R
Rod Speed
Alexander Grigoriev said:
Yes it does.
Yes it does.
J
J. Clarke
Arno said:
Again, according to what law? The US Code does not contain the word "byte"
and the word "bit" appears only two times in the context of electronic data
processing, storage, transmission, retrieval, or other related matters,
once referring to a "bit tax" and the second time in stating the
requirements for something called a "telecommunications modernization
plan".
By who?
The specific wording refers to the _package_ and specifies "net quantity of
contents". The contents of a package containing a hard disk would in
English units be "1 hard disk". Is there an SI equivalent of "hard disk"?
Why not search the US Code?
J
J. Clarke
Arno said:
Disks are marketed in "SI units" because somebody at IBM decided to call the
units of data by those names.
Which has exactly what to do with data storage?
J
J. Clarke
Arno said:
I know that this is going to come as a shock to you, but that law has no
authority within the borders of the United States.
"You would assume"? The US Code is online, if you are in doubt you should
check instead of assuming.
F
Folkert Rienstra
Arno Wagner said:
Another stupid attempt at a troll from our babblehead.
F
Folkert Rienstra
Alexander Grigoriev said:
Nonsense. Of course it does support disks over 137GB , just not the
part that's over 137GB.
[engrish snipped]
F
Folkert Rienstra
Arno Wagner said:
Arnie the advisor. Wonderful 'advice' Arnie always has.
A
Arno Wagner
You can claim that all you like. It does not make it true.
Arno
A
Arno Wagner
Previously J. Clarke said:
Hard disks have a primary defining size, their capacity. You would
not get away with putting "a quantity of milk" on a container or
"a block of vanilla ice", because they both have a primary
size measure as well.
Because I could not care less and US law is not what gouverns
international trade and treaties?
However it tuns out that there is a "Unifrom Weights and Measures Law"
in the US. Wou want to look especially at "Special Police Powers" and
"Civil Penalties". As far as I understand the US legal system, you
also will have to reseaerch court decisions and intividual state
adoption to really find out what this law means. Also a lot of it
refers to NIST handbooks, which do not seem to be online. However
there is only two allowed choices for units: SI and the Imperial (?)
units customary in the US, both in the form as published by NIST only.
If you use anything else, you become subject to the "Civil
Penalties".
Arno
D
dew
Arno Wagner said:
You're the one making the claim.
D
dew
J. Clarke said:
Nope, IBM didn't drive it, and initially hard drive capacity was stated
using the same binary units as were used with memory with the PC.
J
J. Clarke
Arno said:
Not analogous, milk and ice cream are bulk commodities that can be packaged
in any quantity. You cannot have half a hard disk.
Then why do you keep insisting that there is some law or other when you
really have not the slightest idea whether it exists?
The US Code does not contain the phrase "uniform weights and measures"
Nor does it contain the phrase "special police powers". There are 419 hits
on "civil penalties", none of which appear in the same section with
"weights" or "measures" or "metric" or "SI".
First you have to demonstrate that there is a law, which you still have not
done.
NIST handbooks are not "a law".
Sez who?
According to what law?
Hint, it will have an identifier of the form "N USC N" where each "N" is an
integer, for example "15 USC 125".
A
Arno Wagner
Previously J. Clarke said:
You did not look in the right place. These are state laws, adopted by
most or all states by now.
Arno
J
J. Clarke
Arno said:
Then provide a link to one.
J
J. Clarke
dew said:
Huh? When did IBM not call the capacity of a million-byte disk a
"megabyte"?
D
dew
J. Clarke said:
The original PC hard drive, the ST506, used binary not decimal MBs.
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/specs/mfm/st506.html
So did quite a few drives after that too.
B
Bob Willard
dew wrote:
Initially, HD capacity was stated in characters; and, the choice of SI or
M$ for defining KB/MB/GB/etc. did not matter, since IBM spec'd HD sizes
in exact (or maximum) number of characters. For ref, see the IBM Journal
of R&D, Vol.1, No.1, of 1957. The IBM 350 (the first, AFAIK, commercially
offered HD) held 5,000,000 characters: 500 chars/track, 100 tracks/surface,
2 surfaces/platter, and 50 platters on the one shaft.
And, the latter (by a decade or so) IBM 1301 supported two character sizes,
6-bit and 8-bit; IBM did not, even then, refer to those storage entities
as bytes -- or to HD capacities in MBs or GBs. (The IBM 1301 held up to
2840 6-bit or up to 2205 8-bit characters on each of its 10,000 data tracks.)
IIRC, the major scam in HD sizing for many years was that HD vendors delivered
HDs unformatted, and quoted HD capacity in unformatted bytes -- knowing full
well that the required act of formatting took a big bite. The formatted
v. unformatted capacity difference was far more significant than the
relatively trivial SI v. M$ definition of a GB.
Personally, I do not recall HD vendors ever sticking to the powers-of-two
sizes that were near-universal for RAM. My first home HD was a 20 MB unit,
latter upgraded to a whopping 30MB; seemed adequate, since that computer
did not run anything from M$.
Initially, HD capacity was stated in characters; and, the choice of SI or
M$ for defining KB/MB/GB/etc. did not matter, since IBM spec'd HD sizes
in exact (or maximum) number of characters. For ref, see the IBM Journal
of R&D, Vol.1, No.1, of 1957. The IBM 350 (the first, AFAIK, commercially
offered HD) held 5,000,000 characters: 500 chars/track, 100 tracks/surface,
2 surfaces/platter, and 50 platters on the one shaft.
And, the latter (by a decade or so) IBM 1301 supported two character sizes,
6-bit and 8-bit; IBM did not, even then, refer to those storage entities
as bytes -- or to HD capacities in MBs or GBs. (The IBM 1301 held up to
2840 6-bit or up to 2205 8-bit characters on each of its 10,000 data tracks.)
IIRC, the major scam in HD sizing for many years was that HD vendors delivered
HDs unformatted, and quoted HD capacity in unformatted bytes -- knowing full
well that the required act of formatting took a big bite. The formatted
v. unformatted capacity difference was far more significant than the
relatively trivial SI v. M$ definition of a GB.
Personally, I do not recall HD vendors ever sticking to the powers-of-two
sizes that were near-universal for RAM. My first home HD was a 20 MB unit,
latter upgraded to a whopping 30MB; seemed adequate, since that computer
did not run anything from M$.
G
Gerhard Fiedler
Bob said:
Which makes sense. The raw storage units on a HD are sequential by nature,
and there's nothing particularly binary about them. The raw storage units
of RAM, however, are accessed through a defined set of binary address
lines, usually located in component cases where size and pin count is
important and minimized, and therefore (so far) the usual sizes are binary
potencies.
It's quite possible that RAM storage goes the same way disk storage has
gone and becomes simply a quantity, not necessarily a binary one,
disconnected from specific case requirements -- and at that point, the more
common decimal potency multipliers may start being used.
Which wouldn't be a bad thing... it's about time that 1 MB of data in RAM
fits in 1 MB of storage space on disk
Gerhard
A
Arno Wagner
Previously J. Clarke said:
Since using google seems to be too much effort for you, here is one:
http://www.plantboard.org/weights measures law.htm
Seems to be from Arkansas.
You might also want to look here:
http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/laws/ncwm-uniform-laws.html
Where you can also find the "Uniform Packaging and Labeling Regulation"
and a document giving the adoption status of it and the the Uniform
Weights and Measures Law (5th link from the top). If I read this
correctly, every state besides Rhode Island has adopted the Weight
and Measurement law, however Rhode Island uses it as guideline.
Here is something else, which provides a neat summary
of why being metric has advantages:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode15/usc_sec_15_00000205---a000-.html
Personally I think that should be more than enough. You may
continue this discussion without my participation from here
onwards. You obviously have no interest in the truth, merely in
maintaining your own misconceptions. Otherwise you could have
easily found all the above by yourself.
Arno
A
Arno Wagner
Previously Bob Willard said:
Interesting. That was before my time.
Incidentially, bit and byte are not SI units. Not too surprising,
since they do not need any physical basis. They can simply be
counted. Only the prefixes are SI. For binary prefixes and definition
of bit and byte, I find only IEEE and ICE standards. IEEE and IEC have
'B' for byte, but IEEE uses 'b' for bit while IEC uses 'bit'.
For RAM ist is necessary in otder to utilize address lines efficiently.
For HDDs there is no need at all.
Arno