Ubuntu fixes disk capacity bug
Summary: Snow Leopard converted to base-10 last year, provoking digerati outrage. Now Linux distro Ubuntu 10.04, "Lucid Lynx" is following. When will Microsoft get with the program?
Snow Leopard converted to base-10 last year, provoking digerati outrage. Now Ubuntu 10.04, "Lucid Lynx" a Linux distro, is following.
And the CPU-centric traditionalists are cranky. Get over it: for 200 years kilo has meant 1,000 and it's time for computer nerds to join the rest of the human race.
The problem with base 2 Drive vendors have always measured capacity in the proper SI units of 10^n. Because CPUs access RAM in bytes, words and longwords - all powers of 2 - many long-time computer users got used to thinking of kilo, mega, giga and so on as base 2 prefixes.
But they aren't. The French invented the metric system in the 1780s and all its units have always been based on 10 - not 2.
We could all ignore the difference when talking about megabytes, but as we move into the Petabyte and beyond era, the percentage difference between base 2 and base 10 keeps growing:
This has to be fixed. Changing to how disk vendors have always measured it is the right way to go.
BTW, Ubuntu allows users to change the default to the old geezertech model. When will Microsoft get the memo?
The Storage Bits take The enterprise has been enduring the consumerization of tech for 3 decades. Now the same is happening to early adopters.
The arguments are always the same: the (PC, NetWare, SATA) isn't good enough. And the old guard always loses because in America, if it is cheaper and mostly does the job, we go with it.
But this shift is more significant because it is another signal that the CPU-centric era is coming to an end. Oh, we'll keep buying CPUs, but as Apple is demonstrating, who really cares what makes their iPhone or iPad go?
We're moving into a data and storage-centric world. The only reason people buy CPUs and networks is to access data they care about, be that videos, spreadsheets, games or web sites.
99.9% of the market could care less that CPUs access RAM in powers of 2 - they don't even know there's a difference. They just want their computer to agree with what is on the disk drive box.
Kudos to Ubuntu for joining the 21st century.
Comments welcome, of course. I changed my mind on this issue after seeing how it confused civilians in the small town where I live. See Your capacity will vary for my old view and Snow Leopard fixes disk capacity bug for the new and improved me.
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Talkback
I have to agree
but really annoys me with regards to flash
media. I needed to fill card with 4GB of data
at work to test a feature in our software. But
I had to use an 8GB card because the 4GB card
won't actually hold 4GB of data according to
Windows.
(Yes, I know that even calculating both on base
10 won't change what can actually be stored on
a card. It would just be nice if they agree.)
Same thing happened to me, only in Linux.
perhaps check for block reservations?
difference in bases, so thats no surprise.<br>
For not being able to put more than 3.4G on the
drive, perhaps ext4 behaves the same way ext2/3 does
and by default reservs a number of blocks for root?
I don't know if it does (I don't use ext4) but it may
be worth checking.
They could have simply switched to using **bibytes....
As someone who dual boots Ubuntu with Windows, I can see this becoming a nuisance rapidly.
So dump Ubuntu or...
That is true.
RE: Ubuntu fixes disk capacity bug
Reducing everything to the lower common denominator is a sad way to be.
seems like diminishing returns
When do you think the average consumer is going to own a Petabyte? My guess is probably never. By the time we're dealing with that much information, it will all be in the cloud. IT groups will be responsible for buying that kind of storage --where the 2base/10base discrepancy is well understood.
Mac and evidently Ubuntu have only introduced further confusion to a system that as gotten us by for decades. Apple pool of 'Think different' ideas must be getting shallow.
20 years to a Petabyte
Drive capacities have been growing at about 40% annually, or 5x every 5
years. If the current average consumer has a Terabyte today, in 20 years
they'll have almost a Petabyte.
Hard to believe, I know, but when I started in the industry a Terabyte was
unimaginably huge - over 1,000 9" disks - and now I have over 10 TB at
home.
Robin
But is 1TB even average today?
There are also factors that could significantly slow drive capacity growth. SSD is one. Cloud storage is two.
SSD will clearly favor performance to capacity for quite some time. With TB SSD costing several thousands currently, PC vendors will likely opt to scale capacities back down into the hundreds of GB range. This becomes increasingly realistic as consumers offload storage needs to the cloud.
Like I said in my previous post, I think the cloud will end up being people's primary mass storage medium as our storage needs approach the PB mark. This allows the storage vendors to provide the abstraction between the base2 capacities they purchase and the capacities they advertise to the consumer. How the OS cites capacity will be relatively moot beyond a couple hundred TB.
This is the long way of reiterating that Apple is simply leading a movement to further complicate storage capacity labeling.
Re: 20 years to a Petabyte (off topic)
I am an IT person - I have 320 GB drive on my home machine (15% used) and a 128 GB SSD on my work notebook (35% used).
And that is more storage than most of the people that I know.
Petabyte HDD may never exist
This is sad :'(
But then again... I'm old-school, and alas, old-school nowadays is just another way to say deprecated.
So what's next? Computers will "learn" to use base 10 instead of base 2? Will the 8 bit byte become obsolete too in favor of the 10 bit one?
This is sad :'(
Precisely
If stores sold bags that only held 10 ounces of food, you wouldn't expect them to enforce a change that said 1 pound = 10 ounces. It's the storage manufacturers that caused this problem, and it should have been them that complied with the data standards of "power of 2" measurements.
Trying to use the argument that "it uses Kilo, therefore it should be 1000" is ridiculous. You don't have a mega-metre, or a tera-metre and I'm damn sure it will never be X number of peta-metres to anywhere. It certainly hasn't stopped liquid measuring 1000 millilitres in "Litres", not "kilomillilitres". If the units of measurement/weight/volume aren't compatible with the units of data storage, I don't see what the problem is.
The average user has no point of reference as to what a Gigabyte actually refers to. To them it's measured in the number of photos it can store, or the number of illegally downloaded MP3's and movies. They don't care that a Kilobyte is 1024 bytes and not 1000 bytes. They don't understand what a byte is anyway. If you're tech-savvy, which seems to count ZDNet bloggers out on most occasions, you know the score, you don't care, you just deal with it.
Alexstrasza: Look up BCD (Binary Coded Decimal). We used to use base 10 for scoring algorithms years ago in assembler language, it was a complete pain in the backside.
Agreed a byte is not a gram or meter
lrfocke
WAIT, what?
Unless you mean that manufacturers who are known for making RAM do it with their SSD and flash memory... but somehow I don't think that's what you meant.
My bet
Wrong comparison
Computers work for us, not the other way around
Now, since a computer's great advantage is in its calculating ability, it is
just plain silly to force us into an unnatural mode of thought simply to
accommodate the machine. Or the programmer.
Every other engineering field uses base 10. Get over it.
Agreed. Now, does my computer have 4.3GB of RAM?
If operating systems are going to start quoting sizes in decimal, they should do it with an optional geek switch.