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Snow Leopard (10.6) does use Base 10
- Thread starter darijoe
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There is not a single logical reason to use powers of 2 to describe hard disc sizes. There is no advantage. The choice was completely arbitrary when computers were at their early stages. Building a module with 1024 bytes of RAM = 2^10 made more sense than 1000 bytes of RAM. So it made sense to say one kilobyte when you actually meant 1024 bytes. With small numbers the error in comparison to correct SI was small (2.4%), with a terabyte - which was unthinkable back then - the error is already 9% and it gets worse and worse as sizes increase without having any advantage! There is no base 2 advantage in storage calculation. Hard disks have arbitrary sizes anyway and always differ by at least a few megabytes. Their sizes never align exactly with base 2 boundaries as little kilobyte RAM modules did.
Apple has to be applauded for ending this senseless, flawed logic from kilobyte times. It doesn't scale. A petabyte disk will have already a difference of over 11 terabyte compared to metric scale and it will get worse beyond that.
Apple has to be applauded for ending this senseless, flawed logic from kilobyte times. It doesn't scale. A petabyte disk will have already a difference of over 11 terabyte compared to metric scale and it will get worse beyond that.
Maybe it is true that the use of powers of two are illogical, but it is way to late to try and change it. Every single computer and electronic device as long as the average consumer can remember has used ^2 as a way of measuring data. It will be too confusing to change it. And Gibibytes are only used by wikipedians and people who think that ogg vorbis will outcompete mp3 any day now.
For this to be acceptable, all hardware (like flash and hard disks) should have an the exact base10 size as is stated on the packaging. A hard disk that states 500GB on the box must have an actual 500 base10 gigabytes size.
See my post at the end of the previous page if you haven't already read it.
Until the hardware manufacturers cease to build in base2 and declare the same value in base10 on the packaging, Apple's switch is unacceptable and possibly deceiving.
That's not true. All data transmission units use base 10. Most storage devices use base 10, only RAM originally uses base 2. It makes sense in the latter case, since RAM cells are manufactured with cell numbers in powers of 2 (HDs are not) and sizes (and thus error compared to the regular meaning of kilo, mega, giga, etc.), are much smaller than hard disks. Only operating systems used to stick to this logic (for much too long).
I don't see what's supposed to be so confusing for consumers. When they buy a 1 TB drive, OS X will show exactly 1 TB. When their email account has a 20 MB attachment size limit, all emails will still go through, since being only slightly smaller. Only Windows within Bootcamp will show a several gigabyte smaller disk size. When this consumer looks up the reason behind this on Google he will find out, that Windows still expresses hard disk space in a unit system descended from computers with 2^16 bytes of RAM, while Apple switched to standard meaning of kilo, mega, giga like it is used anywhere else on this planet.
Well, Americans are used to ****ed up unit systems like pounds and ounces. They might find the symmetry of 1k x 1k = 1000000 very confusing...
You are really funny! Hard disks are neither "build" in base 2 nor base 10. Every hard disk has a fixed number of bytes. With modern drives this number is too high to express it directly, so mega, kilo, giga, and tera units are used to make it readable. Here you can either use base 10 or base 2.The common meaning in all sciences is kilo=1000, mega=1000000, giga=1000000000, tera=1000000000000, that's base 10. So you just take your number of bytes on the drive and divide it by 1000000000 if you want base 10 gigabytes. Or you use base 2 and divide by 1073741824. It's so funny that you think a hard drive can be build in either base 2 or 10 and manufacturers could cease to do so! Also your other post doesn't exactly hit the nail on the head. Computers don't calculate anywhere in kilo, mega, and giga units. They just know base 2 numbers, that's all. Kilo, mega, and giga are just human readable segmentations of this number space without any equivalent in hardware. So a computer doesn't really give a **** in which units you partition byte counts. It's about as important as wether it outputs text in blue or green color. The only ones having to care about byte count partitioning are programmers, when they read/write from/into RAM, CPU registers, or system buses. And they care about multiples of your architecture's or I/O system's bit depth and not about kilos, megas, gigas, and whatnot.
I wanted to see if I could find any non wikipedia info on the gibibyte and the following link came up. Looks like a standard created by the International Electrotechnical Commission in 1998.
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
Also your other post doesn't exactly hit the nail on the head. Computers don't calculate anywhere in kilo, mega, and giga units. They just know base 2 numbers, that's all. Kilo, mega, and giga are just human readable segmentations of this number space without any equivalent in hardware. So a computer doesn't really give a **** in which units you partition byte counts. It's about as important as wether it outputs text in blue or green color. The only ones having to care about byte count partitioning are programmers, when they read/write from/into RAM, CPU registers, or system buses. And they care about multiples of your architecture's or I/O system's bit depth and not about kilos, megas, gigas, and whatnot.
What's funny is you think that I truly mean hardware manufacturers build in base2 or base10!
One must separate between the intent and execution of the hardware manufacturers and that is what I am referring to in that case.
On top of that, your last paragraph shows you completely misunderstood my post and took things for their literal meaning where you shouldn't.
All of what you said is taken for granted (which means I know its true and I'm not even going to bother to bring it up) within my post.
I've reread my posts to see if I was maybe incorrect or unclear about something but their is nothing to change.
My reply to you is my first post in this thread.
Suggestion: I think you are not understanding me at the right level of abstraction/scope.
What's funny about your statement is that base-10 is actually the standard. I already discussed this at length in another thread... but read up on IEEE 1541-2002.
I would also like a way to switch back to base-2, but base-10 is the standard now. Base-2 is just the de facto standard.
Actually, it would mean gigaBIT
There's an 8-fold difference (assumed "byte" is an 8 bit word) between GB and Gb, you know...Actually, the de facto standard is different depeding on what it is used for:
- data transmission rates: base 10 (has a close relationship to frequencies measured in Hz; you don't want 1 MHz with a symbol size of 16 bits to yield 1.91 MB/s instead of 1 MHz * 16 ((bit/s)/Hz) / (8 bit/B) = 2 MB/s)
- hard disk sizes: base 10
- flash memory cards: base 10
- solid state disks: base 10
- unformatted floppy disk sizes: base 10 (has a close relationship to bit density)
- formatted floppy disk sizes: mixed (e.g. "1.44 MB" = 1.44 * 1024 * 1000 Bytes)
- file systems/file sizes: base 2
- RAM: base 2
Anyone know any good apps to replace Finder, so we can avoid this issue
Pathfinder looks great but it costs, anything similar that is free
Pathfinder looks great but it costs, anything similar that is free
Sorry, your backpedalling makes it only worse, because: hard disks are built with base 10 intent for ages. A 500 GB disk will have roughly ~500000000000 bytes and it is advertised in base 10 notation as 500 GB.
If hard disks were built with base 2 intent, a 500 GB model would have roughly 536870912000 bytes, which is not the case.
What is so hard to understand?
Harddrive's have base 10
Filesystem's have base 2
They are not the same thing!
In man page for command df we have both base 10 AND base 2 to use why not in the finder. It's just Apple and beta testers being silly.
NAME
df -- display free disk space
SYNOPSIS
df [-b | -h | -H | -k | -m | -g | -P] [-ailn] [-t] [-T type] [file | filesystem ...]
LEGACY SYNOPSIS
df [-b | -h | -H | -k | -m | -P] [-ailn] [-t type] [-T type] [file | filesystem ...]
DESCRIPTION
The df utility displays statistics about the amount of free disk space on the specified filesystem or
on the filesystem of which file is a part. Values are displayed in 512-byte per block counts. If nei-ther neither
ther a file or a filesystem operand is specified, statistics for all mounted filesystems are displayed
(subject to the -t option below).
The following options are available:
-H "Human-readable" output. Use unit suffixes: Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte and
Petabyte in order to reduce the number of digits to three or less using base 10 for sizes.
-h "Human-readable" output. Use unit suffixes: Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte and
Petabyte in order to reduce the number of digits to three or less using base 2 for sizes.
NAME
df -- display free disk space
SYNOPSIS
df [-b | -h | -H | -k | -m | -g | -P] [-ailn] [-t] [-T type] [file | filesystem ...]
LEGACY SYNOPSIS
df [-b | -h | -H | -k | -m | -P] [-ailn] [-t type] [-T type] [file | filesystem ...]
DESCRIPTION
The df utility displays statistics about the amount of free disk space on the specified filesystem or
on the filesystem of which file is a part. Values are displayed in 512-byte per block counts. If nei-ther neither
ther a file or a filesystem operand is specified, statistics for all mounted filesystems are displayed
(subject to the -t option below).
The following options are available:
-H "Human-readable" output. Use unit suffixes: Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte and
Petabyte in order to reduce the number of digits to three or less using base 10 for sizes.
-h "Human-readable" output. Use unit suffixes: Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte and
Petabyte in order to reduce the number of digits to three or less using base 2 for sizes.
What's so hard for you to understand? There is not a single file system, that would use kilo, mega, giga, and whatnot units internally, neither in base 2 nor base 10. They just use bytes and blocks.
Kilo, mega, giga, ... byte count partitioning is not used anywhere internally before translating byte counts to human readable output. It's a human interface feature and the choice of base 2 and base 10 is arbitrary. So ending the base 2 trek, which made roughly sense during kilobyte times, but was just a pain in the ass ever since the introduction of the first gigabyte gear (already over 7% deviation from base 10), is a sensible choice. Even the first IBM mainframe hard disks counted in base 10 BTW.
I also read that post from a person that never used them. Does the old mainframe run OS X 10.6? No? Do your computer take up so much space that it needs a whole basement? It has nothing to do with OS X 10.6! That is just a silly and dumb excuse for Apple and betatesters to not give me a choice how I will see my bits and bytes. This is "ALL must LOVE Glossy and Glassy displays and firewire is not used because I say so" issue transfered to the filesystem.
Apple needs to give us the choice to use either Base 10 or Base 2.
Personally, I'd consider base 10 as one of the main refinements in Snow Leopard. The disaster that is 2^x has to end, it just keeps getting worse the larger drives become...
A compromise I've proposed for years would be for systems to have a configuration choice between displaying MB and MiB, with the default set to MB. Base 2 fanatics could then hopefully live with making a configuration change once, and then have an extra "i" here and there, while the rest of us could enjoy one million meaning 1,000,000.
There are absolutely no rational reasons for burdening end users with base 2.
A compromise I've proposed for years would be for systems to have a configuration choice between displaying MB and MiB, with the default set to MB. Base 2 fanatics could then hopefully live with making a configuration change once, and then have an extra "i" here and there, while the rest of us could enjoy one million meaning 1,000,000.
There are absolutely no rational reasons for burdening end users with base 2.
I am not back-pedalling. You're missing the point still.
I think you're almost there though!
My point is that hardware manufacturer's should have never declared base10 values. It should have always been and should always be (in my opinion) in base2.
It wasn't long ago that people who bought computer hardware expected values in base2 (because that's how the computing world turned) and were surprised to find that they were in fact base10. Consumers today seem to have forgotten that it was a dishonest and possibly illegal practice or have simply given up. It wasn't ages ago that the switch occurred, it started in the late 90s. We all watched it unfold as consumers.
Now Apple decides to push this even further under the rug and I am not happy with this. This saves the hardware manufacturers from ever having to own up to their past dishonest practices.
This is why I don't like the switch.