[wplug] 4GB Ram not seen by Linux kernel

[Tim Lesher]

On Feb 6, 2008 11:36 PM, Mackenzie Morgan <macoafi at gmail.com> wrote:
> The IEEE caved to the hard drive manufacturers and decided 1024 megabytes
> are not a gigabyte.

That's a nice, romantic view of what happened (those darned megacorps
screwed us again!), but it's not quite correct.

The folks who maintain the SI (aka metric system) standard, put their
foot down and asserted that, as "kilo", "mega", etc. have had base-10
definitions for almost two hundred years (and ratified internationally
for over 30 years), these silly upstart tech industry guys really
ought not have appropriated them to mean different things.  So the
storage industry created "kibi" prefixes, and the SI folks said, "ok,
that's a better idea, although we're still not sanctioning them
because we don't do computing".

So if the IEEE "caved" to anyone, it's the SI folks.

IMHO, the fault really lies with the folks who decided that 1024 is
close enough to 1000 to misappropriate internationally-standardized
units. :-)

...and on further review, after spot-checking my recollection versus
Wikipedia, I ran across this interesting tidbit:

----
Hard disk drive manufacturers used MB, i.e. 10^6 bytes, to
characterize their products as early as 1974.[22] By 1977, in its
first edition, Disk/Trend, a leading hard disk drive industry
marketing consultancy segmented the industry according to MBs (decimal
sense) of capacity.[23]

The presentation of hard disk drive capacity by an operating system
using MB in a binary sense appears no earlier than Macintosh Finder
after 1984. Prior to that, on the systems that had a hard disk drive,
capacity was presented in decimal digits with no prefix of any sort
(e.g., MS/PC DOS CHKDSK command)."
----

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix#Consumer_confusion

The usual disclaimer about the fallibility of Wikipedia applies, but
hey, looks like we can blame Apple. :-)

-- 
Tim Lesher <tlesher at gmail.com>