K3b sees 4.7GB DVD+R as 4.4 GB

[Toralf Lund]

Tim wrote:

>On Sat, 2006-01-14 at 07:41 -0600, Jeff Vian wrote:
>  
>
>>As has already been said by Peter, this is a marketing speak.
>>    
>>
>
>No, not really.  It all stems from the ABSOLUTe MISUSE of kilo by the
>computer fraternity.  Kilo means, and ONLY means, "one times ten to the
>third power", i.e. "one thousand".  Likewise, Mega means, and ONLY
>means, "one times ten to the sixth power", i.e. "one million".  Even if
>you change base units (so you're not using powers of ten) to express the
>worth of Kilo and Mega, etc., they've still got to mean one thousand or
>one million, etc., not some *slightly* different value.
>  
>
[ ... ]

>
>
>There's only one mob to blame for the confusion of what KB and MB, etc.,
>mean:  The computer programmers.
>  
>
Yes, in a way you are right. But I *very much doubt* the marketing 
people would have adopted a different standard from the computer 
programmers, if it wasn't for the fact that it would give them a higher 
number to use in their advertising.

>And it doesn't stop there, either.  Is one MB 1024 KB, or something
>else?  People have different opinions about that, so it makes MB even
>more vague than KB.
>
Not really. People who say 1kb is 1024 bytes will also say that 1Mb is 
1024kb. They don't change their minds about the factors in the middle of 
it all.

>  What about Giga and Terra, are they each 1024 times
>their inferior?
>
>Opinions about thing that need to be facts should have been properly
>sorted out many years ago.  Opinions are useless in computer programming
>where one thing has to work with another.  I've already seen this thing
>screw up drive handling on another personal computer OS, where drives
>could get filled to 101% capacity (and error, of course), because
>different programmers working on it had different idea about what Kilo
>and Mega meant.
>  
>
Actually, what it means should not matter one bit in that context. The 
only sensible thing to do in capacity calculations of the kind you 
mention, is to work in bytes, or possibly (if the device works that way) 
in the "blocks" that form the allocation unit of the drive. Converting 
to kilobytes or whatever first would be completely meaningless, even if 
there was no confusion about what it meant.

- T