On Mon, 2006-01-16 at 15:24 +1030, Tim wrote: > Tim: > >> And it doesn't stop there, either. Is one MB 1024 KB, or something > >> else? People have different opinions about that, so it makes MB even > >> more vague than KB. > > Toralf Lund: > > Not really. People who say 1kb is 1024 bytes will also say that 1Mb is > > 1024kb. They don't change their minds about the factors in the middle > > of it all. > > Unfortunately, that only works if they're consistent (which not > everybody is, and why we have this mess), and if you have such clues to > fall back on. For instance, if they only ever mention the term MB, you > don't know what they're referring to. > > There's only one example I can come up with that makes virtually useless > use of the kilo prefix (and other multiplier prefixes), and that's in > computing. Everything else is consistently the same: > > 10km = ten thousand metres > 10kV = ten thousand Volts > 10kg = ten thousand grams > 10kB = something vague and useless > All of these examples use the decimal system for measurement. > As far as things like hard drive sizing goes, there's another side to > the issue: A 10 gig drive, for instance, whatever you think the value > of G might refer to, might well be a 10.246 gig drive, but the number It might be 10.246GB in decimal terms, but in binary terms is only about 9.6GB raw size and only have about 8.9GB of usable space after formatting. A perfect example of this is the marking on a new drive I recently got. It is marked as 160GB. The fine print says that 1GB is 1 billion bytes. This is interchanging of terms between numbering systems. A billion is always 10^9 since billion is only defined in the decimal system. (1,000,000,000) A gigabyte in binary is always 2^30 bytes, which is actually 1,073,741,824 bytes in decimal. > was rounded down for simplicity sake. You really do need to list things > in bytes if it's important to be precise. > That was the beginning of this thread. Marketing speak for using decimal values and expressing it in such a way that it implies the binary value instead. There is one segment of the hard drive industry that uses the true gigabyte size to express the drive capacity. A scsi 36.4GB drive is truely 36.4GB and is equivalent to an IDE drive that is claimed to be a 40GB drive. Again, 'Marketing Speak' allows a vendor to mark something in such a way that it implies one thing but does not give the actual facts in terms of the true context. It takes advantage of the different numbering systems and the *known* fact that the majority of people only understand the decimal system. Your entire argument has been that everything we do should be in the decimal system. Computing is binary, not decimal, and terms used to represent values in the computing world are also binary. If you can understand that, then the problems disappear as long as terms are used according to the context. The great majority of our population do not understand the difference so it is easy for "marketing" terms to be misleading. > -- > Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. > I read messages from the public lists. >
