🚀 go-pugleaf

nsayer@quack.kfu.com (Nick Sayer) writes:

>bloody thing don't you have to FORMAT it?! Hello! I have also caught
>a vendor once using 1,000,000 as a "megabyte". If you do that, the 1.4G
>drive I mentioned above really looks like a 1.5G drive. Such a deal!

Hate to tell you this, but they ALL do that now. Go pick up a Computer
Shopper and take a look- all the drives listed are listed as
1 MB = 1 million bytes. This has happened simply because when people do
a "dir" or similar while at the keyboard the number shown at the bottom
says "340,xxx,xxx free bytes". Thus they think it's a 340 MB drive instead
of the 320 MB drive it really is.

Heck, some CMOS's even list MB as millions of bytes now. Most instruction
manuals on drive installation do.

The first major case of this occuring, AFAIK, is with "360K" disks. Although
*EVERYONE* called them 360K they were really only 320*1024 bytes... (ie- 320K)

>It's as bad as an airline selling the same seat twice - any other
>business that did the same thing would get sued out of existence.

It's a matter of definitions, and the public has redefined MB.

Can't say that I agree with the redefinition, but I don't see it changing
back either.
-- 
Tom Sorensen * gt0040a@prism.gatech.edu * Team OS/2
Chairman, Yellow Jacket OS/2 User's Group * Vice President, Georgia Tech ACM
"OS/2 is what DOS and Windows should have been. Windows/NT aspires to become
what OS/2 is." - Lee Reiswig, May, 1993.