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

And I made up an example to highlight how things get more confusing once you start mixing different systems.


Dear, oh dear. There were no different systems before the introduction of the new standard. The whole point of the question you tried to answer was that there was no need for it in the first place. You only proved that it is now confusing, because we have two.

Do you understand that "kilo" comes from the Greek word for "thousand" and was probably in use for centuries before it even became an international standard?

Can you see how this is like taking the word "dozen" and using it to mean "thirteen", then attempting to argue that it's correct to do so?


Yes Brendan, I do. However this kind of thing happens all the time, and is perfectly fine. In fact is specifically happens in the unfortunate example you gave. Maybe look up a "baker's dozen"?

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=bakers+dozen&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq...

Reply Parent Score: 2

zlynx Member since:
2005-07-20

There were no different systems before the introduction of the new standard.

No. There were three.

Hard drive bytes: base 10 but with an odd 1024 byte base unit, probably because of 512 byte block sizes.

Network speed and CPU megahertz: base 10 all the way.

RAM: base 2

Reply Parent Score: 2

kwan_e Member since:
2007-02-18

There's another standard:

Libraries of Congress.

Reply Parent Score: 2