5 ms·

> Anyone who is using base 10 is simply wrong. You can say that, but that doesn't make it true, or reasonable. The facts on the ground are that OSX and drive m

> Anyone who is using base 10 is simply wrong. You can say that, but that doesn't make it true, or reasonable. The facts on the ground are that OSX and drive manufacturers use base-10 MB/GB. And, as I point out in the article, CPU frequencies, GPU frequencies, thumb drive capacities, and hard drive capacities are all actually base 10, so it's not like base 10 is going to go away. Why should the capacity of memory chips affect how we describe file sizes and drive sizes? Please explain?

kazinator 11y ago
Frequencies are irrelevant. Yes, frequencies are base 10 all the way back to the dawn of RF in early radio before electronic computing. So what? Nobody wants base 10 to go away. Just away from the prefixes in kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte! "Giga" and "mega" do not mean exactly a million or billion; they are the root of words like "megalomania" and "gigantic". Mega: From Ancient Greek μέγας ‎(mégas, “great, large, mighty”), from Proto-Indo-European meǵh₂s ‎(“great”). Cognate with Latin magnus, and with Germanic words: Gothic 𐌼𐌹𐌺𐌹𐌻𐍃 ‎(mikils), Old English micel, Middle English muchel, English much, Old High German mihhil, Old Norse mikill, Danish meget.* [Source: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mega- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mega-] Giga: From Ancient Greek γίγας ‎(gígas, “giant”); cognate to giant. [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/giga- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/giga-] Nothing about a million or billion! Kilo is the one that means one thousand, from Greek. (χίλιοι / khílioi). > Why should the capacity of memory chips affect how we describe file sizes and drive sizes? So that, for example, a gigabyte of swap space corresponds exactly to a gigabyte of RAM. Doh? Who wants the description of size to change when data is moved between RAM and disk? Speaking of "memory chips", flash storage is memory chips too. We should use the same units for memory chips that we use for ... memory chips.
- Avernar 11y ago
  > Frequencies are irrelevant. No they're not. They're very relavent for anything dealing with networkig and communications. I recently programmed an atmega chip for a homebrew project and the frequency of the SPI bus was very relavent.
  - kazinator 11y ago
    They are not relevant to measures of information storage. A megahertz is as irrelevant in this debate as a centimeter, or kilopascal --- except to the extent that it bolsters the argument that mega means million in all kinds of units, which nobody is disputing.
Avernar 11y ago
> thumb drive capacities I don't recall ever seeing a thumb drive advertised base 10. Have you seen base 10 for thumb drives often?
- brucedawson 11y ago
  I have never seen a thumb drive advertised using anything other than base 10. You have probably assumed that since thumb drives and SD cards typically have capacities of 8/16/32/64 GB that the GB are actually GiB. But that assumption is wrong. Check out the actual capacity. As I mentioned in the blog post, every flash drive and SD card that I have checked has used the base-10 GB. The extra capacity is there, but it is kept in reserve for bad blocks and headroom needed for efficient use of flash. It is entirely invisible outside of the flash drive. Base 10 is far more prevalent in computing than most computer experts realize.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]

kazinator 11y ago

Frequencies are irrelevant. Yes, frequencies are base 10 all the way back to the dawn of RF in early radio before electronic computing. So what? Nobody wants base 10 to go away. Just away from the prefixes in kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte! "Giga" and "mega" do not mean exactly a million or billion; they are the root of words like "megalomania" and "gigantic". Mega: From Ancient Greek μέγας ‎(mégas, “great, large, mighty”), from Proto-Indo-European meǵh₂s ‎(“great”). Cognate with Latin magnus, and with Germanic words: Gothic 𐌼𐌹𐌺𐌹𐌻𐍃 ‎(mikils), Old English micel, Middle English muchel, English much, Old High German mihhil, Old Norse mikill, Danish meget.* [Source: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mega- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mega-] Giga: From Ancient Greek γίγας ‎(gígas, “giant”); cognate to giant. [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/giga- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/giga-] Nothing about a million or billion! Kilo is the one that means one thousand, from Greek. (χίλιοι / khílioi). > Why should the capacity of memory chips affect how we describe file sizes and drive sizes? So that, for example, a gigabyte of swap space corresponds exactly to a gigabyte of RAM. Doh? Who wants the description of size to change when data is moved between RAM and disk? Speaking of "memory chips", flash storage is memory chips too. We should use the same units for memory chips that we use for ... memory chips.

Avernar 11y ago
> Frequencies are irrelevant. No they're not. They're very relavent for anything dealing with networkig and communications. I recently programmed an atmega chip for a homebrew project and the frequency of the SPI bus was very relavent.
- kazinator 11y ago
  They are not relevant to measures of information storage. A megahertz is as irrelevant in this debate as a centimeter, or kilopascal --- except to the extent that it bolsters the argument that mega means million in all kinds of units, which nobody is disputing.

Avernar 11y ago

> thumb drive capacities I don't recall ever seeing a thumb drive advertised base 10. Have you seen base 10 for thumb drives often?

brucedawson 11y ago
I have never seen a thumb drive advertised using anything other than base 10. You have probably assumed that since thumb drives and SD cards typically have capacities of 8/16/32/64 GB that the GB are actually GiB. But that assumption is wrong. Check out the actual capacity. As I mentioned in the blog post, every flash drive and SD card that I have checked has used the base-10 GB. The extra capacity is there, but it is kept in reserve for bad blocks and headroom needed for efficient use of flash. It is entirely invisible outside of the flash drive. Base 10 is far more prevalent in computing than most computer experts realize.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]