Insisting that the "27.9Mb" file someone just clicked on is actually 29.26 powers-of-ten megabytes does not strike me as a point of view that's certain to sweep the world. I sincerely hope that this nonsense fades away in the near future, but I don't expect that to actually be the case, because redefining the gigabyte as 0.931 previous gigabytes and the terabyte as 0.9095 previous terabytes is (a) confusing for normal users and (b) in deadly opposition to the desires of the hard-drive companies.

(I think all OSes use powers-of-two for file sizes, but I'm not sure. Is there some oddball OS that uses powers-of-ten?)

The computer industry did not exist when kilo, mega, giga, and so forth were defined. They are part of the metric system (you may have heard of it).

The computer industry bastardised the existing definitions (which were all powers of ten), not the other way around.

I think it's foolish, even annoying, that Microsoft chooses to use the wrong (binary) prefixes for file sizes. It loses one of the major advantages of the metric system - the idea that one can simply shift the decimal point and adjust the prefix on the unit of measure: 0.31G = 31M = 31000k for everything EXCEPT things expressed using the wrong (binary) prefixes.

Dan - please stop pushing this foolishness. Binary prefixes are ONLY appropriate for RAM, and you know that.

Remember that the computing world used the binary system and had STANDARD definitions for bit, byte, kilobyte, gigabyte, etc, for decades before SI decided they were going to *correct* us by attempting to redefine a standardized term already in use.

Bit and byte don't exist in the decimal system. It is an invalid expression to define prefixes like kilo =1000, giga=1,000,000, etc, in the decimal system because a prefix is inherently a descriptor of the base unit (that unit being binary).

In other words, there's no such thing as gibibyte, and gigabyte is never 1 million bytes. IF the standards organization wants to define a term then logically and scientifically they can use the prefixes to mean decimal values ONLY if they use a different base unit that is defined in the decimal system. They tried to change the prefix when they needed to change the base unit!

If they like throwing "ibi" onto words to fix what they mistakenly thought was a problem, then 1 million bytes would be termed gigabibi. Seems silly, but technically correct for making up new words instead of the mess they made instead.

... except for hard drives, and DVDs, and tape drives, and older floppy drives, and networking speeds, and processor speeds, ...

"the rip-off factor, in other words"

What a bunch of baloney.

Hard drives have always been measured in correct power-of-10 units. The first hard drive ever sold was the IBM 350 RAMAC in the 1950s. It featured 50,000 sectors, each of which held 100 alphanumeric 7-bit characters. I'm not seeing a connection to powers of two, are you? Through the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, hard drives continued to be measured in powers of 10, as they are today. Operating systems that used "binary K" like CP/M and DOS didn't even come out until the 70s.

Early floppy drives (8-inchers) were also measured in decimal kbytes and megabits. Meanwhile, your 56K modem was 56,000 bits per second, not 57,344. Today, your Ethernet connection is 100,000,000 bits per second, not 104,857,600. Your MP3 files are 128,000 bps, not 131,072. Your 50 GB Blu-Ray disc holds about 50,000,000,000 bytes, not 53,687,091,200. The ONLY thing that's inherently powers of two is memory. If you have evidence to the contrary, please present it, because all I've seen is complaints of fraud against drive manufacturers with no evidence to back it up.

The problem isn't deceitful marketing; it's Microsoft. What conceivable benefit is there to reporting a 100,000,000,000 byte drive as "93 GB" in one place and "95,367 MB" in another place? None. Microsoft's notation is stupid and useless. Western Digital was absolutely correct in their response to getting sued:

'Surely Western Digital cannot be blamed for how software companies use the term "gigabyte"—a binary usage which, according to Plaintiff's complaint, ignores both the historical meaning of the term and the teachings of the industry standards bodies. In describing its HDD's, Western Digital uses the term properly. Western Digital cannot be expected to reform the software industry. ... Apparently, Plaintiff believes that he could sue an egg company for fraud for labeling a carton of 12 eggs a "dozen," because some bakers would view a "dozen" as including 13 items.' http://paulhutch.com/wordpress/?p=214

Using "G-" to mean "1,073,741,824" is just wrong, plain and simple.

Everyone who has ever purchased a hard drive finds out the hard way that there are two ways to define a gigabyte.   When you buy a "500 Gigabyte" hard drive, the vendor defines it using the decimal powers...

The upshot is that anybody hoping to make themselves clear must define their terms every single time, not just dive in with a blithe assumption that other people will understand the way they happen to do it.

I wrote about this in the very first Dan's Data letters column.

Have long wind edly said that, my point was that back in the day we actually cared about the block size of the partition, so that the partition that I stored all my BS 2k docs on would be a 600 mb partition with a .5k block size, and the partions that I set up for photoshop skratch disk and Video Capture would have the max block size, (32k or 64k) depending on what hard drive formatting utility was in use.
We were using FWB Hard Disk Toolkit and RAID toolkit back in 1990-92. so if I saved a 2k file on the partition with 64k block size, it would take up 64k. Again that was back when we cared and actually controlled all processes and applications on our EXPENSIVE little macs. QUADRA 640av....blog...blah blog a blam!

PEACE no warts on rolling logs peas in yurtz

ERic PIt Crew out :-)

I remember reading a post by someone about this and they stated that prior to the 100Mb Drive, disk sizes were accurate. It was the maker of the first "100Mb" Disk that broke the rule, it was probably because they were short by a little, and someone suggesting using 1000 bytes to the kilobyte system as a way around it.

James

And don't get me started on PSU ratings.

Their job is to be as kind to their product's capabilities as possible, and our job call bullshit on it.