Comment by ari_elle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ari_elle | Hacker News Reader

Nitpick (and most likely even considered OT):

- Mac OS shows storage space the right way, because it shows capacity in KB/GB (which is base 10 by definition)

- Windows OS shows storage space the wrong way, because while using base 2, it still claims to show you space in KB,GB (but actually it's GiB)

To what is generally better: Well for the common user GB might make more sense, since every storage device is marketed with GB in mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Quantities_of_bytes

And people who feel cheated because of less storage space seem to ignore the fact that this tablet is running a full Windows Operating system.

I guess it's just the mindset of many to think of tablets as "big smartphones" instead of compact full-fledged computers.

When did the redefining of a KB from 1024 bytes to 1000 bytes happen? And has it truly happened? If you get 2GB RAM don't you get 2048 MB, not 2000 MB? I've always thought it was just the harddrive manufacturers being stingy, claiming their drives had more than they actually did.

The switch - although not in my head - came when more people got computers, cameras and iPods, being exposed to storage compared to computers, where they didn't care or know. People care about storage since the store large amounts of mp3 and images.

1000KB = 1GB, 1000GB = 1TB is easier for most people than 1024KiB = 1GiB, 1024Gib = 1TiB.

Manufactures do it because bigger numbers sell better than smaller ones.

Which works fine until people create or download a few files and find they have been conned: they don't have as much usable space as they thought they'd paid for.

The redefining went the other way. Under the conventions of metric prefixes, k has always meant 1000, not 1024. It was only in the computer industry that k was bastardized to mean 1024, and once enough people realized it was wrong, they created the ki prefix to indicate the 10th power of 2.

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