[- - e r i k - -]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

Catering to non-savvy users by covering up reality is a bad idea.

No, that is a good idea.

Not that writing bytes in base-10 instead of base-2 is any less real of course.

[besson3c]

"Reality" was not the best word to use, but nobody writes bytes in base 10. What happens when some guy tells his buddy that this file on his drive is a certain file size and it shows up in his OS as a completely differing file size?

[Chuckit]

Bytes are always written in base 10. In base 2, a megabyte is 100000000000000000000 bytes. Unless your iMac is reported as having a 111110100 GB hard disk, you're getting your numbers in base 10. Kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes and so on are just defined as powers of 2. </nitpick>

Oh, and it's a retarded change. Changing the definition of a MB just for the sake of some third-party marketing weasels is lame.

[- - e r i k - -]

It makes more sense in my book. As a computer nerd since the mid eighties, the concept of a MB being 1024Kb has always been one that's been hard to explain. Non-engineer people think in base 10. It's not just marketing, it just makes sense.

Why shouldn't a 500GB iPod display that you have 500GB available? Would it be more "honest" to market it as a 465GB HD? Because as far as I know hard drives don't actually come in 500 binary gigabyte capacities.

It's about time a major computer maker shed what only matters to the most hardcore geek and settle for the more sensible metric byte measurement.

[besson3c]

The problem is, that horse has already left the barn. When everybody else expresses bytes another way, are you really doing your users a favor?

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

Bytes are always written in base 10. In base 2, a megabyte is 100000000000000000000 bytes. Unless your iMac is reported as having a 111110100 GB hard disk, you're getting your numbers in base 10. Kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes and so on are just defined as powers of 2. </nitpick>

Oh, and it's a retarded change. Changing the definition of a MB just for the sake of some third-party marketing weasels is lame.

Unfortunately, they aren't "some" third-party marketing weasels, they're the entire storage industry. Even goddamn DVD burnables confuse customers because they can't actually burn the 4.7 GB the damn thing claims to fit.

Change an entire industry, or help the unfortunate nomenclature ****-up ("mega" is a million, not some base-2 approximate) finally make sense.

Apple chose the latter.

[- - e r i k - -]

Some more research into this and a secondary reason for it is that as multiples get higher, the discrepancy between the binary byte and the decimal-byte gets larger:



The historical reason why we have kept on the software (binary) vs hardware (decimal) way of counting is that the binary and decimal discrepancy on lower values are negligible, but once you get up to GB and Exa you are starting to see real discrepancies which lead to confusion and anger.

Besides, the precedence was set in 1999 to apply Mega, Giga etc. ONLY to the bytes as counted in decimal:

In 1999, following recommendations by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) in 1995[3] and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the standards organization known as the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) adopted a set of distinct prefixes (cf. IEC 60027), e.g., kibi (symbol Ki, from "kilobinary")[2] and mebi (symbol Mi, from "megabinary"), to indicate binary multipliers. The system used the multiplier 1024 (210), rather than 1000 (103) as in the SI system, to arrive at successively larger prefixes. Under this recommendation, the SI prefixes should only be used in the decimal sense: kilobyte and megabyte denote one thousand bytes and one million bytes respectively, while kibibyte and mebibyte denote 1024 bytes and 1048576 bytes respectively. This recommendation has since been adopted by some other leading national and international standards bodies, that now prescribe that the prefixes k, M and G should always refer to powers of ten, even in the context of information technology.

Seems it took a decade for the software crowd to catch up.

[- - e r i k - -]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

The problem is, that horse has already left the barn. When everybody else expresses bytes another way, are you really doing your users a favor?

Software manufacturers, not hardware manufacturers. So no, not everyone else. Two camps, one following the wrong way of measuring storage, the others doesn't. And all this time I bought into the "weasel hardware marketers" theory myself. Quite happy to have proven myself wrong actually

It's like a change from imperial to metric units. The change can be awkward at first, but at least we'll all be better off from it in the end.

[megasad]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

Bytes are always written in base 10. In base 2, a megabyte is 100000000000000000000 bytes. Unless your iMac is reported as having a 111110100 GB hard disk, you're getting your numbers in base 10. Kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes and so on are just defined as powers of 2. </nitpick>

Ah, you're right to be nitpicky, it's an area where precise wording is pretty important else confusion is easily spread. I'll think of a better way to phrase what I mean.

[EDIT - I simply changed the first "reported" to "defined" which should clear things up ]

[- - e r i k - -]

The awkward part is that Apple's own apps now show a discrepancy. Even under Snow Leopard my 16GB iPhone shows up as 14.65GB (really 14.65GiB) in iTunes. Hopefully that'll be rectified soon.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by - - e r i k - - 

Yes. That is now ⇧-⌘-⌫

Great. Come to think of it, Mail should have always had it that way.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by kylef 

25. You can see the strength of all wireless networks

Awesome! Finally there. :thumbsup

[Simon]

Originally Posted by Jasoco 

You know what's nice? Deleting opened folders no longer leaves the window open but set to the next folder up. It now closes the window when it is deleted.

It's great to see changes like these. Sure it's just a tiny detail, but it's simply not Mac-like to have stuff misbehave like that.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by megasad 

30. File sizes, hard drive sizes, SD Card sizes...  Everything other than RAM itself is now reported in base 10 instead of base 2.  So where before 1 Kilobyte was 1,024 bytes, in Snow Leopard 1 Kilobyte is 1,000 bytes.  And this continues up the chain; 1MB is 1,000,000 bytes (0.95MiB) instead of 1,048,576, 1GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes (0.93GiB) instead of 1,073,741,824 and 1TB is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes (0.91TiB) instead of 1,099,511,627,776. All of which means that now, when a hard drive says it's "250GB", it actually appears that way in the Finder and in Disk Utility, where before it used to be reported as ~232GB. It's strange and unusual but I'll get used to it.  The main thing to remember is that files other people give you will probably be "bigger" than they say, and files you give other people will probably be "smaller" than you say.

At first I wasn't thrilled to read this, but then I was reminded of this:

Originally Posted by - - erik - -

Besides, the precedence was set in 1999 to apply Mega, Giga etc. ONLY to the bytes as counted in decimal

and the fact that as storage capacity continues to grow and we use bigger and bigger media, we'll be seeing even larger discrepancies.

Probably it's the right call. Apple (assuming they do this consistently across all their apps) might just end up leading the software crowd into adopting the updated nomenclature. Fact is, smart people know what the real deal is and can adopt to different conventions. The not so well informed will see what they expect to see. In the end most people will be happier.

In the best of all worlds, everybody would have learned to think in base 2 when it comes to computers, we would have never used metric prefixes for non-base 10 values, and HDD manufacturers would have never started cheating people out of those 24 kBytes.

But that's not the world we live in. The base 10 switch is a done deal. Maybe it's time software just follow and we get beyond the mess we live in now.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

It's actually probably better not to custom install it from the disc, because downloading it will cause it to get logged on Apple's servers. I get the sneaking suspicion that if all the people who know they want Rosetta install it from the disc, and Apple looks at their server logs and sees that Rosetta hasn't been downloaded much, they'll use that as an excuse to claim that no one's using it and remove it from the next OS release.

As crazy as it may sound at first, I'm afraid you might just not be wrong there.

All for the sake of inflating file size values a bit so that users will notice the hard drive having more free space on it after installing Snow Leopard (and here you thought that came from removing printer drivers...).

So now we know where that came from. Tricky bastards!

[Simon]

Originally Posted by - - e r i k - - 

The awkward part is that Apple's own apps now show a discrepancy. Even under Snow Leopard my 16GB iPhone shows up as 14.65GB (really 14.65GiB) in iTunes. Hopefully that'll be rectified soon.

Yeah, indeed. If Apple really wants this change to make sense they need to do it across their entire line: OS, apps, the whole shebang. Otherwise it will just add to the confusion.

[Spheric Harlot]

iTunes 9.

[P]

The reason OSes kept reporting kilobytes as 1024 bytes etc even after the official definition changed is that it's more computationally intense to do it that way. A sector, the smallest possible unit of a hard drive, is 512 bytes. Count the number of sectors used and divide by two, and you have the size of the file in kilobytes. You can also count the number of allocation blocks used - on HFS+, an allocation block is usually 8 sectors big.

The size of RAM will always be a power of 2, but the sector size of the hard drive is completely arbitrary. I know some drives in proprietary systems had a 514 byte sector back in the day (but I don't remember why, probably something related to parity checks). Why 512 bytes became the standard instead of 500 is a mystery. It is definitely not related to the fact that a kilobyte was 1024 bytes - that's just something us geeks came up with. Also, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

[Jasoco]

Originally Posted by Simon 

It's great to see changes like these. Sure it's just a tiny detail, but it's simply not Mac-like to have stuff misbehave like that.

Actually, it worked this way in Tiger. Like Spotlight, they are just returning things the way they were 2 years ago. Also, it still doesn't work right with moving folders which means it's only halfway fixed.

No reason moving a folder should change its open window contents out of confusion. The OS tracks files, so why does it lose track of a folder if it happens to be open when you move it?

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot 

iTunes 9.

Where?

[colourfastt]

Originally Posted by P 

Why 512 bytes became the standard instead of 500 is a mystery. It is definitely not related to the fact that a kilobyte was 1024 bytes - that's just something us geeks came up with.

A byte is 8 bits, therefore: 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024. A byte is octal not decimal, so a "kilo" octal is "1024" decimal.

[64stang06]

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot 

iTunes 9.

09/09/09 for iTunes 9?

[Dakar V]

Its plausible.

[Jasoco]

So is Sega's successor to the Dreamcast.

[Dakar V]

Well, its certainly helped by the rumor of an Apple event for the 9th, which would typically be about iPods, and therefore iTunes.

[Jasoco]

The 9th is a Wednesday.

They usually do things on Tuesday.

The 8th.

[Dakar V]

They key word being usually.

[RAILhead]

I have an NDA, too, and I'll concur that the $29 upgrade -- especially on Intel systems -- is worth EVERY penny. SL screams on my MacBook Pro test system.

[Judge_Fire]

An app that hangs used to take its Apple menu with it, resulting in the cumbersome "you must switch to a live app to access Force Quit from the Apple menu"- feature. Was this fixed in 10.6?

(Not sure if this was already fixed at some point, actually, kinda hard to test nowadays )

[64stang06]

Originally Posted by Jasoco 

The 9th is a Wednesday.

They usually do things on Tuesday.

The 8th.

Except in 2005 where it was done on a Wednesday. Sure, every year since it was on a Tuesday, but hey.

[Jasoco]

Guess we'll find out in a few weeks.

[Spheric Harlot]

Well, we're getting rumors about a complete rewrite of iTunes in Cocoa.

We've got odd discrepancies between iTunes and the rest of the (new) OS WRT KB/MB calculation.

And we've got a rumored media event, and an iTunes 8.something that locks up for 30 seconds when I want to change the fourth ID3 tag in a row.

Hm.

[Jasoco]

I have that lockup when I try to change a tag in a file that I ran through a program that adds tags like Atomic Parsley.

My suggestion, don't use those programs. Because they can't just add the tag. They have to create a brand new file from the old file with the new data.

I used it because back then iTunes didn't do changing the "Media Type" on multiple videos. (You know, like if a video is a TV Show, Movie or Podcast) Only then did I discover that iTunes doesn't like to play nice with these newly re-encoded files.

[Spheric Harlot]

^ Interesting. Will look out for whether this might be the issue here.

Thanks for the tip!

[- - e r i k - -]

So many things will be launched/released on the 09/09/09 I think there's a risk of getting lost in the crowd.

[pooka]

Flash 10 appears to run significantly worse with Safari+SL. Odd since Adobe seems to have actually been trying a little harder lately with mac builds.

[Simon]

Flash can run even worse than it already does on a Mac???

[Brien]

That sucks...

It sounds like everything has an animation in Snow Leopard though.

[Spheric Harlot]

Yes, and everything has a song, too.

Snow Leopard will be presented on September 9th by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Elton John.

[P]

Originally Posted by colourfastt 

A byte is 8 bits, therefore: 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024. A byte is octal not decimal, so a "kilo" octal is "1024" decimal.

Sarcasm. Look it up.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by colourfastt 

A byte is 8 bits, therefore: 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024. A byte is octal not decimal, so a "kilo" octal is "1024" decimal.

If you're going to pedantic about it, how's this. "kilo" is the SI prefix, it's a metric prefix. Therefore, it's always base 10 no matter what you append to it. In that sense 1 KB = 10^3 bytes = 1,000 bytes.

I think what you were thinking about is the kilo-binary byte KiB. Kilo-binary is 2^10, and in that sense 1 KiB = 2^10 bytes = 1,024 bytes. This is what in the old days was (erroneously) called a Kilobyte an abbreviated kB.

The problem is that initially we were using KB when we meant KiB. That problem persists, but for the MB and the GB it has been settled according to SI. 1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes, 1 GB = 10^9 bytes, etc.

[Big Mac]

Originally Posted by pooka 

Flash 10 appears to run significantly worse with Safari+SL. Odd since Adobe seems to have actually been trying a little harder lately with mac builds.

That's not pleasant news.

[Chuckit]

The problem is that KiB is complete nonsense invented decades after "kilobyte" had already been defined as 1024 bytes. That's like if I suddenly decided to start referring to computers as "space poodles" and insisted that everyone else do the same. What the heck is a non-binary byte, anyway?

[- - e r i k - -]

Problem is you can't just go ahead and reinvent kilo as 1024, it's an SI prefix meaning 1000.

[P]

Kilo means 1000 as a prefix to official SI units. Byte is not an official SI unit, and if SI were to designate an official unit of data storage, it would be the bit, not the byte. I honestly wish they'd do that, because there is no debate about kilobit - 1 kilobit = 1000 bits - and at least then we'd have a way to exactly describe storage. This wouldn't change marketing - horsepower is the unit of measurement for engine effect, even though it should be W or rather kW - but it would at least make the situation clear in the fine print.

There is absolutely no logical reason to mix the binary unit byte with decimal prefixes, and the only reason that storage manufacturers do so is because small manufacturers started doing that in the eighties as a marketing trick. All those small manufacturers died and were bought up by bigger ones around 1990 or so, so those large manufacturers have a potential liability for the small ones. The only plausible way out of big payouts in court was pretend that a kilobyte had always been 1000 bytes. This is easily disproved by just looking at the sector size, but reality rarely gets in the way of marketing.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by - - e r i k - - 

problem is you can't just go ahead and reinvent kilo as 1024, it's an si prefix meaning 1000.

qft.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by P 

Kilo means 1000 as a prefix to official SI units. Byte is not an official SI unit, and if SI were to designate an official unit of data storage, it would be the bit, not the byte. I honestly wish they'd do that, because there is no debate about kilobit - 1 kilobit = 1000 bits - and at least then we'd have a way to exactly describe storage.

SI does actually have an official position on using metric prefixes to the byte. They make entirely clear that using kB for 1,024 bytes is wrong. 'k' is a prefix meaning 10^3 regardless of what it is appended to.

This is also reflected in the ISO/IEC standard IEC 80000-13:2008 that followed the original IEC 60027-2:2005.

In 1999, following recommendations by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) in 1995 and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the standards organization known as the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) adopted a set of distinct prefixes (cf. IEC 60027), e.g., kibi (symbol Ki, from "kilobinary") and mebi (symbol Mi, from "megabinary"), to indicate binary multipliers. The system used the multiplier 1024, rather than 1000 as in the SI system, to arrive at successively larger prefixes. Under this recommendation, the SI prefixes should only be used in the decimal sense: kilobyte and megabyte denote one thousand bytes and one million bytes respectively, while kibibyte and mebibyte denote 1024 bytes and 1048576 bytes respectively. This recommendation has since been adopted by some other leading national and international standards bodies, that now prescribe that the prefixes k, M and G should always refer to powers of ten, even in the context of information technology.

[OreoCookie]

I think the market is simply heading towards adopting powers of 1,000 instead of powers of 1024, if you buy a harddrive, this is the size you see on the box. To implement this into the OS is reasonable.

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

The problem is that KiB is complete nonsense invented decades after "kilobyte" had already been defined as 1024 bytes. That's like if I suddenly decided to start referring to computers as "space poodles" and insisted that everyone else do the same. What the heck is a non-binary byte, anyway?

I'll have you know my space poodle is perfectly happy to conform to the metric system.

[P]

Originally Posted by OreoCookie 

I think the market is simply heading towards adopting powers of 1,000 instead of powers of 1024, if you buy a harddrive, this is the size you see on the box. To implement this into the OS is reasonable.

Hard drives have been advertised that way since at least the eighties - there is absolutely no movement in one direction or another that I can see. Some apps use "MiB" and "KiB" in the interface, but that's all.

I really don't think that this can ever be considered a good change. If Apple had simply done the same thing of writing "MiB" and whatnot, then fine, but now we will have a setup where the computer will use "MB" to mean two different things in different places, depending on context - not to mention that there is this operating system with a 90% market share that uses them differently.

Originally Posted by Simon

SI does actually have an official position on using metric prefixes to the byte. They make entirely clear that using kB for 1,024 bytes is wrong. 'k' is a prefix meaning 10^3 regardless of what it is appended to.

I wasn't aware. It's an absolutely terrible recommendation, and I wasn't aware that IEC had signed off on it. Even if you don't want to switch to using bits for storage, a reasonable suggestion would have included a new name for both units (ie, a different name for the unit than than "byte", or making the unit "By" or something) to make it clear which system was used. This way MB remains ambiguous forever.

I am reminded of the IEC standard colors for electric wiring. Current standard is that the live wire is black, brown or grey and the neutral is blue, with the ground being yellow-green. There used to be conflicting standards on the use of red wires - they were the line in some countries, and ground in others. To avoid misunderstandings, the standard was rewritten to never use red wires for anything. This way, if there's a red wire anywhere you can't trust that the standard has been used. If the clowns that wrote the binary prefix standard had written this standard, they would have insisted that the ground wire stay red forever, because that's the way it should be and if anyone was electrocuted as a result, that was their problem.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by Simon 

SI does actually have an official position on using metric prefixes to the byte. They make entirely clear that using kB for 1,024 bytes is wrong. 'k' is a prefix meaning 10^3 regardless of what it is appended to.

Well, that's fine, because this is "K" rather than "k".