
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.
Member since:
2010-01-21
It was decided that having "kilo/giga/terabyte" and "kB/GB/TB" referring to powers of 1024 was at odds with the rest of the SI unit system.
Hence why what we both agree to be 'proper' gigabytes are now called "gibibytes" (giga binary bytes) and use the abbreviation "GiB".
When I first discovered that, I didn't like it but, after thinking about it for a while, I decided it makes more sense this way. (The whole point of SI prefixes like giga- is that they're consistent)
Also, while I doubt you'd want to, it means you can confuse or amuse your friends by speaking of kibigrams and kibimeters if you want. (The only use I can think of for those units would probably be for stating representational limitations of variables in game engines and other computer-based physical simulations in a concise, intuitive fashion)
Edited 2013-01-30 03:24 UTC