A proposal for honest hard drive space disclosure
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 30th Jan 2013 00:38 UTC
Hardware, Embedded Systems Marco Arment: "Everyone should play by the same rules. A proposal: storage capacities referenced or implied in the names or advertisements for personal computers, tablets, and smartphones should not exceed the amount of space available for end-user installation of third-party applications and data, after enough software has been installed to enable all commonly advertised functionality. With today's OSes, iPads could advertise capacities no larger than 12, 28, 60, and 124 GB and the Surface Pros could be named 23 and 83 GB." Wholly agreed. When I buy a box of 100 staples, I expect it to contain ~100 staples - not 50 because the other 50 are holding the box together.
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HappyGod
Member since:
2005-10-19

Hi Brendan,

Congratulations on this years most arrogant and silly post so far. Don't get your hopes up though, the year is young.

Calling people uneducated simply because they dissagree with you makes you sound opinionated. Your reputation doesn't improve when you try to provide an example of why you're right, and only succeed in proving the opposite point.

I asked why anyone would need to know how many bytes there are in a MB/GB/TB.

You gave this silly and contrived example:

Let's try this. If you've got a 2 MB disk and you're downloading data at a rate of 8 KB per second; how long until you run out of space to store received data?

Possible answers include:
a) 2*1024*1024/(8*1024) = 256 seconds
b) 2*1000*1024/(8*1024) = 250 seconds
c) 2*1000*1000/(8*1024) = 244.14 seconds
d) 2*1024*1024/(8*1000) = 262.144 seconds
e) 2*1000*1024/(8*1000) = 256 seconds
f) 2*1000*1000/(8*1000) = 250 seconds


This is beyond laughable. When was the last time you needed to know how many seconds it would be until you ran out of disk space? When or why would anyone need to know this? How would it go: "Geez is it 244.14 seconds until I run out, or is it 250 seconds? I'd better work this out or else ... oh wait."

No. The use of "K = 1024" was always wrong


Why was it always wrong? It never complied with any standard, simply because there wasn't one. That doesn't make it wrong at all.

It did however have a de-facto standard that was in use by 100% of interested parties. That is a standard. It's not codified, but it is a standard.

But yes, some people aren't educated and prefer to remain wrong.


This statement tells a story about you. And it's not pretty.

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