macports' hardlinks and time machine backups

[Peter West]

When I see MiB, I think million bytes. Is this wrong?

One of the disk manufacturers was taken to court over advertising a device with n gigabytes of storage, meaning n*1,000,000,000 bytes. The buyer assumed that a Gb was 1K*1K*1K bytes, where 1K was 1024. The court agreed with the plaintiff. Now on all disks, AFAIAA, the size of a Gb is spelled out.
--
Peter West
pbw at pbw.id.au
“My soul magnifies the Lord…”

> On 15 Aug 2017, at 2:30 am, Michael <keybounce at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, 14 Aug 2017, Rainer Müller wrote:
>> 
>>> Finder on macOS uses base 10, so "GB" stands for 1000*1000*1000 Bytes. du(1) uses base 2, so "G" means 1024*1024*1024 Bytes.
>> 
>> It's for this reason that I've always referred to the base-10 usage as "marketing MB", because the numbers are bigger.  There is a trend to use e.g. "MiB" and "GiB" for the real number (amongst us computer freaks who use base-2).
> 
> It's not marketing. It's very much a real issue.
> 
> Is one computer MB 1000 * 1024? Before you think you know, have you checked floppies?
> When you are dealing with network speeds, and communications, how many bits are in a kilobit? That is something that dates back to telephone signaling, not a recent hard drive marketing thing.
> 
> Yes, it's much easier for computer hardware to use 2^10 instead of 10^3. But as soon as you move away from "I have N wires that I'm pulsing twice for a row and column select", or away from "There are this many bits in a register", and ask yourself "Why do we use these oddities and call them standard prefixes?", can you come up with any answer other than "Because other people who came before me and did not understand the problem used those terms"?
> 
> We now understand the confusion and problem of having two different meanings for the same prefix. So, the newer, inaccurate one got renamed with an "i".



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