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>inflate advertised capacity It's not "cheating" to use standard base-10 SI unit prefixes. Words like "mega" were in use centuries before PCs and have a well d

by oofabz 8y ago

>inflate advertised capacity It's not "cheating" to use standard base-10 SI unit prefixes. Words like "mega" were in use centuries before PCs and have a well defined meaning. Networking rates are all discussed in base ten and nobody complains about those. Megapixels are base 10 as well. It is not merely tolerable, but is in fact more correct, to use decimal prefixes for computer storage. I believe this old meme about dishonest hard drive manufacturers is a ridiculous conspiracy theory and insistence on binary prefixes for storage is a form of linguistic hypercorrection.

skrebbel 8y ago
It's because when you buy a 1TB hard drive, plug it in, Windows reports that it was actually a 900GB hard drive or something like that and you feel cheated. All file sizes everywhere we look are reported using binary prefixes. That's why people say the HD manufacturers are dishonest. It's a fair point of view.
- Causality1 8y ago
  I agree with both of you. Frankly we need to all pick a day and on that day everybody change their settings so their OS reports sizes in base 10. Not gonna happen but that's what we need.
  - unilynx 8y ago
    And now my 16GB machine suddenly has 17,2GB of memory, divided by the OS not into 4KB pages,but almost-but-not-quite 4,1KB pages. For some parts powers of 2 will still work best, and the dividing line will probably always be arbitrary.
    - nothrabannosir 8y ago
      There is no golden rule about memory having to be a power of 2 at all costs. Manufacturers can make base 10 round memory. Pages will be 4KiB. For the few engineers who care.
      - pwg 8y ago
        Actually, there is. Because the underlying numbering system in the hardware of a computer (i.e., the bus wires) is binary, powers of 2 are just the natural results. I.e., a binary address bus of 16 bits in width can address 2^16 different memory cells, which is 65,536 individual locations. To make this a 'decimal sized' memory would require either ignoring 5,536 possible addressable locations, or using bus lines that are not binary. Ignoring addressable locations does not maximize the usage of the available numbering system, and building ten value electrical bus wiring in hardware is a significantly much more difficult engineering effort than building two value electrical wiring (because two value electrical wiring is simply "on" or "off"). This is why so many of the "computer units" that were close in size to the standard SI units were measured in powers of 2 sized values instead of powers of 10. Computer hardware is using binary numbers everywhere, and powers of 2 are simply the natural outgrowth of that usage. It was humans that decided that 2^10 (1024) was 'close enough' to the SI k to call it a "kilobyte" and that 2^20 (1,048,576) was 'close enough' to the SI m to call it a 'megabyte' and so forth.
        nothrabannosir 8y ago
        Great point, I take back what I said about RAM. Thanks for that. However, I stand by my disapproval of bleeding that into the consumer space, especially for files and hard drives. As you said, power of 2 is a hardware detail. Not something that end users (should have to) care about.
      - metaphor 8y ago
        How pervasive is said base-10 round memory on the market? And why would a golden rule be necessary? Base-2 is the natural order of digital computer organization. Deviations introduce unnecessary complexity. Unnecessary complexity is a form of inefficiency. And markets tend to not tolerate inefficiencies for long...except when marketing can bullshit its way in getting ignorant consumers to pay out more for less.
- nothrabannosir 8y ago
  Doesn’t windows say “GiB” now? It’s been a while since I used windows , but I seem to recall Win10 doing so. I side with HDD manufacturers: binary format is arcane and pointless. We should stop using it in software, too. Not start using it on drives.
metaphor 8y ago
> Networking rates are all discussed in base ten and nobody complains about those. Modern networking rates pay hommage to the days of analog communication systems whose rates were measured in units baud, which adheres to SI rules; the imperative relationship here is time, which also adheres to SI rules. At today's scale, these are understood to be notional approximations. Even if Joe Average had the means to precisely measure throughput, who's really going to make a huge stink with all the overhead and uncertainties that exist in real-world networking? Computer memory is physical and different. If a computer says a file is 1.42 MiB and Joe Average can't copy it to his "1.44 MB" diskette because it's too large, you don't have to be a computer scientist to be batshit annoyed by the antics of marketing. > Megapixels are base 10 as well. So? Whether we're talking about a physical display or digital picture, resolution doesn't have any inextricable relationship with computer memory. > It is not merely tolerable, but is in fact more correct, to use decimal prefixes for computer storage. Absurd. Digital computers are fundamentally base-2. No amount of marketing quackery can change that. The first week of a freshman course in digital logic is all that's needed to dispel such nonsense.

by oofabz 8y ago

skrebbel 8y ago

It's because when you buy a 1TB hard drive, plug it in, Windows reports that it was actually a 900GB hard drive or something like that and you feel cheated. All file sizes everywhere we look are reported using binary prefixes. That's why people say the HD manufacturers are dishonest. It's a fair point of view.

Causality1 8y ago
I agree with both of you. Frankly we need to all pick a day and on that day everybody change their settings so their OS reports sizes in base 10. Not gonna happen but that's what we need.
- unilynx 8y ago
  And now my 16GB machine suddenly has 17,2GB of memory, divided by the OS not into 4KB pages,but almost-but-not-quite 4,1KB pages. For some parts powers of 2 will still work best, and the dividing line will probably always be arbitrary.
  - nothrabannosir 8y ago
    There is no golden rule about memory having to be a power of 2 at all costs. Manufacturers can make base 10 round memory. Pages will be 4KiB. For the few engineers who care.
    - pwg 8y ago
      Actually, there is. Because the underlying numbering system in the hardware of a computer (i.e., the bus wires) is binary, powers of 2 are just the natural results. I.e., a binary address bus of 16 bits in width can address 2^16 different memory cells, which is 65,536 individual locations. To make this a 'decimal sized' memory would require either ignoring 5,536 possible addressable locations, or using bus lines that are not binary. Ignoring addressable locations does not maximize the usage of the available numbering system, and building ten value electrical bus wiring in hardware is a significantly much more difficult engineering effort than building two value electrical wiring (because two value electrical wiring is simply "on" or "off"). This is why so many of the "computer units" that were close in size to the standard SI units were measured in powers of 2 sized values instead of powers of 10. Computer hardware is using binary numbers everywhere, and powers of 2 are simply the natural outgrowth of that usage. It was humans that decided that 2^10 (1024) was 'close enough' to the SI k to call it a "kilobyte" and that 2^20 (1,048,576) was 'close enough' to the SI m to call it a 'megabyte' and so forth.
      - nothrabannosir 8y ago
        Great point, I take back what I said about RAM. Thanks for that. However, I stand by my disapproval of bleeding that into the consumer space, especially for files and hard drives. As you said, power of 2 is a hardware detail. Not something that end users (should have to) care about.
    - metaphor 8y ago
      How pervasive is said base-10 round memory on the market? And why would a golden rule be necessary? Base-2 is the natural order of digital computer organization. Deviations introduce unnecessary complexity. Unnecessary complexity is a form of inefficiency. And markets tend to not tolerate inefficiencies for long...except when marketing can bullshit its way in getting ignorant consumers to pay out more for less.
nothrabannosir 8y ago
Doesn’t windows say “GiB” now? It’s been a while since I used windows , but I seem to recall Win10 doing so. I side with HDD manufacturers: binary format is arcane and pointless. We should stop using it in software, too. Not start using it on drives.

metaphor 8y ago

> Networking rates are all discussed in base ten and nobody complains about those. Modern networking rates pay hommage to the days of analog communication systems whose rates were measured in units baud, which adheres to SI rules; the imperative relationship here is time, which also adheres to SI rules. At today's scale, these are understood to be notional approximations. Even if Joe Average had the means to precisely measure throughput, who's really going to make a huge stink with all the overhead and uncertainties that exist in real-world networking? Computer memory is physical and different. If a computer says a file is 1.42 MiB and Joe Average can't copy it to his "1.44 MB" diskette because it's too large, you don't have to be a computer scientist to be batshit annoyed by the antics of marketing. > Megapixels are base 10 as well. So? Whether we're talking about a physical display or digital picture, resolution doesn't have any inextricable relationship with computer memory. > It is not merely tolerable, but is in fact more correct, to use decimal prefixes for computer storage. Absurd. Digital computers are fundamentally base-2. No amount of marketing quackery can change that. The first week of a freshman course in digital logic is all that's needed to dispel such nonsense.