. Ah yes, like the IBM 53FD, a "1.2 MB" floppy that had 1200x1024 byte storage? That was in 1977, by the way. All later floppies also didn't adhere to the arbitrary prefix redefinition. Nor did hard disks. Nor optical disks. Nor do USB sticks. Nor do bandwidths. Nor do SSDs. RAM incidentally does, but only because it naturally happens to have power-of-twos capacities. NVRAMs probably won't. What kind of "consistency" are you trying to defend by pretending that kilo=1024? > How is this a step forwards? Once everyone unfucks themselves and we use binary IEC and metric SI prefixes like we should, everything will be less ambiguous than at any arbitrary point in the past 50 years.

soneil 11y ago

> everything in computer-land was base-2 and things were simple This has never been true though. Processors have never been "kibihertz". Nor busses, nor modems. Just ram. The board I'm building at the moment has ram specified as 10ns. That's 10x10^-9 seconds, not 10x2^-20 seconds. Which sounds silly to have to even say, but that's how I feel every time someone wants to pretend that just because something was commonly held when they were at school, does not mean it fits today's standards. And harddrives, the one everyone obsessed about because their OS incorrectly shows them base2. No. No they weren't. The famous pictures of an IBM305 being lifted out of a plane. That's a 5Mb drive. It holds 5 million characters. 5,000,000 characters. It's embarrassing enough that this fallacy is older than half our readers. It's even more embarrassing that it was never true in the first place.