10 ms·
Mac finder uses 1,000,000 bytes instead of 1,048,576 bytes for file sizes (2011)
- varjag 6y agoOK but why Apple then says "GB" for RAM sizes in its marketing materials rather than these bullshit units? I guess "17.179869184 GB RAM" doesn't have the same ring to it?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- saurik 6y agoHard disks are typically sold with 1000-based units and memory is typically sold with 1024-based units: the market is inconsistent, and therefore so is the user interface; if you by 512 MB of RAM you get 512 MiB, but if you buy 1 TB of disk, you get only like 0.9 TiB, and so if you have a UI showing you how much space a file takes up it should (sadly) likely work different from a UI showing you how much space a process takes up :(.
- varjag 6y agoI am very aware HD manufacturers pushed through the megabyte rebranding via SI back in late 1990s. There is no good technical reason to have inherently power of two quantities in power of ten measures. The reason for re-standardization effort was deflection of legal responsibility for misleading marketing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#Lawsuits_over_definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#Lawsuits_over_definition
- soneil 6y agoWhats inherently power of two about them? I have two PS/2 era drives that predate your "rebranding". One, 20MB (actual 21.3MB or 20.3MiB) has a CHS geometry 612x4x17. The other, 40MB (41.5MB or 39.5MiB) has a CHS geometry of 1038x2x39. None of these values are powers of two (other than heads, because platters happen to have two sides) I'd argue that all we're seeing here is the long, long tail of lazy shortcuts taken in the early-home-computer era. Not a truth, a lazy shortcut - that software took as convention and hardware didn't.
- Volundr 6y agoTIL that hard drive platters are two sided. It makes perfect sense you can store data on both sides, yet never occurred to me before.
- varjag 6y agoAddressing and alignment of computer memory on binary architectures is happening on binary boundaries due to arithmetic properties. You can not buy a 1,000,000,000 bytes RAM chip for that reason. Magnetic and paper tape, drums, delay lines and hard disks are (imperfect) hacks to have more memory due to cost of RAM.
- grishka 6y ago> due to cost of RAM. And its volatility.
- protomyth 6y agoI still say the US Office of Weights and Measures should require all computer storage (either RAM or SSD/HD) in the US be measured in base 2 units. This continued base 10 usage in a binary world is confusing and frankly done to rip-off consumers.
- deaddodo 6y agoOne of the responses in that discussion: > However, if you think about, it does make sense for the computer to use the same standard as the HD manufacturers. No, it makes more sense for hard drive manufacturers to stop using a system that artificially inflates their disk size advertisements.
- grishka 6y ago1 MB = 1 million bytes. Formatted capacity less. Somehow they're getting away with this.
- deaddodo 6y agoThey obligatory HDD KMA disclaimer.
- hypertele-Xii 6y agoMeaning, there are 1 million bytes of storage, but pretty much all filesystems use some of those bytes to represent information about the files in addition to the files themselves. Hence, formatted, the resulting filesystem will have capacity less than that. You could, if you really wanted to, write 1 million raw bytes to the disk. But you'd need special software to read and write it, because de facto software expect there to be a master partitioning table or whatever it's called.
- grishka 6y agoI understand how file systems work, but then the properties window, in any OS, shows you the raw size anyway. Probably minus the tiniest fraction that the partition table occupies, but still. My point was that storage device manufacturers somehow get away with redefining units. No one else does this. Imagine if you bought a 1L bottle of milk, only to see in fine print that "1L = 800 ml".
- kludgeon 6y agoworth noting this context free link is 10 yrs old.
- jl6 6y agoCorrectly. 1MB is one million bytes, and files do not intrinsically come in power-of-two sizes. It may still make sense to use MiB for RAM though.
- varjag 6y agoIt may make sense for SI to stick to physical units business.
- kube-system 6y agoMaybe they tried to, but nobody could agree on a time to do it. :D
- SAI_Peregrinus 6y agoAnd there's already a unit for "amount of substance": the mole (symbol mol). 6.02214076e23 bytes is rather more than one encounters every day, but prefixes can handle that. A zeptomol of data is 602.221476 bytes, an obviously convenient number for indivisible amounts of data.
- argvargc 6y agoFiles may not, but file-systems do. All else being equal, I see it as better to under-promise and over-deliver than the reverse: In a world where there was one commonly-accepted meaning for MB (ie, the world where computers were invented, proliferated and became ubiquitous), and one assumed meaning (however logical it may be), users without the requisite nugget of binary knowledge would be positioned to be pleasantly surprised that they had "more than they paid for". In the case of file-sizes, this is to that users detriment, but in the case of the potentially more litigious issue of amount of drive space or RAM being purchased, this is to the users advantage. For those that simply knew, on the other hand, things were just as expected. Conversely, in the world where we now have two justifiable hard meanings for MB (one historical, one "canonical"), and people who go about endlessly correcting each other about them, we have handed the "things are as expected" situation to the everyday users, while the rest have inherited a mix of "less than I paid for" and "confusion". All-up, not a worthwhile trade IMO.
- williesleg 6y agoWhat a rip off Tim Apple the Bean Counter.
- grishka 6y agoYes. And it drives me crazy. There is a "defaults write" command to fix it once and for all, right? Please tell me there is.
- aabd 6y agoa
- theodric 6y agoThere was this, but it's broken since ages https://www.google.com/amp/s/brkirch.wordpress.com/2014/11/01/switchdisksizebase-v2-1/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/brkirch.wordpress.com/2014/11/0...
- beervirus 6y agohttps://brkirch.wordpress.com/2014/11/01/switchdisksizebase-v2-1/ https://brkirch.wordpress.com/2014/11/01/switchdisksizebase-... Fixed link.
- comprev 6y agoTitle needs (2011)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lallysingh 6y agoOn a local scale, this makes sense. Make the units of data consumption match the units of data capacity. The files are measured in powers of 10, the disks are measured in powers of 10. If the disk was sold on its power-of-2 capacity, then display the file sizes in their power-of-2 sizes. On a larger scale, this is a giant mess. Apple is the only one who'd actually try and fix this. Both in terms of power (hardware & software) and in clout.
- ColFrancis 6y ago> Both in terms of power (hardware & software) and in clout. I'd also add their "bravery", similar to dropping the 3.5mm jack.
- Animats 6y agoMandatory XKCD.[1] [1] https://xkcd.com/394/ https://xkcd.com/394/
- mdeck_ 6y agoThis is nothing new. Just another example of corporations screwing over consumers with ambiguous/confusing measurements. See e.g.: - ISPs advertising network speeds in megabits per second instead of megabytes (who ever uses megabits otherwise???) - Banks advertising interest-bearing accounts with APY and advertising loans with APR. Do folks have other good examples? I’m sure there are lots.
- colejohnson66 6y agoThe whole megabits/gigabits thing seems like a holdover from when internet speed was measured in bits. Not kilobits, but bits. 300 baud (bits/sec) modems and the like. When 1200 baud was reached, no one wanted to be the one to switch to a “lower” number of ~150 bytes/sec. EDIT: baud is not exactly the same as bits/second. But in those times, it was pretty much the same. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20534417/what-is-the-difference-between-baud-rate-and-bit-rate https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20534417/what-is-the-dif...
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agobaud and bps are not actually the same thing, although in the era of 300 baud they may as well have been.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mdeck_ 6y agoThis may be a historical explanation, but it also seems a tacit agreement with the point above, when it says “no one wanted to be the one to switch to a ‘lower’ number.” No one measures anything in kilobits or megabits today (nor has for decades)—except ISPs measuring the speeds they promise to customers.
- jl6 6y agoSure they do - nearly all networking gear is sold by bits/sec, e.g. gigabit Ethernet, 10Gb Ethernet, and so on. Media encoding also commonly uses bit rates, e.g. 320kbps MP3.
- nickcw 6y agoI'm not sure everyone will ever agree on this. I was amused to discover a few years ago when I had to order an E1 network connection at 2 Mbit/s that it was actually 2048000 bit/s, perhaps what you might call a 2 kikbit/s line now-a-days ;-)