On Dec 27, 2011, at 4:38 PM, Robert Monaghan wrote: > Hi All, > > I was aware of the inflated numbers for marketing hard drives. But I wasn't > aware that Apple jumped on the marketing bandwagon. > (Apple adopt marketing terms? Never..) > > Well, as I have a 10.6/10.7, base 2 is history, I guess. > > I am going to keep the metric terminology myself. (MB/KB, etc.) > I had not heard that SI had adopted metric terms.. :) > > Thanks for your thoughts! Its an annoying problem. Not a major issue. > > Enjoy the Holidays! > > bob.
It’s not a marketing bandwagon per se. Kilo was a metric prefix meaning 1000 long before computers existed, and the SI has defined kilo, mega, giga, etc. since 1960, well before computers were seen much outside of labs. Using "kilo" to mean 1024 was never a technically correct thing to do, although back in the old days when operating systems could run off of a floppy disk, we were usually dealing with small enough sizes that the discrepancy wasn’t that large. However, with larger units such as TB which we’re using nowadays, this can become a real problem — the difference between one binary terabyte and one decimal terabyte is over 99 decimal gigabytes, certainly a non-trivial amount. In this day and age, KB, MB, GB, etc. should be used to refer to 10^3, 10^6, and 10^9 bytes respectively, as per SI. Using KB to refer to 1024 bytes has been deprecated by all the standards organizations, and thus Apple is doing the right thing here (as were the hard drive manufacturers, but obviously for marketing purposes rather than because it was the correct thing to do). If you need to refer to powers of 1024, you should use KiB, MiB, TiB, etc. as per IEEE 1541. As I mentioned before, I prefer to use these units because currently, the inconsistency in the common usage of KB, MB, and the rest makes them very unclear, especially when dealing with the larger units. If everyone eventually gets on board with using these units correctly, then these units will become more useful than they are today. Charles_______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
