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Re: GiB? MiB? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Over?
by Boyle M. Owl on Friday 02/Nov/2007, @09:04
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"Hooray for the KDE-team that does what should have been done a long time ago. Hopefully we can drag the US of A into the 21:st century (or atleast the 20:th) and make them use metric units as well soon"
Do you use metric seconds, hours, days?
Computers are "naturally" base 2. Not base 10. A file size in RAM should be the same as in magnetic media. How else do you map it? Eh?
And as what I say about disk sizes, it's been "Salesman Gigabytes" or megabytes, especially when I explain it to someone who isn't a geek like me. I say that because if I say "gibibytes", I sound like a total tool and I confuse whoever I'm talking to, make their eyes glaze over and they stop listening.
This is all because some time in the early/mid 90's disk manufacturers moved from a base 2 unit to base 10, because it made drives "look bigger".
Seagate just lost a settlement recognizing that they deceived customers by stating their disk sizes as base 10 units instead of base 2, which cheated customers out of appx 7 percent of space. These days all the manufacturers do it because it's not in their interest to truthfully say how big their disks are in true gigabytes, because they _all_ lie.
This "gibibytes" and "mibibytes" (ugh) shenanigans is all about "fixing" the "salesman gigabytes" problem. It should be the other way 'round, don't you think? It's not about usability at all, because if it was about usability, units between RAM, and magnetic media would be consistent, wouldn't it?
People are not dumb. They certainly understood base 2 units before the marketroids changed disk measurement to base 10 and that kilobytes and megabytes in RAM were the same as on the disk or tape.
You can say gibibytes and mibibytes and sound like a total tool if you want, but you won't catch me saying it, or anyone else I know. The only people pushing this have never mapped bytes on the disk into RAM and edited it in hex (or any other programmer worth his salt).
Excuse me while I go and build something out of 74LSxx logic gates.
Get off my lawn, you kids.
Oh yeah, and as for metric units, they aren't all that special and are just as arbitrary as "english" measurement. It's not my fault you can't count in base 12 (or two, or 8, or 16)
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Re: GiB? MiB? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Over?
by ac on Friday 02/Nov/2007, @17:02
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>Do you use metric seconds, hours, days?
Bzzt, wrong. The problem isn't that memory uses base 2 but that they hijacked the SI prefixes that were in use for well over a century. Embrace and Extend of another standard with your incompatible extensions, hmm who does this remind me of...
Or in short: If you are against MiB, you are a Microsoft-lover =)
>Computers are "naturally" base 2. Not base 10.
You mean like your CPU clockrate? Or your Ethernet connection? Or your DVD size? Or even your harddisk's latency?
How about the 1.44MB Floppy that is an unspeakable hybrid between KiB and MB.
>A file size in RAM should be the same as in magnetic media. How else do you map it? Eh?
Oh yes, the main use of the disk space value in the file manager status bar.
Not once have I used it to check the free space of my harddisk (where it might be of some minor use seeing how harddisks and most usb drives and stuff are measured in SI), but I use it constantly to map files to RAM address space in my mind.
>And as what I say about disk sizes, it's been "Salesman Gigabytes" or megabytes, especially when I explain it to someone who isn't a geek like me. I say that because if I say "gibibytes", I sound like a total tool and I confuse whoever I'm talking to, make their eyes glaze over and they stop listening
Then stop using gibibytes and start using GB. Non-geeks certainly don't give a fsck about addressing RAM.
>Seagate just lost a settlement recognizing that they deceived customers by stating their disk sizes as base 10 units instead of base 2, which cheated customers out of appx 7 percent of space. These days all the manufacturers do it because it's not in their interest to truthfully say how big their disks are in true gigabytes, because they _all_ lie.
Yeah the American court system is broken. Tell me something new. And they don't lie, they use a different definition that's prevalent and consistent for just about anything but RAM and some other memory chips.
>This "gibibytes" and "mibibytes" (ugh) shenanigans is all about "fixing" the "salesman gigabytes" problem. It should be the other way 'round, don't you think? It's not about usability at all, because if it was about usability, units between RAM, and magnetic media would be consistent, wouldn't it?
Why not make RAM consistent with magnetic and optical media?
>People are not dumb. They certainly understood base 2 units before the marketroids changed disk measurement to base 10 and that kilobytes and megabytes in RAM were the same as on the disk or tape.
If people weren't, the other harddisk manufacturers wouldn't have been forced to follow suit after Maxtor(?) came up with the base 10 idea.
>You can say gibibytes and mibibytes and sound like a total tool if you want, but you won't catch me saying it, or anyone else I know. The only people pushing this have never mapped bytes on the disk into RAM and edited it in hex (or any other programmer worth his salt).
Which would be about...well just about all of them.
>Oh yeah, and as for metric units, they aren't all that special and are just as arbitrary as "english" measurement. It's not my fault you can't count in base 12 (or two, or 8, or 16)
the problem isn't that it's either one of those but that english measurements use just about *all* of them, plus 10 and 20.
5280 feet to the mile, base, well it's because the furlong is 660 feet
12 inch to the feet, base 12
32 fl oz to the quart, 4 quarts to the gallon, base 2
16 oz to the pound, 2000lb to the ton, base "we love you all"
the english measurements aren't arbitrary, they're fubared.
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Re: GiB? MiB? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Over?
by Arnomane on Sunday 04/Nov/2007, @05:32
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Sorry but the time second *is* a SI base unit. Even the meter itself is defined via time (lightspeed)! So seconds *are* metric. The second is therefore the most metric unit you can think of.
And minutes hours and days aren't exactly base 2. It is a (today) somewhat confusing system introduced by the Babylonians. Ever heard of base 60 and 360 and why it was choosen by the old Babylonians? They did choose base 360 because they had _no_ computer power. Base 360 allows for a lot of divisions without remainder.
So you claim metric units aren't special. Aha. So it must be a total coincidence that it fits so perfectly into daily life: Originally a Kilogramm was defined via a litre of water and a litre is a dm³. Ah and degree Farenheit has such a logical definition (qicksilver and blood) in contrast to degree Celsius/Kelvin (just water). And I hope you know that in the US there are different area units around that are not just a factor of 2, 10 or something else but are a horrible floating point factor...
Ah and by the way SI is being used in the scientific world only (beside Atom Units and Electron Volt) and US scientists from the NIST and other institutions play a *big* role in the anticipated new more precise definition of the Kilogramm...
So SI is the world standard, cause it simply makes sense to every rational brain and cause it is so damn easy to caculate with as thousands of scientists from all over the world have invested heir whole lifetime into the SI project.
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