On 11/14/2019 11:39 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
Rene Lamontagne wrote:

Why in hell do we need that?

Marketing Departments, and proper standardization of magnitude prefixes.

Using a power of 2, HDDs would look smaller than using a power of 10.
Marketing could make HDDs look larger to computer illiterates by
describing capacity in, say, megabytes.

2 ^ 20 = â€*1,048,576‬ mebibyte (megabyte misnamed, renamed with new prefix)
10 ^ 6 = 1,000,000 megabyte (properly named)

1.05 megabytes = 1 mebibytes

Back then, and with HDDs being much smaller, any incremental increase in
size at the same price meant more revenue from customers that thought
the same-priced drive gave them a wee bit more capacity.

kilo, mega, giga, tera, and so on were defined as powers of 10, not 2.
Only until computers showed up which work in binary did those prefixes
get misused to represent magnitude. A megabyte should've been 10 ^ 6,
but was first defined as 2 ^ 20; i.e., the mega prefix got misused.
Back then, there were no magnitude prefixes for binary values.

If you are old enough, you would've been around when the naming
correction happened. mega is a decimal magnitude. mebi is a binary
magnitude.


Everything you say above is correct. But language is not fixed; the
meaning of words changes with time, and the prefixes kilo-, mega-,
giga-, tera-, etc. are an example of this. Today, they represent binary
magnitudes. Should that change have happened? As far as I'm concerned,
no. But it did.

For all practical purposes the prefixes like mebi-, with "b" inserted,
are almost never used, and should be dropped, even though they are
international standards. The only real exception to everyone's using the
decimal terms in a binary way is disk manufacturers. They use the terms
in a decimal way because it makes what offer for sale sound larger. As
far as I'm concerned, it's deceptive advertising. It confuses many
people and should be prohibited. They should be required to state the
sizes of their drives using powers of 2, as everyone else does.




--
Ken