This is the kind of stuff that gets me. As a Small Business Owner, when I read something like this I think “give me a break….don’t you have anything better to do?”
But, as I stop and think about it, I realize that the distinction being examined here is important and potentially expensive.
This must be what Small Business Owners think when I start talking about depreciation.
A long-running California lawsuit over whether all megabytes and gigabytes are created equal may have reached its end on Friday.
The class action lawsuit against Kodak, Sandisk, Lexar Media, and other memory card makers alleges that the defendants intentionally misrepresented the capacity of their flash memory devices by using decimal definitions, in which a megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes. The suit says a binary definition is appropriate, meaning that one megabyte equals 1,048,576 bytes and that the memory card sizes were overstated by 4 percent to 5 percent.
When memory capacity was smaller, the difference didn’t mean much. A decimal kilobyte, at 10^3=1,000 wasn’t very different from 2^10=1,024.
But as capacity grows, the differences become more significant (technically, the ratio between the decimal and binary representations increases). This explains why your new terabyte drive isn’t as capacious as you hoped it might be. A 10^12=1,000,000,000,000 decimal terabyte is roughly 10 percent smaller than the binary equivalent of 2^40=1,099,511,627,776. Here’s more background on why computers work this way.
You can read the original article here.
