6 ms·

Files 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 on

Files 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.

soneil 6y ago
There was never one commonly accepted meaning for a MB. Storage has always been base10. Linespeed has always been base10. RAM is native to a matrix, and lazy programmers like to pretend that means everything is. The first commercial drive, the IBM 305, stored 100,000 characters on each of 50 platters, for 5 million total characters. Drives have been a base10 number of sectors for my entire lifetime.
- argvargc 6y ago
  > There was never one commonly accepted meaning for a MB. If that was correct, this HN post wouldn't exist. For the 50 years preceding Apple's intervention, any example that can be produced of MB equalling 1,000,000 bytes, likely has about one MiB-worth of counter-examples showing it equalling 1,048,576 bytes.
  - pseudalopex 6y ago
    No.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#Units_based_on_powers_of_10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#Units_based_on_powers_of_...
    - argvargc 6y ago
      This wikipedia article quoting a standard formalised in the late 90's, and only beginning to gain adoption from that point on, largely supports my statement.
      - pseudalopex 6y ago
        The Wikipedia article lists things that always used the base 10 definition. It has examples of disks from the 1970s. And it mentions a 3rd definition of megabyte used since the 1980s.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >For the 50 years preceding Apple's intervention, any example that can be produced of MB equalling 1,000,000 bytes, likely has about one MiB-worth of counter-examples showing it equalling 1,048,576 bytes. You'd be surprised... M has been the accepted prefix for 1,000,000 since the 19th century, widely used in science, networking standards and disks, decades before Apple made any change itself...
    - Aerroon 6y ago
      >M has been the accepted prefix for 1,000,000 since the 19th century Except when it, of course, isn't. $10M is certainly not ten megadollars. Even science isn't that consistent about it. The SI base unit for mass is the kilogram. Yet we don't have megakilograms. We have megagrams, but nobody uses them. Instead we use tons. Somehow kilotons and megatons are used though. If we're willing to accept the above then why couldn't we have stuck with the powers of 2? Digital information at some level is going to become base 2.
      - coldtea 6y ago
        >$10M is certainly not ten megadollars. Money is not covered by S.I./metric units anyway, so not sure what's the point of this argument. And even at that, while M here is the "mega" unit, the value 10M is still 10 million (1010^6) dollars (not 102^20 dollars).
      - turbopony 6y ago
        That's a good point. We might have to start saying megadollars. M$10 looks kind of clumsy, though.
      - rualca 6y ago
        > Except when it, of course, isn't. $10M is certainly not ten megadollars. The unit of currency is the dollar. There is no units of currency that corresponds to 1M dollars. The SI system of units devised a systematic way to define derived units that reflect a certain amount expressed in the base unit. Currency don't have the benefit.
      - soneil 6y ago
pseudalopex 6y ago
File systems don't come in power of 2 sizes. They come in arbitrary numbers of blocks. Most storage devices have a power of 2 block size. But not all.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Integrity_Field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Integrity_Field
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
> All else being equal, I see it as better to under-promise and over-deliver than the reverse: But "over-promise" could mean multiple things. If I'm buying a hard drive "over promise" means larger. If I'm figuring out how much space a game will take up on my hard drive before I buy it, "over promise" means smaller.
stkdump 6y ago
Nobody over-promises (or under-promises for that matter) when the meaning of units and prefixes are clear. Division by powers of 1000 ceased to be an expensive operation relative to user interaction a very very long time ago. And even back when it was, I am sure would the error have been in the order of 10% (as it is now with TB vs TiB), they absolutely would have taken the more expensive but more correct operation. I just see no advantage in continuing to resist the unification of the meaning of prefixes. And where people prefer the old way for some nostalgic reason, just put the 'i' in there and you are good.
- argvargc 6y ago
  This makes sense when dealing with intrinsic units that also follow the base10 pattern. Bytes do not. Bytes are made up of 8 bits, and bits are powers of 2. Neither of these facts have any relation to base10. There is inevitable shoe-horning happening on either side of the argument. If a new metric was to be introduced to provide for those who wish for "everything to be neat and tidy, excepting for the base unit", they should be the ones using a new term, while the rest of everyone continues using the incumbent one. Overriding the commonly-accepted and widely-used term with a secondary meaning is a sub-optimum solution.
  - pseudalopex 6y ago
    8 bits is just a convention. 6 and 9 bit bytes were common until the 1980s. Standards still say octet or specify 8 bit bytes. ISO and IEC standards defined a byte as 8 bits in the 1990s. But they also defined kilo and mega as powers of 10. Powers of 2 were never used exclusively.
    - argvargc 6y ago
      Powers of 2 remain fundamental to bits regardless of how many bits are grouped together. I've only made the correct claim that the logical continuance the employment of powers of 2 into units of scale was sufficiently widespread as to be considered convention, something those who created the standards you cite also readily acknowledge.

soneil 6y ago

There was never one commonly accepted meaning for a MB. Storage has always been base10. Linespeed has always been base10. RAM is native to a matrix, and lazy programmers like to pretend that means everything is. The first commercial drive, the IBM 305, stored 100,000 characters on each of 50 platters, for 5 million total characters. Drives have been a base10 number of sectors for my entire lifetime.

argvargc 6y ago
> There was never one commonly accepted meaning for a MB. If that was correct, this HN post wouldn't exist. For the 50 years preceding Apple's intervention, any example that can be produced of MB equalling 1,000,000 bytes, likely has about one MiB-worth of counter-examples showing it equalling 1,048,576 bytes.
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  No.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#Units_based_on_powers_of_10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#Units_based_on_powers_of_...
  - argvargc 6y ago
    This wikipedia article quoting a standard formalised in the late 90's, and only beginning to gain adoption from that point on, largely supports my statement.
    - pseudalopex 6y ago
      The Wikipedia article lists things that always used the base 10 definition. It has examples of disks from the 1970s. And it mentions a 3rd definition of megabyte used since the 1980s.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >For the 50 years preceding Apple's intervention, any example that can be produced of MB equalling 1,000,000 bytes, likely has about one MiB-worth of counter-examples showing it equalling 1,048,576 bytes. You'd be surprised... M has been the accepted prefix for 1,000,000 since the 19th century, widely used in science, networking standards and disks, decades before Apple made any change itself...
  - Aerroon 6y ago
    >M has been the accepted prefix for 1,000,000 since the 19th century Except when it, of course, isn't. $10M is certainly not ten megadollars. Even science isn't that consistent about it. The SI base unit for mass is the kilogram. Yet we don't have megakilograms. We have megagrams, but nobody uses them. Instead we use tons. Somehow kilotons and megatons are used though. If we're willing to accept the above then why couldn't we have stuck with the powers of 2? Digital information at some level is going to become base 2.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      >$10M is certainly not ten megadollars. Money is not covered by S.I./metric units anyway, so not sure what's the point of this argument. And even at that, while M here is the "mega" unit, the value 10M is still 10 million (1010^6) dollars (not 102^20 dollars).
    - turbopony 6y ago
      That's a good point. We might have to start saying megadollars. M$10 looks kind of clumsy, though.
    - rualca 6y ago
      > Except when it, of course, isn't. $10M is certainly not ten megadollars. The unit of currency is the dollar. There is no units of currency that corresponds to 1M dollars. The SI system of units devised a systematic way to define derived units that reflect a certain amount expressed in the base unit. Currency don't have the benefit.
    - soneil 6y ago

pseudalopex 6y ago

File systems don't come in power of 2 sizes. They come in arbitrary numbers of blocks. Most storage devices have a power of 2 block size. But not all.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Integrity_Field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Integrity_Field

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

> All else being equal, I see it as better to under-promise and over-deliver than the reverse: But "over-promise" could mean multiple things. If I'm buying a hard drive "over promise" means larger. If I'm figuring out how much space a game will take up on my hard drive before I buy it, "over promise" means smaller.

stkdump 6y ago

Nobody over-promises (or under-promises for that matter) when the meaning of units and prefixes are clear. Division by powers of 1000 ceased to be an expensive operation relative to user interaction a very very long time ago. And even back when it was, I am sure would the error have been in the order of 10% (as it is now with TB vs TiB), they absolutely would have taken the more expensive but more correct operation. I just see no advantage in continuing to resist the unification of the meaning of prefixes. And where people prefer the old way for some nostalgic reason, just put the 'i' in there and you are good.

argvargc 6y ago
This makes sense when dealing with intrinsic units that also follow the base10 pattern. Bytes do not. Bytes are made up of 8 bits, and bits are powers of 2. Neither of these facts have any relation to base10. There is inevitable shoe-horning happening on either side of the argument. If a new metric was to be introduced to provide for those who wish for "everything to be neat and tidy, excepting for the base unit", they should be the ones using a new term, while the rest of everyone continues using the incumbent one. Overriding the commonly-accepted and widely-used term with a secondary meaning is a sub-optimum solution.
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  8 bits is just a convention. 6 and 9 bit bytes were common until the 1980s. Standards still say octet or specify 8 bit bytes. ISO and IEC standards defined a byte as 8 bits in the 1990s. But they also defined kilo and mega as powers of 10. Powers of 2 were never used exclusively.
  - argvargc 6y ago
    Powers of 2 remain fundamental to bits regardless of how many bits are grouped together. I've only made the correct claim that the logical continuance the employment of powers of 2 into units of scale was sufficiently widespread as to be considered convention, something those who created the standards you cite also readily acknowledge.