Its not false advertising, they are just following IEC and IEEE standards. The IEC realized that people were incorrectly using SI prefixes to denote quantities of binary numbers. That's why in 1999 the IEC introduced the prefixes kibi, mebi, gibi, etc. to specify multiples of a binary quanity. So, in reality, its us who are still using incorrect notations. Hardware manufactures stick to the IEEE standards. So it's the engineers, not the marketing and sales people who are responsible.
477MiB = 500,170,752 bytes = 500MB
However, once something gets stuck in someone's head, it hard to change. Take the metric system as an example. Its a far better system of measurement than the old standard, but people here in the US still thumb their noses at it. I'm like you and I too get that confused, because that's how I learned it way back when. Hopefully they are teaching the next generation the correct notations so a few generations from now this will all be interesting geek trivia.
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Luke -Jr Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 12:53 PM To: Monty J. Harder Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: USB flash recovery tools?
On Thursday 15 March 2007 12:37, Monty J. Harder wrote:
Nothing false about it. It's the inevitable result of using an established term to mean something different.
"using an established term to mean something different" is dishonest/false. :p
The SI prefix 'M' means 10^6, not 2^20.
I don't see any legitimacy to a claim over a single-letter abbreviation. Can I claim 'L' and prevent anyone from making any abbreviation beginning with that letter? :)
Memory is almost always listed using the binary terminology, which would be written MiB according to the most popular disambiguation
scheme.
Only SI proponents use MiB from what I've seen.
HD manufacturers all use the SI meaning, because it allows them to advertise a larger number of MB.
Exactly. False advertising.
A third definition of 'MB' is that used by floppy drives, 10^3 x 2^10,
or 2000 sectors of 512 bytes. A '1.44 MB' floppy has 2880 sectors.
IIRC, that was an accident. _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list [email protected] http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug