And where did they get their figure of 32 decimal gigabytes?
Flash chips come in binary gigabytes.
If you've saved up $499 for a 32GB Microsoft Surface RT, you might want to save a bit more for a capacious microSD memory card, or at least break out one of your external USB drives: according to Microsoft, half of that 32GB will be unavailable for your files. Microsoft has published a support note that details how 16GB is all …
Flash chips come in binary gigabytes.
Have you ever actually tried to buy large capacity flash chips? Or even used a USB flash drive? They are generally metric sizes. These are all far eastern manufacturers and if they can save 7% die area and claim the same capacity to you bet they will. It isn't as if there is any fundamental needed to fill out the memory to a nice binary size - we are not talking about parallel interface chips here.
While the flash blocks are indeed binary sizes and there may be a 'binary' total, some are reserved for wear and bad sectors and 32GiB of raw cells never ships as a 32GiB drive.
That 7% difference is very convenient for covering that hidden space without having to list 'odd' capacities though.
I'm still hoping this will go in eventually.
Dont you mean "Im?" Correcting grammar on this or practically any other forum is a thankless pursuit and distracts from the topic at hand. Besides, if you do away with hints of this nature, how will you know whom to ignore?
Going back to the topic of the Slab's specs writ in Market Speak, why is it necessary to list the Cover port along with all of the other ports? It is a dedicated interface and, while important to the functioning of the device itself, is much the same as listing a hinge for the screen of a laptop. Another example of MS almost getting it is the full-size (yay!) USB 2.0 (fail!). Yes, it differentiates the Slab from the iPad, but only feeds into the marketing story that Apple wants to tell in that it is Old Tech - hardly an innovation.
No,
Microsoft make it easy for you to add an SD card to the tablet. However, the built-in apps, such as the Video player etc, can't actually see that additional space rendering it not so usable or easy for the average user to use.
Yes, there are ways and means around this, but they really should've had a media scanner a la Android to automatically scan the external media for playable files.
well, let's focus on what it CAN see on that card. It can see some things, right? Right?
that said, I still applaud MS (did I just say: "applaud MS"?!) for adding that sd slot. Miles ahead of Google and Apple. Even if what's on the card can't be seen by the the device, it's still... a revolutionary approach, no less.
@AC 10:07
I probably wasn't very clear - what I meant to say is that internal apps can't see videos on external storage automatically, and add them to the Windows libraries.
You have to manually browse to the SD card and find your videos, rather than just picking "Videos". My Galaxy Note 2 scans internal and external media and presents all the available video files in the Video Player app without me having to explicitly go look for it.
http://www.teamradicus.com/post/Surface-and-SD-Card.aspx
So your complaining because your to lazy?
Yes it is a nice to have feature , but your first post did say it couldn't see them which is wrong. Most people are used to finding external media themselves.
If I have inserted a full (of say text files, PDF's etc) 64GB sd card into a slot then thought "I will watch a video" I don't want my tablet scanning that 64GB if it does not have video files on them.
That is just me though, you (and others no doubt) obviously would and thus it would be good if it were added to the options in the future.
*Most* people would probably never use external media, beyond sticking a DVD or a CD into a laptop. However, having done so, regular Windows would prompt them what they should do with it.
I'm not talking about the tech savvy user here (who are very much in the minority) but the mums, dads, grandads and grandmothers who aren't particularly computer literate.
P.S. Having already "corrected" the error in my original post, it's a more than a little churlish to take me up on it again, don't you think? The point stands that media on your SD card does not end up in your Windows libraries unless you are prepared to jump through hoops to do so, and that is a fail in my opinion. YMMV.
I did. I've read Dean Takahashi's book about Xbox and it said that BillG agreed to trimmed down OS on Xbox (while initially he was all for full blown Windows there). I think BillG/SteveB need to spend more time thinking / less time drinking
16GB just for the OS, sounds like to make Windows RT Microsoft just recompiled the Windows 8 binaries for ARM and then locked it down so you could only install software from the Windows store and left all the other crud for full fat windows in there that won't be needed. Of course the surface comes with Office installed so that bound to take up a chunk of the space whether you want office or not.
To compare the OS restore software for my Ainol Android 4 tablet fits on a 1GB SD card with just a few hundred meg of free space left
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So what? It isn't like Apple does it any differently when they sell iPxxx devices. If they do it differently then why is there note 2* on the bottom of tech specs page of each device?
"2. 1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less."
* it's note 1 for the iPhone
There's no such thing as a decimal gigabyte and the term gibibyte is as meaningless as counting in 1000s on a computer system. Memory on all computers (it has nothing to do with Windows) is counted using binary - just because that's too complicated for sales people and computer illiterates to add up doesn't mean you can change it. That would be like teachers being allowed to tell kids 90 degree angles are 100 degrees or Pi is '3' just because geometery is too difficult for thickies to understand. That may be true both of people who buy PCs and what passes for maths students today, but it doesn't make changing the numbers correct.
The BIPM, IEC and IEEE all disagree with you, and define a gigabyte as 10⁹ bytes. You may not like it but that is reality. If it is a choice between using definitions devised by recognised international standards organisations and a semi-anonymous poster on El Reg I know who I will trust.
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IEEE Std 1541-2002 is relevant here given the whole standard is on the 10^9/2^30 issue. Paragraph 4.1 is cut and dry:
The SI prefixes shall not be used to denote multiplication by powers of two.
I see you've already been thumbed down. I'm not surprised. After all, of course some anonymous nobody commenting on a discussion forum knows better than a recognized international committee of experts.
Well done on the sarcasm Rebecca, but the Spectacularly Refined Chap actually was saying what you said, before you, and in a less unpleasant way.
And (slightly off-topic, but...) while standards bodies are important, it's not that IEEE are experts in anything that makes them right, it's the fact that they define the standard. It could be done by a five year old, as long as everyone else abided by his/her standard.
Sir,
converting between gigabyte and gibibyte: multiply by 1000**3, then divide by 1024**3, correct?
I f do that with 32, I get (32 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000) / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = 29.8023 = 29.80GiB.
Meaning their rounding algorithm is off... 29.80 should read 30GiB rather than 29GiB...
Just me 0.80 cents,
(or Just me 0.00 cents in Microsoft terms,)
Guus
In the interests of fairness, it should be said that later Android devices (i.e. those that shipped with ICS or Jellybean) generally don't support Apps2SD any more. This is because the device is no longer partitioned with a discreet, limited, amount of space for apps, and instead apart from essential /system and a few other partitions, apps and data share the same partition on external storage.
...I want to throttle the busybody knob goblins whose addled brains brought forth the 'gibibyte'. Hey, marketers hijacked a computer industry term! Here's the solution - let's *give it to them* (genius, right?) and then we'll make up our own moronic-sounding alternative! Then we can run around Wikipedia changing unit types and acting smug!
It'll be awesome!
Seriously. Kibibytes? Really? What freaking brain trust came up with that? Even monikers as objectively foolish as 'Wii', 'iPod' and 'iPad' managed to subsume themselves into culture, and have ended up sounding relatively normal. But the kibi-mibi-gibi gibberish sounds just as absurd now as it did on the day it appeared - despite its having been regularly shoved un-lubed up the collective anus of units users for years.
Gibibytes are like Mitt Romney, Red Bull, and getting your penis caught in your pants zipper - you'll never get used to it.
Thank you, and good night.
"Gibibytes are like Mitt Romney, Red Bull, and getting your penis caught in your pants zipper - you'll never get used to it." -- David W.
I got used to it. But the Bi units are only really ever appropriate for stuff, like parallel addressed memory, where decimal units are a poor fit with reality. For serially-accessed storage, bandwidth and anything else you wish to measure, you might as well stick with the decimal (SI) definitions.