Time to change the way how lawyers earn their money. Here in Europe, they earn their daily bread with salaries, not with boni from won lawsuits, tempting everybody to sue for every other dog-pile they encounter along the way to the court.
This has nothing to do with rule of law, it's just the rule of the old mammon, it's what drives northern America, these days.
Where'd all this GiB stuff come from, and HDD suddenly not storing info in binary. I'm slightly worried, final year masters student in electronic engineering, and have NEVER come across GiB! A HDD does not have 8,000,000,000 bytes. The reason we use k, M, G, T is not out of laziness either, they just have a different meaning in a digital sense.
There is ALWAYS a difference between the spirit and the letter of the law, just as there is a difference between the spirit and the letter of scripture (the original laws.)
What we have in this lawsuit is the ugly modern man, obsessed with numbers, obsessed with his own expectations, obsessed with money. What difference does it make how much money changed hands to buy the iPod? The money itself is just a meaningless number printed on a piece of paper, the same as the 8GB claim or the 7.5 GB explanation.
There was perhaps a time when Mac users were creative eccentrics, but now that the Mac has become mainstream, the number of morons using macs is growing, and the petty vindictiveness will grow with it. (From what I have seen, most iPhone buyers are complete morons. From cross platform to cross contamination.) :-)
Apple has become the ugly brute on the screen, desiring power and mass compliance. Isn't it odd how people become that which the oppose? Choose your enemy wisely.
Ironically, the law student made a good choice. Experience is the best teacher. Buy suing Apple he will get experience that the law school could never teach him, and he will have a huge built-in legal team to help him.
If only these law school students had more imagination, and went after copyright and patent laws instead of such drivel. If all men are created equal, then why is the work of some men regarded as superior and protected by the government? The law is a farce, and people are foolish to put so much faith in it.
As Anarchus keenly observed: Democracy is a system where the wise speak and the fools decide. (He was an optimist, since the wise are seldom given the chance to speak.)
Lincoln was a lawyer. I can't think of any other inarguably respectable ones that were though.
Yes, but his claim to fame was that he never spent more than one year in school, and it wasn't a law class.
Interesting that Truman was elected a judgeship in 1922, where he built a reputation for honesty and efficiency. It was after he was appointed judge that he attended the Kansas City School of Law in 1923 at the age of 39. He attended for two years and left without graduating in 1925.
To many, most of the other considered greatest Presidents had little or no upper school law training, e.g.,
? George Washington: Surveyor, Farmer/plantation owner, Soldier (General of United Army of the Colonies)
? Thomas Jefferson: Writer, Inventor, Lawyer, Architect, Farmer/Plantation owner, but didn't go to law school
? Andrew Jackson: Soldier, Lawyer, but didn't go to law school
? James K. Polk: Lawyer, Plantation owner, but didn't go to law school
? Theodore Roosevelt: Public Official, Rancher
? Franklin Roosevelt: Lawyer, failed to stay on for his law degree after passing state exams allowing him to practice law; had little interest in law and little enthusiasm to be a lawyer.
? John F. Kennedy: Writer
? Lyndon B. Johnson: Teacher, Public Official
? Ronald Reagan: Actor & broadcaster, President of the Screen Actors Guild
Woodrow Wilson being the exception, however, after a year in practice he abandoned his law career and went back to school to study history.
Where'd all this GiB stuff come from, and HDD suddenly not storing info in binary. I'm slightly worried, final year masters student in electronic engineering, and have NEVER come across GiB! A HDD does not have 8,000,000,000 bytes. The reason we use k, M, G, T is not out of laziness either, they just have a different meaning in a digital sense.
Yes, an 8 GB HDD really does have 8,000,000,000 bytes (well, as already mentioned probably a few thousand more or less, once bad sectors etc. have been taken into account)
k, M, G, T etc are decimal prefixes that work in powers of ten
k = 10^3
M = 10^6
G = 10^9
T = 10^12
It used to be the case that it was accepted that when used in the context of computers, that these prefixes changed their meaning, so that rather than 1 kB = 1,000 bytes, it = 1024 bytes.
This is clearly deeply moronic. What if you really want to mean 1,000 bytes? Why shouldn't 1 kB = 1,000 bytes?
Realising that there was an issue, in 1999 the International Electrotechnical Commission came up with new "binary prefixes", which work as powers of two. So kibi, Mebi, Gibi and Tebi etc. were born:
Kibi (Ki) = 2^10
Mebi (Mi) = 2^20
Gibi (Gi) = 2^30
Tebi (Ti) = 2^40
Later, the IEEE adopted these as official prefixes, and the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (who govern SI, where the k, M, G, T etc. prefixes come from) "officially" prohibit the use of those prefixes to represent powers of two (e.g., according to them, a kB never, ever, ever equals 1024 bytes.)
It would seem that we have the answer. Flash works like HDDs, not RAM, so the space available on flash advertised as having 8 GB capacity is 8 GB (8,000,000,000 bytes) or 7.45 GiB (also 8,000,000,000 bytes).
Well, in general, a raw NOR Flash array (without a controller) usually has an electrical interface which is directly compatible with common RAM chips in terms of reading. (Writing is another story.) But NOR Flash usually doesn't come in big enough denominations that you start having to worry about large discrepancies between binary and decimal prefixes.
But we're talking about high-capacity NAND Flash with an integrated controller, and it is organized more like HDDs than RAM.
Quote:
Where'd all this GiB stuff come from, and HDD suddenly not storing info in binary.
Nobody is suggesting that HDDs don't store information in binary.
We're talking about the unit of measurement used to count how much storage space happens to be in use.
If I have a fence 24 metres long, it is perfectly legitimate to say it is 2 dozen metres long.
Let's say I have an array capable of storing 24 bytes, it would be equivalent to say that it is capable of holding 2 dozen bytes.
Bakers sometimes ignore this convention, and choose to use the number 13 to represent a dozen. This is a known discrepancy. However, the overriding definition of "dozen" continues to be accepted as 12. The term "baker's dozen" is used to avoid ambiguity.
If I have a fence 3141000 metres long, then it is also 3141 kilometres long, or 3.141 megametres long.
If I have an array capable of storing 314100 bytes, it would be equivalent to say that it is capable of holding 3141 kilobytes, or 3.141 megabytes.
This historically hasn't been respected by certain sectors of the computer industry. They like to refer to "kilo" as 1024, etc. This discrepancy has been recognized. However, the base-10 definitions of "kilo", and friends has about 300 years of precedence over the computer science definition.
(The computer science definition, by the way, has never been unanimous on this point. For example, 1 kilobit per second (kbps) has always been accepted as meaning exactly 1000 bits per second, despite the fact that a 256 kilobit SRAM chip is accepted as containing 262144 bits or 32 of what-has-been-traditionally-known-as-kilobytes. Most hard drives advertised as having X MB have never really contained space for exactly X MB according to either the 2^20 or the 10^6 definition. But they've almost always been closer to the 10^6 definition.)
Recognizing the discrepancy, and the fact that it continues to get bigger as we reach into the giga- and tera- range, an attempt was started in the late 1990's to come up with an acceptable replacement for kilo, and friends. This was undertaken with two goals in mind:
1) Computer science has a legitimate reason for wanting to hold on to its convenient base-2 labeling scheme in areas where it is most appropriate.
2) The terms kilo and friends should NOT be used directly for that labeling scheme because they already have other meanings.
The compromise solution that has been proposed by some standards bodies is the definition of the binary prefixes such as GiB, which you've apparently just met.
It's described in amendment 2 of IEC standard 60027-2 ratified in 1999. It is also supported by IEEE standard 1541.2002, which was ratified in 2003 and entered "full usage" in 2005.
JEDEC standards for integrated circuits still use K, M, G and friends in their binary context; however, the JEDEC standard also notes that the usage is deprecated by other standards bodies.
I always figured that the people pushing the "i" notation are not the people that you want to humor. I know what it means, I know "better", but there are better or more interesting things to worry about. It's certainly a lot more nerdy than I care to get, kind of like the Kirk vs. Pickard arguments. Multiply that message by an order of magnitude or two for those suing based on ignorance of what the box says.
Comments
Lest we forget, the most highly respected American Presidents were those who never stepped to the bar. The majority of the rest were lawyers.
Lincoln was a lawyer. I can't think of any other inarguably respectable ones that were though.
Time to change the way how lawyers earn their money. Here in Europe, they earn their daily bread with salaries, not with boni from won lawsuits, tempting everybody to sue for every other dog-pile they encounter along the way to the court.
This has nothing to do with rule of law, it's just the rule of the old mammon, it's what drives northern America, these days.
What we have in this lawsuit is the ugly modern man, obsessed with numbers, obsessed with his own expectations, obsessed with money. What difference does it make how much money changed hands to buy the iPod? The money itself is just a meaningless number printed on a piece of paper, the same as the 8GB claim or the 7.5 GB explanation.
There was perhaps a time when Mac users were creative eccentrics, but now that the Mac has become mainstream, the number of morons using macs is growing, and the petty vindictiveness will grow with it. (From what I have seen, most iPhone buyers are complete morons. From cross platform to cross contamination.) :-)
Apple has become the ugly brute on the screen, desiring power and mass compliance. Isn't it odd how people become that which the oppose? Choose your enemy wisely.
Ironically, the law student made a good choice. Experience is the best teacher. Buy suing Apple he will get experience that the law school could never teach him, and he will have a huge built-in legal team to help him.
If only these law school students had more imagination, and went after copyright and patent laws instead of such drivel. If all men are created equal, then why is the work of some men regarded as superior and protected by the government? The law is a farce, and people are foolish to put so much faith in it.
As Anarchus keenly observed: Democracy is a system where the wise speak and the fools decide. (He was an optimist, since the wise are seldom given the chance to speak.)
Lincoln was a lawyer. I can't think of any other inarguably respectable ones that were though.
Yes, but his claim to fame was that he never spent more than one year in school, and it wasn't a law class.
Interesting that Truman was elected a judgeship in 1922, where he built a reputation for honesty and efficiency. It was after he was appointed judge that he attended the Kansas City School of Law in 1923 at the age of 39. He attended for two years and left without graduating in 1925.
To many, most of the other considered greatest Presidents had little or no upper school law training, e.g.,
? George Washington: Surveyor, Farmer/plantation owner, Soldier (General of United Army of the Colonies)
? Thomas Jefferson: Writer, Inventor, Lawyer, Architect, Farmer/Plantation owner, but didn't go to law school
? Andrew Jackson: Soldier, Lawyer, but didn't go to law school
? James K. Polk: Lawyer, Plantation owner, but didn't go to law school
? Theodore Roosevelt: Public Official, Rancher
? Franklin Roosevelt: Lawyer, failed to stay on for his law degree after passing state exams allowing him to practice law; had little interest in law and little enthusiasm to be a lawyer.
? John F. Kennedy: Writer
? Lyndon B. Johnson: Teacher, Public Official
? Ronald Reagan: Actor & broadcaster, President of the Screen Actors Guild
Woodrow Wilson being the exception, however, after a year in practice he abandoned his law career and went back to school to study history.
But the rest of us pay!
Where'd all this GiB stuff come from, and HDD suddenly not storing info in binary. I'm slightly worried, final year masters student in electronic engineering, and have NEVER come across GiB! A HDD does not have 8,000,000,000 bytes. The reason we use k, M, G, T is not out of laziness either, they just have a different meaning in a digital sense.
Yes, an 8 GB HDD really does have 8,000,000,000 bytes (well, as already mentioned probably a few thousand more or less, once bad sectors etc. have been taken into account)
k, M, G, T etc are decimal prefixes that work in powers of ten
k = 10^3
M = 10^6
G = 10^9
T = 10^12
It used to be the case that it was accepted that when used in the context of computers, that these prefixes changed their meaning, so that rather than 1 kB = 1,000 bytes, it = 1024 bytes.
This is clearly deeply moronic. What if you really want to mean 1,000 bytes? Why shouldn't 1 kB = 1,000 bytes?
Realising that there was an issue, in 1999 the International Electrotechnical Commission came up with new "binary prefixes", which work as powers of two. So kibi, Mebi, Gibi and Tebi etc. were born:
Kibi (Ki) = 2^10
Mebi (Mi) = 2^20
Gibi (Gi) = 2^30
Tebi (Ti) = 2^40
Later, the IEEE adopted these as official prefixes, and the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (who govern SI, where the k, M, G, T etc. prefixes come from) "officially" prohibit the use of those prefixes to represent powers of two (e.g., according to them, a kB never, ever, ever equals 1024 bytes.)
Learn more at the font of all computer-related knowledge: Wikipedia page on binary prefixes
Well, the 8 GB iPod nano uses flash, doesn't it.
It would seem that we have the answer. Flash works like HDDs, not RAM, so the space available on flash advertised as having 8 GB capacity is 8 GB (8,000,000,000 bytes) or 7.45 GiB (also 8,000,000,000 bytes).
Well, in general, a raw NOR Flash array (without a controller) usually has an electrical interface which is directly compatible with common RAM chips in terms of reading. (Writing is another story.) But NOR Flash usually doesn't come in big enough denominations that you start having to worry about large discrepancies between binary and decimal prefixes.
But we're talking about high-capacity NAND Flash with an integrated controller, and it is organized more like HDDs than RAM.
Where'd all this GiB stuff come from, and HDD suddenly not storing info in binary.
Nobody is suggesting that HDDs don't store information in binary.
We're talking about the unit of measurement used to count how much storage space happens to be in use.
If I have a fence 24 metres long, it is perfectly legitimate to say it is 2 dozen metres long.
Let's say I have an array capable of storing 24 bytes, it would be equivalent to say that it is capable of holding 2 dozen bytes.
Bakers sometimes ignore this convention, and choose to use the number 13 to represent a dozen. This is a known discrepancy. However, the overriding definition of "dozen" continues to be accepted as 12. The term "baker's dozen" is used to avoid ambiguity.
If I have a fence 3141000 metres long, then it is also 3141 kilometres long, or 3.141 megametres long.
If I have an array capable of storing 314100 bytes, it would be equivalent to say that it is capable of holding 3141 kilobytes, or 3.141 megabytes.
This historically hasn't been respected by certain sectors of the computer industry. They like to refer to "kilo" as 1024, etc. This discrepancy has been recognized. However, the base-10 definitions of "kilo", and friends has about 300 years of precedence over the computer science definition.
(The computer science definition, by the way, has never been unanimous on this point. For example, 1 kilobit per second (kbps) has always been accepted as meaning exactly 1000 bits per second, despite the fact that a 256 kilobit SRAM chip is accepted as containing 262144 bits or 32 of what-has-been-traditionally-known-as-kilobytes. Most hard drives advertised as having X MB have never really contained space for exactly X MB according to either the 2^20 or the 10^6 definition. But they've almost always been closer to the 10^6 definition.)
Recognizing the discrepancy, and the fact that it continues to get bigger as we reach into the giga- and tera- range, an attempt was started in the late 1990's to come up with an acceptable replacement for kilo, and friends. This was undertaken with two goals in mind:
1) Computer science has a legitimate reason for wanting to hold on to its convenient base-2 labeling scheme in areas where it is most appropriate.
2) The terms kilo and friends should NOT be used directly for that labeling scheme because they already have other meanings.
The compromise solution that has been proposed by some standards bodies is the definition of the binary prefixes such as GiB, which you've apparently just met.
It's described in amendment 2 of IEC standard 60027-2 ratified in 1999. It is also supported by IEEE standard 1541.2002, which was ratified in 2003 and entered "full usage" in 2005.
JEDEC standards for integrated circuits still use K, M, G and friends in their binary context; however, the JEDEC standard also notes that the usage is deprecated by other standards bodies.
I always figured that the people pushing the "i" notation are not the people that you want to humor. I know what it means, I know "better", but there are better or more interesting things to worry about. It's certainly a lot more nerdy than I care to get, kind of like the Kirk vs. Pickard arguments. Multiply that message by an order of magnitude or two for those suing based on ignorance of what the box says.
Picard! Kirk sucks.