5 ms·
This sort of misrepresentation should be outright illegal. Why does it feel like big corporations are just getting more blatantly evil these days?
by fouc 6y ago
This sort of misrepresentation should be outright illegal.
Why does it feel like big corporations are just getting more blatantly evil these days?
- boomboomsubban 6y agoThis is already what they did with "KB/MB/GB/TB." Evil, but not any more blatant.
- throw0101a 6y ago> This is already what they did with "KB/MB/GB/TB." The 'confusion' as to whether the "K" prefix meant a factor of 10^3 or 2^10 goes back decades. In 1961 a book says "it is more usual to express the speed in bits or kilobits (1,000 bits) per second"; an IBM 1410 manual says ""The 40K core array requires 40,000 valid five-position addresses from 0,000 to 39,999." In 1962 an ACM paper referred to a "4K IBM 1401" which had 4000 characters of storage, but in 1964 Amdahl wrote a paper that had 1K meaning 1024. Academics went back and forth a bit it seems. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_binary_prefixes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_binary_prefixes For hard drives specifically, a 1974 example has Mbytes in the 10^6 sense. Further examples often have drives using the base-10 sense of the prefix (including the first 5 ¼ inch floppy), while memory chips using the base-2 sense of the prefix. The powers-of-1024 nomenclature of kibi/mebi/etc was introduced in 1995, with IEEE mandating SI prefixes only be used for powers-of-1000 in 1997. The IEC follows suit a couple of years later. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
- userbinator 6y agoIn 1962 an ACM paper referred to a "4K IBM 1401" which had 4000 characters of storage, but in 1964 Amdahl wrote a paper that had 1K meaning 1024. That's easy to explain, as a 1401 is actually a decimal computer.
- throw0101a 6y agoFurther up: > In the 1950s, "1 kilobit" meant 1000 bits:[9][10]
- ATsch 6y agoIt just randomly so happened that drive manufacturers used the meaning that benefitted them and is not really used by anyone else
- throw0101a 6y agoIt just randomly so happened that drive manufacturers used the meaning of what the SI folks said the meaning actually was.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoWhile I'll admit they do have a slightly better case here, basically every OS's definition is more important than the SI. They clearly did it to make their drives look bigger. As proof, why are they sticking behind old SI definitions 25 years after they added the other ones?
- throw0101a 6y ago> As proof, why are they sticking behind old SI definitions 25 years after they added the other ones? Because hard drives, going back to the original (the IBM 350), have used decimal prefixes.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoAt best, that means they should have switched when SSD's happened. Given what this article is about, I don't know why you're giving HD manufacturers the benefit of the doubt.
- wtallis 6y agokB, MB, GB, etc. were genuinely ill-defined when the drive manufacturers started using them to their advantage. Those units were not standardized by SI or ISO, there was precedent for both the binary and decimal interpretations, the unambiguously binary KiB, MiB, etc. had not yet been introduced, and industry standards organizations like JEDEC and IEC were not particularly helpful in resolving the situation. None of those mitigating/confounding factors apply to RPM, so the current lies are more blatant. (Though it does seem somewhat relevant to point out here that a "500GB" drive usually has an accessible capacity of 500,107,862,016 bytes, implying an effective definition of 1GB=1,000,215,724 bytes, which is neither 1024^3 bytes nor 10^9, nor 10^9 rounded up to the nearest whole (binary-sized) sector. And that effective GB definition varies with drive capacity.)
- pseudalopex 6y agoDifferent 500 GB models have different capacities. They're just guaranteed to hold at least 500,000,000,000 bytes.
- wtallis 6y agoI haven't actually been able to verify with multiple 500GB hard drives, but the exact byte count I quoted does seem to be universally standard for 500GB SSDs.
- ryandrake 6y agoMore like what they did with the "X" value of CDROM drives. 1X, 2X, 3X, etc. It started out being a rough multiple of the expected data rate. Eventually manufacturers realized they could change it to measure something else (I think rotational speed or something) so they could inflate the "X" value more and more without a corresponding increased data rate for the user. This will inevitably happen when you let marketing define your units or there is no regulatory body enforcing basic truth in advertising.
- michalhosna 6y agoThis one is wrong on the OS side of thigs. KB = Kilobyte, which from SI definition of kilo means 10^3. KiB = Kibibyte, was formaly defined later by IEC in 1998 as 2^10 OSes (Windows/Mac/Linux), are the ones doing it wrong, using 2^10 internaly, but presenting using SI prefixes.
- pseudalopex 6y agoApple uses powers of 10 now.