After struggling to work out which folders would fit on a memory card, and then stumbling on this post, was wondering why the terminology is still so inconsistent, despite the supposed introduction of terms like Kibibyte?
I mean, they introduced the different terms to clean up the confusion, but, as that post says, everyone in the industry just carried on using the existing Kb,Mb,Gb,Tb,etc while the drive and memory card manufacturers, it seems, still use the terms to mean the decimal version. They can get away with it because even under the new terminology regime they are technically correct, so presumably can't be accused of false-advertising, and it's _everyone else_ who is "wrong" by not using the binary terms (and they can't be forced to change because they aren't gaining any unfair advantage by using those terms to denote the larger units).
Thus the confusion continues. Seems to me that what should have happened was to change the term for the "decimal" units, as then the storage manufacturers could have been legally obligated to use those terms.
That said, I'm not at all clear on whether the fact that hard-drives and memory cards come out with less than the stated capacity is due to the difference between binary and decimal units or is just down to space lost in formatting.
I mean, they introduced the different terms to clean up the confusion, but, as that post says, everyone in the industry just carried on using the existing Kb,Mb,Gb,Tb,etc while the drive and memory card manufacturers, it seems, still use the terms to mean the decimal version. They can get away with it because even under the new terminology regime they are technically correct, so presumably can't be accused of false-advertising, and it's _everyone else_ who is "wrong" by not using the binary terms (and they can't be forced to change because they aren't gaining any unfair advantage by using those terms to denote the larger units).
Thus the confusion continues. Seems to me that what should have happened was to change the term for the "decimal" units, as then the storage manufacturers could have been legally obligated to use those terms.
That said, I'm not at all clear on whether the fact that hard-drives and memory cards come out with less than the stated capacity is due to the difference between binary and decimal units or is just down to space lost in formatting.