Mebibyte (Not misspelled!) vs Megabyte
1,000,000 bytes is NOT a useful measurement! The only person who could possibly think this was a good idea is someone who knows little to nothing about computers and how they work. When working with computers you need measurements that are powers of two, multiples of 8, or multiples of a power of two. There are good sound reasons for this (that I, as a programmer, understand perfectly, but that would take too long to explain here).
It is unsurprising that this poorly conceived unit was designed in 1998 and is still mostly unused today. Sadly it is used in the compression program I use on Linux. Imagine my surprise when I tell it to split into "1024MB volumes" and end up with something other than 1GB listed as the file size. (eg, the file browser uses the "old" unit definitions, and the compression program uses the "new, braindead" definitions)
Actually the rot started back in the 1980s. You had the 360kb disk, the 720kb disk, all good so far. But then you had the 1.44MB floppy. Note that 720 x 2 = 1440. It's just a double-sided 720 (1440), except they knocked three zeros off it, and called it "1.44MB". The big irony here was the
units that the "1.44" is in. The KBs are normal, 1024 bytes, but the MBs are 1000KBs, so it's "1MB = 1024 x 1000 Bytes". At the time me and other people tried to work out how they claimed it was 1.44MB because that made no sense any way you looked at it. I worked it out years later.
Memory manufacturers at least still use sane sizes, because you can't bullshit memory alignments, but harddrives are different. Things don't explode because of HDs not being the size they say they are.
The rot for hard-drives actually started with the marketing for the 4GB hard-drive. 1024^3 bytes is 4.29 billion bytes, so they marketed that as "4.3GB". After that they got looser and sloppier: HD sizes became more arbitrary, so they'd just round up to the nearest 1000. Given that, the actual megabytes can appear almost 10% lower than the HD manufacturer tries and tell you. One common thing is to blame Bill Gates for the 10% chunk of drive you "lost". This is an erroneous belief, but it's not one that the HD makers have any interest in correcting. The problem comes because Windows tells you the accurate size of the drive using 1024-based measurements.
Author
Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14464859 times)