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A Look at WWDC 2009 Build of Snow Leopard
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Wat type of system do you have where 1TB shown as less than a gigabyte? I need to avoid that platform as the overhead is very large
!I know what you meant but others may think you have a very inefficient set-up and your overhead is very large indeed!
D
it only stretches it to the 'best' viewing size for your screen. i enjoy this feature - i never really make anything smaller (except for finder+itunes) - safari is always at a good size.
Guys relax if it bothers you --that-- much buy a mouse with 2 buttons ad all of the get info etc is available, (CUE CRYING ABOUT ONE BUTTON APPLE MOUSE).
Personally I find it far quicker to use key strokes, I can navigate through all kinds of options. And I guess this varies from person to person but I have never had a problem doing 3 key commands with my non-mouse hand. I suppose I am used to key stokes in Final cut and Logic so that helps a bit.
I just watched an episode if the Simpson's on Hulu (my kids LOVE that show - I do not, but it was three against one - so I lost) and they had a GREAT spoof on Apple - and the Apple store plus all the Apple products. It was the Mapple Store and the MiPhone and MyCube and Mypod - it was utterly fascinating how non-Apple users view die-hard Apple people. When I read your posting I think of that episode - because you feel that Apple can do no wrong and the OP is just plain of-base because NOTHING MS does can compare to Mapple, er, Apple. That is unfortunate and something I hope you consider next time you blindly follow Apple.
This is NOT a dig on you in the least, well not directly - but you should understand how non-Apple users view the Mac Elite and unfortunately for many in the Mac user-base the Simpson's portrayal of the small but vocal user-base is fairly accurate given many of the posts here and on the myriad other Apple fan sites and blogs.
Windows 7 DOES have a much better 'finder' feature compared to Apple - and NO, MS did NOT steal the dock/finder/search from Apple! They ARE similar but why do you feel that anything that is close to what Apple has done or will do is simply 'theft'? People are concurrently capable of similar ideas and execution of those ideas without someone 'poaching' those ideas.
I STRONGLY suggest heading to Hulu and watch the episode of the Simpson's I was speaking of. I am not sure you would find it entertaining but it is - like it or not, the way many Apple users and Mac elitists are viewed. I have many Windows users who would most likely enjoy using the Mac platform but will NOT because of the PERCEPTION of its user-base. Many posts here and elsewhere do nothing but promote that.
D
Your hand doesn't have to leave the mouse:
1. Select the folders/files you want to know the combined size of
2. Right-click one of the files/folders
3. Press and hold alt with you non-mouse hand and click Show Inspector
You have GOT to be kidding.
Wait, no it makes perfect sense to suggest that two competing companies would create similar products without influencing each other.
Gimme a break. Every business experiences this. If you aren't lifting ideas from your competitors while innovating on your own, the world is gonna pass you by.
Thank you, those are also good points. The whole concept of ipod/itunes "library syncing" is atrocious. It's the reason I used an iRiver (linux based) mp3 player up until recently. I just love plugging it in and seeing it show up as a mass storage device. I'm sure this topic has been beaten to death already though so I digress.
As for watching videos on a mac, I've never had a problem. As soon as I got my mbp I installed perian, flip4mac, and vlc. Almost every format plays fine in quicktime and for the few that don't, they play in vlc.
It might not be a big thing for you, but for some it will be. Think of how you will fastly compare files on differend OS's with each and another. There's another thread over here and it seems that many people will be bothered. If it's ok for you then fine. It might be better for the average consumer, but not for everybody. It has been alright for over 25 years, why change it now?
At least give us the option to turn it back.
I don't think that the other OS's will change it in the near future.
I'd just like to add that my chief complaint with binary prefixes is that they've become impossible to use.
It used to be that you could see a file listed like this:
11714 2009-01-14 09:34 blah.txt
You'd think to yourself "OK, that's about 11.7K". In binary units 11.7K is 11980.8 bytes (yes, eight-tenths of a byte -- binary prefixes are technically incompatible with base-10 decimal notation). But in any case you are only off by 2% or so.
Nowadays we have a lot more files like this:
251006844 2008-12-16 10:27 bigfile.dat
Eyeballing it, people would call this a 251MB file. Geeks are aware that this isn't quite right with binary prefixes, but unless they whip out the calculator, they have no idea what the "real" binary value would be. 251MB in binary units is really 263192576 bytes -- the eyeball estimate is off by nearly 5%.
The error grows:
1KB - 2.3%
1MB - 4.6%
1GB - 6.8%
1TB - 9%
In other words, the use of "binary" lookalikes for SI prefixes involves a calculation that users cannot perform without the benefit of a computer. This becomes important in many real-world contexts -- suppose you know each photo you take is 10MB and you want to know how much space 1000 of them will take up. It ought not take a computer to tell me how many gigabytes a trillion bytes is.
It used to be that you could see a file listed like this:
11714 2009-01-14 09:34 blah.txt
You'd think to yourself "OK, that's about 11.7K". In binary units 11.7K is 11980.8 bytes (yes, eight-tenths of a byte -- binary prefixes are technically incompatible with base-10 decimal notation). But in any case you are only off by 2% or so.
Nowadays we have a lot more files like this:
251006844 2008-12-16 10:27 bigfile.dat
Eyeballing it, people would call this a 251MB file. Geeks are aware that this isn't quite right with binary prefixes, but unless they whip out the calculator, they have no idea what the "real" binary value would be. 251MB in binary units is really 263192576 bytes -- the eyeball estimate is off by nearly 5%.
The error grows:
1KB - 2.3%
1MB - 4.6%
1GB - 6.8%
1TB - 9%
In other words, the use of "binary" lookalikes for SI prefixes involves a calculation that users cannot perform without the benefit of a computer. This becomes important in many real-world contexts -- suppose you know each photo you take is 10MB and you want to know how much space 1000 of them will take up. It ought not take a computer to tell me how many gigabytes a trillion bytes is.
Woops! I was misinformed. For some reason, I thought I did something similar to that a long time ago. I definitely lost something but I guess I didn't do it through cut and paste. Sorry!!!!
If you set them up correctly then it will.. er... be set up correctly!
OSX when you first launch it asks which keyboard language you want. Being in the UK I choose British English as my primary language.
The benefit is that when they put the prefix "Kilo" in front of a measurement, it actually means the same thing as "Kilo" in the standard metric measurement system.
The problem is that with "Kilobyte" it is really 1024 bytes, which isn't using the true definition of "Kilo" which is 1000. When you start getting into Mega, Giga, and Tera, the difference becomes very noticeable. Even though the total byte count is exactly the same in both cases, by using a non-standard definition for Kilo has gotten the computer industry in a weird spot for awhile now.
As long as the entire OS uses base 10 for the counting there is no 'bigger than they really are' trickery happening. They are simply reporting the SI-compliant size, rather than using the '1024 is close enough to 1000' trick that computers have been using for a couple decades. And yes, that is the original trick, as OS writers were trying to find a way to make calculating file sizes faster, and as 1024 was 'close enough' to 1000, they got away with it for the most part.
Ok, this one goes to you. That's somethins which is wrong..though false spelling doesn't bother me as much as new numbers.
Yeah I've seen that.
I hope that others OS's will move to it sooner or later too. In the end it's easier for most of the users when they buy a 500 GB HD and they also "see" 500 GB data.
But at the moment I don't like it. But who knows, maybe the industry will change again.
Uh, I'm not sure the difference between base 2 and base 10 is really understood, judging by this statement...
base 2: 1000000000
base 10: 512
They are fundamentally the same number, mathematically.
If I have 1024 bytes in my file... Most OSes would report that as 1.0KB. Snow Leopard would correctly report it as 1.024KB. If I have 50,000,000,000 bytes on my HDD, Leopard would report 46.5GB. Snow Leopard will report 50GB.
That is all that is changing here, which is moving away from the silly '1024 is close enough to 1000' prefix hack that has plagued us since early OS developers were looking for a way to make file size calculations faster and simpler, and instead using the true meaning of the SI prefixes, as others have posted in this thread.
/foreheadpalm
You're quite right
That's what you get posting before coffee, end up multiplying one base by another.I'm still of the opinion that the base 10 change won't make things simpler. It'd just yield the inconvenience of Leopard/Windows users swapping files with Snow Leopard users and the file size mysteriously changing or even not fitting since your free space isn't consistent. I don't see how that is a better situation then inaccurate HDD manufacturer size ratings. At least in the latter problem, it's fairly well known and consistent.
In some cases that could be irritating for example:
me: fsck -fy /dev/disk1s2
OS X: oh you must mean f*ck -fy /dev/disk1s2
Being serious though, I would be curious to know the answer to this question as well.
But unless every OS and every place in documentation and on the internet where a file size is given is in base 10, it's just going to cause even more confusion than "why is my 500 GB hard drive showing up as 480 GB?" mess.
Using base 2 may not be the proper way, but it's the way we've been using for 30 years and I see no need to change it.
Who says the HDD manufacturers are inaccurate? Right now, they are the only ones using the SI prefixes correctly.
As a programmer myself, I find the fact that we are still using these lazy shortcuts pretty tasteless. 1024 is not Kilo, no matter how much we like it to be that way. So something has to give... either we start using the Kibi (Ki) prefix that SI has created for the sole purpose of letting programmers remain lazy, or we start using the correct SI prefixes.
Either way, while there is short-term pain, we gain in the long run as the prefixes used become easier to trust, instead of relying on the fact that we KNOW the prefix is not what it says on the tin.