Snow Leopard Ditches Real Math For Fake

snow_leopard_fake_math

We’ve always felt that hard drive manufacturers were dirty crooks because of their use of fake math to make drives sound bigger than they actually are. Here’s a quick refresher for those who need it: Because digital information consists of 1’s and 0’s (two possible settings), digital architecture revolves around powers of 2. Long ago, when nomenclature was setup for measuring data the term kilobyte was adopted to represent 2 to the 10th power bytes (base 2, aka real math). The problem here is that 2^10= 1024 and when laymen hear the root “kilo” they think 1000 which is 24 byes less (base 10, aka fake math). So, if you have a 500,000,000 byte drive, base 10 math would call that a 500GB drive, but base 2 math would call that 476.8GB.

We understand why hard drive manufacturers use the base 10 system; larger sounding drives sell better. Now we find out that OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard is using base 10 math to calculate storage space. While base 2 math is the standard storage measurement for operating systems it may at first be difficult to understand why Apple would change to a base 10 system. But think about it once more, doesn’t Apple have a lot to gain if all the storage-containing-hardware they sell sounds bigger than it actually is?

[via Gizmodo]

Update: Force Snow Leopard to calculate storage in base 2 [via Gizmodo]

173 thoughts on “Snow Leopard Ditches Real Math For Fake

  1. So, am I to understand that if I were to rebuild my windows machine that has a 476.8 Gb hard drive to run on Snow Leopard, I would now have a 500 Gb hard drive?! Wow, that means I would ‘gain’ enough Gb’s to cover the HD space that the system files would take up. That’s like running with no system files!

    Go Apple!

  2. Damn, after all these years, we finally lost the battle for ‘kilo’. :(

    Oh well, that’s dictatorship of the masses for you.

    From now on we’ll use ‘kib’ when we mean ‘kb’.

    Signed: Computer Scientist :)

  3. The article is correct. kilo means 1024 on a computer, always has. Apple is using fake math. Drive manufacturers cheat. Contrary to what some people tried to decide a few years ago, there is no such thing as a “kibibyte” and it will not be adopted.

    Also, 2^10 is a perfectly correct notation. Whoever said that is wrong in favor of 10000000000b thinks they are smarter than they are.

    Apple sucks for that one. I want to find a way to hack that out of my snow leopard install, personally.

  4. Simon is hilarious, Luddites. Missed the issue there boy. The issue is about getting lied to using bs math to make a 470 something gb drive look like 500. False advertising, rip off. Go use your fake math and rip your self off Simon. ( go switch to metric to make your prick sound bigger while your at it too.)

    “This is a change for the better and all the luddites posting on the anti-change side of the argument are just going to have to try to keep up, or be left behind.

    Perhaps you could form into some sort of closed-up Amish community where you can cling to the ancient ways forever? This is a technology forum – and technology is moving forward.”

    Are you a comedian cuz that is funny shit you got there boy. HA Your so funny! Keep up the good work bud.

  5. “as a computer science graduate, kilobyte = 2^10 = 1024. this is NOT open to discussion, I am sooooo sick of these companies fudging the math particularly hard drive manufacturers.”

    As an engineering graduate, I find it absurd that someone who’s obviously proud of his (computer science) degree can stand up and say kilobyte = 2^10 = 1024. Kilo = SI prefix = 10^3. *that* is a point that is NOT open to discussion. 2^10 bytes = 1 kibibyte, per the IEC. Maybe if the CS’s of the world spent a little more time learning about standards, we wouldn’t be having the kibi vs. kilo argument right now.

    As to the change in snow leopard, i don’t know that it’s the correct approach to clearing up confusion (i think I’d prefer to see space reported in kibibytes and gibibytes, personally), but I can understand why they made the change they did; as well as why it’s going to become more and more important as time moves forward – we can’t continue to have such large discrepancies between how numbers are represented, especially in a day and age where a 2 terabyte drive costs less than my first external 80 meg hard drive did.

    So argue over if apple should be reporting kilo or kibi’s, but please, stop the ridiculous argument that the SI prefix kilo means anything other than 10^3 – because it doesn’t. Commonly accepted (wrong) information is still wrong.

  6. This semantics argument is to funny. I mean your basically saying because of my Degree I use this word to mean this.

    I mean take the word Pound for a moment and think of all its different meanings. English is full of words that mean different things based on there context. I see no reason why people can’t get off there high horse and realize that in reference to computer science and computer engineering the binary prefixes that amazingly are the same as si prefixes look .

    This wasn’t an over sight. People wanted to adopt a naming scheme that was easy and they defined it with in the nomenclature. Busting down the door of early system designers and telling they were stupid is as bad as going on some holy war about where to keep your brackets.

    Get over it

    The real issue here is that Apple now disagrees with every web server and booting between OS X and Windows makes your drive look incorrectly reported. They should of changed the English not the math. Or my favorite included both.

    One does assume that Ram is still reported in the 2^10 notation so its going to cause all sorts of confusion.

  7. data transfer rates have been using decimal prefixes since the 60s.

    Storage: decimal prefixes since the 60s

    Memory: in the 60s you had 2 meanings:
    65K: approximate by rounding to decimal
    64K: exact with K meaning 1024

    The use of decimal kilobyte is just as old and standard as the binary kilobyte. They are just used in different contexts. Claiming you are being lied to, or that they use “fake math” just shows how much your opinion should not be taken into consideration.

  8. “doesn’t apple have a lot to gain if all the storage-containing-hardware they sell sounds bigger than it actually is?”

    Reminds me of back when CRTs roamed the earth (if any one remembers those).

    Apple long standing reported the *USABLE* diagonal for screen size.

    Everybody else was selling based on *TUBE* size (always larger), not *usable* space size.

    So, while everyone else was selling a 15″(or was it 14″?) display, Apple was selling a 13.3″ display.

    Of course, they were the same size, but in the mind of the consumer, the other monitor was larger. Deceptive.

    And Apple finally caved and went with what the rest of the biz was doing for that reason.

    But, how long before people start pointing out that a similar Dell/whatever is a better value, in part because they give you a drive that has more “GB” on it…

  9. Hmm…

    As long as we’re gonna decide that ‘k’ can mean one and only one thing…let’s standardize the rest of our language too. Every word in the dictionary that has more than one definition will have to be redefined….

    Ah screw it, I don’t have time to write out a long comment when it’s already been done for me. Go read RFC 5513:

    http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5513

  10. As someone else mentioned.. memory is all done to JEDEC standards, where k = 1024. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JEDEC_memory_standards

    >All other applications such as itunes, terminal,

    This is where people show how little they know, like the guy with the CS degree yet doesn’t realise K can actually mean different things inside of CS,… now the terminal, where is that involved with this? you mean bash inside the terminal, nope,.. you mean console tools such as df? oookaaay, apple users don’t understand what anything about what their own machine does, sorry forgot.. anyhow the gnu version of df has been able to format between the preferred meaning of K for a long time, I guess apple’s should to. The OS however doesn’t usually convert in units and just give applications a massive number of 8-bit-bytes and the application can then decide how it wants to format it. Much like the y2k thing were everyone though “computers” were storing just the last two digits of the year,.. I’ve always wondered why no one that actually had a clue didn’t say to all the peopling screaming about the end of the world “you realise most systems store dates as a really massive number of seconds/milliseconds from an epoch, thus this 2 digits roll-over stuff is total shit right?”.

  11. I apologise for repeating most of the points on my side of the argument (i.e. against base 10 kilobytes) but I wanted to put it all together in one post:

    gotta say i’m not a fan of this decision, i think it’s completely nuts and nonsensical. apple stand completely alone in using this base 10 method of reporting disk space, and even then it’s literally only the finder that does it. look anywhere else on your shiny new snow leopard system and it’s all still base 2 – itunes, quicktime… even mobileme.

    now if that doesn’t confuse the hell out of a lot of people i don’t know what will, especially when people notice that the 200mb .dmg they just created is reported in finder (*on the same machine*) to be 204.8mb, and the 4.7gb movie they just downloaded suddenly takes up about 4.928gb of their precious hdd space.
    then they upload a file that finder tells them is a nice round 200mb, but when it arrives on the server it is reported to be only 195.31mb – err, did the upload quit prematurely? is my file all there or what?

    there are an awful lot of people arguing about this on many websites & forums. some people are taking the stance that apple are correct because the kilo prefix means 1000, so ‘strictly speaking’ this is the proper way to report data sizes. but there are plenty of very good reasons why i personally, along with a great many other people, am taking the opposite stance.

    here are a few:

    1. almost the entire world thinks about 1 kilobyte as being made up of 1024 bytes, 1 megabyte as 1024 kilobytes, etc. it has been that way for nearly half a century since engineers and computer scientists decided that these terms are nice ‘n’ friendly, convenient, and not all that far off. this convention is ingrained in, accepted and used by everyone except the hard disk marketers, who only adopted the use of base 10 to make their drives appear to have more capacity than they actually do. they must field hundreds of support enquiries per day as to why somebody’s brand new 500gb hard drive only shows up as about 488gb once installed in their computer.

    yes, about 10 years ago the various standards bodies came up with alternatives/replacements to these units – the kibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte, etc. – but nobody asked for them, and these terms just haven’t caught on – not at all. we’re all happy with our kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes thank you very much.

    to this day most people have never even heard of these ‘new’ terms, and it’s not surprising. 40 years is a long time for a convention to take hold in a growing, learning culture of pc users, and for these standards bodies to expect everyone to accept a sudden redefinition of a whole set of terms is, in my opinion, extremely arrogant and short sighted.

    2. sure, it could be argued that the adoption of base 10 could help clear up confusion with users who aren’t aware of the number of bytes in a ‘traditional’ kilobyte. but unless the entire world changes all at once, including every web server, every operating system, every application, every book on the subject and thousands of websites too, there can be only *more* confusion (as partially illustrated at the beginning of this post). simply moving a file, or storage device, from snow leopard to any other current os (and vice versa, of course) will show a discrepancy in size or capacity, causing confusion also.

    3. it is not helpful to describe disk space or file size in base 10. the smallest physical storage space on any hard disk drive is called a sector, and these are almost always 512 bytes in size, regardless of the capacity of the drive or operating system measuring them. 1 sector can store 512 bytes, so 2 sectors can store 1024 bytes (or 1 ‘old’ kilobyte – fits nicely doesn’t it?). further, in order to store 1000 bytes of information (or 1 of these new ‘metric kilobytes’, if you will), 2 sectors will still be used, as these are the smallest possible space on any disk, and this is where it becomes clear that describing 1 kilobyte as 1,000 bytes is just plain weird.

    in my opinion (and many others’ too) it is not us who need to change our habits, our conventions, our understanding. it is the storage device marketers who should describe the capacity of the devices they are selling using terms that are relevant to the use the devices are intended for – i.e. being installed into computers whose operating systems and their applications all count bytes in multiples of 1024 and report them as such.

    of course the exception to this is apple with their new os, snow leopard, but then we have to remember that apple is also a hardware manufacturer, who also uses base 10 counting to artificially inflate the marketed storage capacity of its products. becoming clearer now?

    apple recently lost a lawsuit over the fact that their ipods and iphones, while being marketed as having certain storage capacities (i.e. 8gb, 16gb, etc.), showed less capacity than was printed on the box once plugged into any computer, including apple’s own.

    in response, rather than changing the ‘claimed’ capacity on the boxes of these devices to reflect the ‘real’ capacity (as reported by theirs and all other current operating systems), apple have instead changed the way their new operating system reports this capacity – to match the marketing.

    i am not a cynical person, but this seems to be the only logical explanation. otherwise, would they not have made some sort of fanfare about this? they could have used it in their advertising campaigns – e.g. if you buy a mac you’ll be able to access all of your 500gb hard drive. pc’s rob you of storage!

    who knows, maybe that’s in the pipeline…

  12. “The problem here is that 2^10= 1024”

    So what? Not all memory sizes are based on powers of two. Bit-based memory chips are, but disks are not, and complex flash-based storage devices with space reserved for checksums and error correction and so on aren’t either.

  13. Poor poor article. Real maths = SI units where kilo = 1000. Fake maths = software manufacturers who use kilo as if it were the binary prefix kibi.

    You’re making this website look incredibly stupid with this article.

  14. >Poor poor article.
    >Real maths = SI units where kilo = 1000.

    Except that memory manufacturers don’t use SI suffixes. Lets paste it again shall we.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JEDEC_memory_standards

    >Fake maths = software manufacturers
    >who use kilo as if it were the binary
    >prefix kibi.

    Depends on what it is doesn’t it.. disks are usually marked with SI values of k,m,g.. memory is always marked with K = 1024, generally with JEDEC standard pinouts, with JEDEC standard speed grades etc. So a disk tool should use k= 1000, and a memory tool should use k = 1024.

    Most tools actually let you choose which notation you want ->

    daniel@mac-chan:~$ man df


    -H, –si likewise, but use powers of 1000 not 1024


    SIZE may be (or may be an integer optionally followed by) one of following: kB 1000, K 1024, MB 1000*1000, M 1024*1024, and so on for G, T, P, E, Z, Y.

    >You’re making this website look
    >incredibly stupid with this article.

    Kind of funny coming from someone with ~1megabyte images of their acne covered face on their website. Pot meet kettle. :/

    Note there are 3 countries that haven’t accepted the SI system.. one of those being the us.

  15. damn it, typed up a big long response and accidentally used this tab to look up something in google.

    to summarize:
    I’m supporting hackaday on this one.

    kilobyte has long since been defined in industry nomenclature as 1024 bytes.

    all the metric supporters are eerily like “bible thumping evangelicals” on the issue.

    the greatest arguments in favor of the metric system boil down to “it’s fashionable”(the “everybody else uses it” and “it’s standard” arguments) and “we’re too stupid to do math that isn’t base ten”(the “it’s easier to learn” argument).

    apple’s decision will encourage the industry toward a future where it’s direction is dictated by people who are too stupid to use a computer, much less understand one.

    when the future of technology depends on fashion and people who don’t understand science or technology, then technology no longer has a future.

  16. Eh? eric may be correct in what he says but all he has done is point out that the ‘size on disk’ argument made by a couple of people is irrelevant to this discussion, and then qualified his position by explaining it.
    He hasn’t contributed anything new in that post, least of all his own opinion. In fact he states in the first sentence that he sets aside the 1000 vs 1024 argument!
    So how could you even know what he thinks about *this topic*, let alone laud him as the only person who ‘gets it’ (which is a pretty stupid thing to say given that there are so many eloquently written posts here by people who clearly do understand the issue but differ in opinion)?

    If you have your own opinion please share it, otherwise kindly save your energy & refrain from posting garbage here.

    Thanks.

    P.S. No offence intended to eric :-)

  17. the real question is why apple (knowing that their users are typically not technically skilled) would make a change that causes a different number to display in the same place with the same label (right or wrong). wouldn’t simply changing the label to kib be a more sane thing to do? as it is, snow leopards results are different than not only PCs but also all of Apples other products (and indeed even some parts of snow leopard!). whether or not this “issue” needed to be address aside, apple’s way of fixing it certainly is strange.

  18. “when the future of technology depends on fashion and people who don’t understand science or technology, then technology no longer has a future.”

    i fully agree. meters and kilograms are just fashions, too. after all, feet and stones are how you measure distance and mass, right?

    1. Actually, science and technology is well on it’s way to measure things relative to Planck units. Metric is just as arbitrary as Imperial units, so far as the universe is concerned. After all, most of the visible universe is clearly not living matter, nor even an ocean full of water!

  19. There was good reasons for disk space to be measured in units of 1024 it that rams in also measured in units of 1024. Since most system now do everything for you most users have no idea why this is important. Say I have 4 gigs of RAM. and how big would I make the swap partition? Well if I make it 4,000,000,000 it would be too small by 294,967,296 bytes. So if the system needs to dump memory to swap it would fail. If doing embedded controller coding and it has 32MB of ram I cal load a file that is 33.55MB into its memory if the file is measured at base 10. When you doing this type of work it’s nice to have everything calculated the same. also consider that when drives first came out they were just extension of memory and in the 8bit days with 1MHZ cpus and 4K 8K it did not make sense to was memory or cpu cycles converting drive space byte units from base 2 to base ten. This base 10 crap was first used when driver hit the 1GB mark. Note that non idiot(consumer) SCSI drives still use 1024.

  20. Well, change one thing and you change the other! This is a very deceptive move on Apple’s part. Sure, your drive will show show up as more capacity, but all of your files will simply show up as larger! A 3 gigabyte video file will look 72 megabytes larger.

    I guess, as long as Apple updates all of their browsers on the system as does Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc. then they’ll be ok. Last I checked, browsers still report download sizes and speeds based on 2^n math while ISPs complicate it further by reporting their speeds in gigabits!

    Let this confusion be a lesson to those who don’t think for themselves and ignore the past!

  21. “Say I have 4 gigs of RAM. and how big would I make the swap partition? Well if I make it 4,000,000,000 it would be too small by 294,967,296 bytes. So if the system needs to dump memory to swap it would fail.”

    Why would the swap partition need to be the the same size as your RAM? Look up how swapping works.

  22. @gyro_john
    You said:
    “As someone educated in computer science, I vote a. A kb is 1024 bytes.”

    And I posit that you fail at your computer science education. Haven’t you even heard of the IEEE? Jeez! 1024 bytes is a Kibibyte, plain and simple. It’s been that way for nearly a decade!

  23. @Andy:
    If you made it *exactly* the same size as RAM and never swapped, you could hibernate. If it’s too small, you couldn’t. If you make it the same size and swap and then hibernate…you’re stuck, won’t work. RAM x 2 is usually recommended.

  24. @Mackenzie
    Here’s a pro-“kb = 1024” argument (not written by me, but I thought it was good enough to copy as-is) which I think about sums up this whole “1000 vs 1024” shenanigans.

    “You cannot pretend that it has been “right” all this time to call a kilobyte 1000 bytes. For decades, kilobyte meant 1024 bytes to all computer scientists, computer engineers, etc. To this day, if you took a survey, 99.9% would say it still does. RAM is still sold this way. 99% of the installed base of OS’s report it this way.

    Instead, you pretend that since KILO means 1000, KILOBYTE must mean 1000 bytes. But you miss three points.

    First, words must be interpreted in their entirety. A “hurricane” is not a fast wooden stick just because its parts might mean that. It would be wrong to say a kilometer is 1024 meters, because that is not the convention. Similarly, absent the recent standard, it is wrong to say a kilobyte is 1000 bytes.

    Second, words change. All the “standards bodies” agreed that “mouse” is a fuzzy little critter that you don’t want to find in your refrigerator. Then some guys decided it would be a good name for the thing that moves your cursor, because it looks all mouselike and stuff.

    Surely adding a whole new meaning to a whole word is more drastic than changing the meaning of a particular prefix when it is used with a particular set of suffixes?

    From the very first moment that “kilobyte” was spoken or appeared in writing, it meant 1024 bytes. It never meant 1000 bytes. The people who used it first were aware that kilo means 1000 in other contexts, but found it irresistably convenient, much like other “cute” units such as mhos. This is not “liberry/library.” This is people defining new words for new things, and using bits and pieces of words they already knew for convenience. Kilobyte NEVER meant 1000 bytes until 1999 or so when some standards bodies decided to redefine it.

    Third, while words change, changing them by executive fiat seldom works. Language is democratic; words that people like will gain the most traction, and they will do so for the meaning that most people like. In France, they have a government agency which decides what words make it into the language. I remember reading that the government decided that “fax machine” had some 10-syllable-or-so french equivalent. The French, not being complete idiots, kept calling them “faxes.”

    You are telling a story where a bunch of people ignored a standards body and made things base-2, and now Apple is fixing it.

    The real story is there was no “metric system” for memory units, engineers did what they always do, and used convenient units (how many electrical engineers use the “standard” S instead of “mho?” other than when publishing – not many.) They defined complete words – “kilobyte” means “1024 bytes.” They didn’t try to “take over” “kilo” to mean something new in any other context. In the engineering context, 1024 made a lot more sense. Only decades later did the standards bodies come along, declare there was confusion because of the hard drive manufacturers, and mandate that kilobyte now means 1000 bytes.

    You are focused on the fact that kilo hasn’t changed meanings. Those of us who are upset are focused on the fact that kilobyte changed meanings. You can have your prefix, but leave us our word.

    (By the way, as long as you purists insist on metric units, what’s with the bits and nybbles? Henceforth, bytes will be divided into decibytes, centibytes, and millibytes. One binary value shall require 1.25 decibytes. There. That’s much simpler.) “

  25. Hard drive space is never actually defined in base-10 units, because any modern computer will adress the memory space using base-2 units.

    When the CPU asks for data from the hard drive, it uses exactly 10 bits per kilobyte and not 9.998 bits to get to an “even” 1000 bytes, because there are no fractional bits. 1024 bytes per kilobyte is used because it would be pointless to toss out 24 bytes just to conform to SI.

    This is why hard drive space is always adressed in chunks of 2^N regardless of the actual number of bits used to record the information on physical media, and this is why the number of bytes in all hard drives must be divisible by that same number.

    So, while hard drive manufacturers are technically right in reporting their drive space in SI units, because the hard drive can store e.g. 250 billion octets one after the other, this is actually wrong because it leads to certain impossibilities.

    For example, you have a flash drive with 1 billion bytes of physical storage, so you say it’s 1 GB, but your flash drive also has 4096 bytes (4 KiB) per erase block which divides to 244140,625 blocks on the chip, which happens to be impossible. Instead, you can have only 244140 accessible blocks which corresponds to 999997440 bytes. Therefore it is not a 1 GB chip in any practical consideration. It’s a 9.76560 GiB or 9.99.. GB chip – not 1 GB.

    The disrepancy may be small, 4 KiB at maximum for any drive size of the same type, but it’s a result of applying SI units to a system where they shouldn’t be applied. When dealing with a system that works in base-2, you use units that match base-2. Otherwise your calculations will not be exact, akin to how it’s impossible to calculate 1/3+1/3+1/3 = 1 exactly using the decimal notation in a pocket calculator.

    Or like someone else pointed out, if you have one million bytes of space, how many 1 kilobyte files can you store in it? The SI advocates would say 1000, but in reality that space is divided into chunks of 1024 (or rather 512) bytes, and therefore you can only store 976 of them regardless of whether or not a kilobyte is 1000 or 1024 bytes long.

    Summa summarum, the hard drive manufacturers are wrong in marketing their drives in SI units, and operating systems are right in showing the available space in units that match base-2.

  26. And the other problem is that a “kilobyte” is not defined in the SI because “byte” is not defined in SI, therefore, while “kilo” means 10^3, “kilobyte” doesn’t actually mean anything in terms of SI. As long as a byte can be of arbitrary lenght, a kilobyte can be an arbitrary number of bits and therefore a kilobyte wouldn’t be unambiguously defined, which is a no-no in SI.

    Which means that a kilobyte can be as long as it damn well pleases, just like a kiloherring can mean anything I want. Neither of the conform to SI, which means that SI has no power over the prefix used within.

    So IEEE can suck my javelin, I will say KB for the rest of my life.

  27. The important thing is not what units you use it is just that you must NEVER measure bytes using base 10 it dose not make any sense. There are physical reasons why you have 256 and 512MB sticks of memory. In short it is retarded to use base 10 measurements for bytes.

  28. lower case ‘k’ is for multiples of 1000.
    upper case ‘K’ is for multiples of 1024.
    (in the realm of CS)

    The ‘kib’ didn’t exist back then because we could all comprehend this logical differentiation.
    It was brought in 2000, because of the dot com boom of the 90s that pushed a lot of non-CS idiots to control and do CS stuff. Then all hell broke loose and nobody understood standards because the ratio of fucktards in the industry was matching the one in the general public.

    The Kib is an excuse for stupidity.

    K’s and k’s are the shit.
    Failure to grasp why makes you less human.

  29. my post is related to the nonsense posted above in this discussion.

    prefix k means “kilo” as 10^3 but that is for base 10. in base 2 kilo is slightly bigger it is 2^10. “kilo” in base 2 is merely a word between programmers to describe 2^10 chunk of memory

    as all memories in the world are based around base of 2 it is completely wrong to display them in base 10 even if that is most common for the layman.

    example:

    1GB RAM module *is* 1024 MB ram module and that is equal to
    1’073’741’824 Bytes or 8’589’934’592 bits because it is in base 2

    in base 10 … there are *no* memory modules organized in base 10, and is the same for hard drives.

    whoever does not understand statements above, needs to read malloc.h very carefully or to learn basic of C or assembler programing.

  30. Maybe they are just using a modified version of scientific notation. That n*10^3 doesn’t mean that the n is being multiplied by 1000, it just means that n is being “shifted” by three digits to the left of the decimal point. If the superscript( in math it would be called a exponent but we are not really doing math) was a negative number, it would mean the n would be shifted to the right of the decimal point.

    In terms of bytes, it would be the same. An 8-bit number shifted three digits to the left would result in an 11-bit number, allow for an addressable memory of 1,024 bytes( with the last bit being for positive or negative for jump commands).

    So, if “kilo-” means 10^3, then a kilometer would be 1m*10^3=1000m and a kilobyte would be 11111111b*10^3=11111111111b. The “kilo-” had a meaning long before the meter was define and the metric system used it as part( not in whole) as its standard.

    In conclusion, they are wrong in their math because they don’t understand the notation that was originally used when scientist and engineers for started off with.

    By the way, anyone who thinks I’m wrong can feel free to google how a slide rule works to see where I got my info from.

  31. I completely agree with the original post by Mike Szczys.

    Base-10 has no place in measuring computer storage. Hard drive manufacturers have been exploiting the base-10 loophole to under-deliver for years, and Apple’s just doing this to cover their asses legally (since they sell computers and iPods that contain hard drives).

    I hope Apple lets us correct the math in a future Snow Leopard update.

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