[HN Gopher] Mac finder uses 1,000,000 bytes instead of 1,048,576...
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Mac finder uses 1,000,000 bytes instead of 1,048,576 bytes for file
sizes (2011)
Author : danielyaa5
Score : 48 points
Date : 2021-02-26 20:54 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (discussions.apple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (discussions.apple.com)
| jl6 wrote:
| Correctly.
|
| 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.
| argvargc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| bluejekyll wrote:
| Additionally, file systems allocate in blocks, so the actual
| amount of storage is based on number of blocks and isn't just
| offsets of bytes.
| varjag wrote:
| It may make sense for SI to stick to physical units business.
| kube-system wrote:
| Maybe they tried to, but nobody could agree on a time to do
| it. :D
| varjag wrote:
| OK 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?
| saurik wrote:
| Hard 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 wrote:
| I 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
| [deleted]
| williesleg wrote:
| What a rip off Tim Apple the Bean Counter.
| grishka wrote:
| Yes. 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 wrote:
| a
| theodric wrote:
| There was this, but it's broken since ages
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/brkirch.wordpress.com/2014/11/0...
| beervirus wrote:
| https://brkirch.wordpress.com/2014/11/01/switchdisksizebase-.
| ..
|
| Fixed link.
| comprev wrote:
| Title needs (2011)
| grishka wrote:
| But modern macOS versions still do this.
| protomyth wrote:
| I 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.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| Networking is also a binary world, yet nobody is using binary
| prefixes.
|
| Storage manufacturers have been using decimal prefixes for
| decades, you should probably get over it at this point.
| varjag wrote:
| How about 10 bit bytes then, would only make more sense,
| right?
| wmf wrote:
| Fibre Channel and Infiniband tried that.
| deaddodo wrote:
| What do you mean? Networking is definitely done in binary
| standards. Your router/switch/NIC is almost definitely rated
| in a bitrate standard.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| IEEE units are base 10. 10Gb/s is 10,000,000,000 bits per
| second.
| qeternity wrote:
| Bitrates are base 10...
| wiml wrote:
| Disk manufacturers use a hybrid system, don't they, since the
| sectors are powers-of-two but they use decimal multipliers to
| inflate the size beyond that? So that a "marketing gigabyte"
| might actually be a megakibibyte.
| dataflow wrote:
| Don't forget 1.44M floppies.
| derekp7 wrote:
| What is really funny is the size is really 1440 KiB,
| which is not 1.44 MiB and is also not 1.44 million bytes.
| So in that case it was a mixture of the two units (they
| would have been better off calling them 1.47 MB, as the
| actual size was 1474560 bytes, or 1.406 MiB which is the
| actual size divided by 1048576).
| pmw wrote:
| I disagree. As Michael Bolton said, "Why should I change? He's
| the one who sucks!"
|
| Kilo, mega, and other prefixes predate computer storage, and SI
| is beautiful because it is consistent. The computer industry
| decided to use standard prefixes with non-standard (base-2)
| quantities. Now let's cut our losses and return to consistency
| with everything else.
| dataflow wrote:
| You're not disagreeing. Parent is talking about the
| measurement units changing, whereas you're saying the meaning
| of the SI prefixes shouldn't change. You can have both:
| require KiB, MiB, etc.
| iab wrote:
| How about micro-inches, or kilo-furlongs. Let's get chaotic
| in here.
| beervirus wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5-s-4KPtD8
| dataflow wrote:
| Your proposal lacks what is commonly called a
| "motivation".
| iab wrote:
| So you're saying "sow discord" is a no-go
| mattashii wrote:
| I'd be all for that. Please standardize your measurements
| to one unit, and use constant logarithmically
| incrementing indicators for larger amounts of these
| units. Better yet: do not base them on (or name them
| after) a unit that differs for each person (why does my
| foot measure 0'11"?)
| [deleted]
| arghwhat wrote:
| Enjoy your 17.179869184 gigabytes of RAM.
|
| The hardware is using sizes in powers of 2 because it's the
| only sensible thing to do, and numbers would be very annoying
| for users if the units didn't account for it.
| lemmonii wrote:
| I will enjoy 16 GiB of RAM, this is an already solved
| problem.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/927/
|
| I say this because most regular folks don't even know
| what a gigabyte is so asking them to understand what a
| gibibyte is does not really "solve the problem" of
| consumer understanding.
| dataflow wrote:
| The xkcd isn't really relevant here, there are only 2
| competing standards here and the proposal is to pick the
| other one.
| [deleted]
| axaxs wrote:
| That would only make sense if these storage mediums had to have
| sizes exactly aligning on them, but that isn't the case.
| perl4ever wrote:
| If memory is going to be measured in powers of two, shouldn't
| disks be, so that you can easily tell how many multiples of
| your memory size they store?
| [deleted]
| rsj_hn wrote:
| By "US Office of Weights and Measures", I take it you are
| referring to NIST's Weights and Measures division? They do not
| have the power to require anything, they publish standards
| documents and make reference measures available to the public
| if someone needs to calibrate.
| deaddodo wrote:
| One 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 wrote:
| _1 MB = 1 million bytes. Formatted capacity less._
|
| Somehow they're getting away with this.
| deaddodo wrote:
| They obligatory HDD KMA disclaimer.
| blawson wrote:
| Apparently you're meant to use kibibyte for 2^10 (1024) bytes,
| with the prefix kilo being the International System of Units'
| version of 1000.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#Multiple-byte_units
| dataflow wrote:
| The funny thing is kibi is short for kilobinary which still
| has kilo in it!
| [deleted]
| Animats wrote:
| Mandatory XKCD.[1]
|
| [1] https://xkcd.com/394/
| mdeck_ wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| The 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.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| baud and bps are not actually the same thing, although in the
| era of 300 baud they may as well have been.
| [deleted]
| kludgeon wrote:
| worth noting this context free link is 10 yrs old.
| lallysingh wrote:
| On 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.
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(page generated 2021-02-26 23:02 UTC)