1000/1024

Have you ever bought a new computer, external hard drive or USB stick, plugged it in  and then been disappointed to find it appears to have considerably less storage than you were lead to believe?

There is an explaination for it and it lies in some kind of disagreement between the people who make the drives, and the people who make the software. A manufacturer will say 1kB = 1000 bytes, but the software says 1KB = 1024 bytes.

Neither are in fact wrong- 1000 being the traditional (decimal - powers of ten) usage of the kilo- prefix (1000metres in 1 kilometre etc.) and 1024 since it is the closest binary integer (power of 2)

Software companies like Microsoft chose to use 1024, hard drive manufacturers, Like WD chose 1000.


This never made a significant difference until drives grew in size and were measured in larger units. e.g. 1 megabyte = 1000/1024 kilobytes and so on...

A 128 megabyte flash drive would be made to have 128,000,000 bytes

When the drive is plugged in, the computer interprets 1024 bytes to be a kilobyte.
This equates to 125000 kilobytes. Dividing by 1024 again will give it in the megabytes.
This is roughly 122 megabytes by the computers interpretation.
The difference between the manufacturers quote and the software's quote is 6MB (4.6%)

This effect gets worse as the units get larger the company multiplies by 1000 another time, while the software divides by 1024.

• For Gigabytes, a320GB hard drive I'm using shows up as 298GB. A difference of 22GB (6.9%)
• For Terabytes , a 2TB hard drive is quoted by windows as 1.81TB. A difference of 185GB (9%)
  
  and if the same pattern were to stay, we could end up with 11.2% less petabytes than we'd postulated and would have trim 13.3% from our expectations of exabytes

If the offending hard drive is inside a new computer, this inconsistency might not be all that robs you of precious space. It's become the done thing to include service partitions alongside the usable part of the drive. In theory, this is a great idea (second only to actually getting a windows disc) so if things go to shit, you can bring up a recovery (mine is by pressing f8 at boot) and restore the computer to its factory settings.

My only complaint is that my laptop has 18GB reserved for this partition on a 320 (298)GB drive, and it's only half full! The drive is only ever accessed for recovery mode and its contents will never change, so that's a clear waste of 9GB that could be harbouring more porn!

Another set of units has been introduced - kibibytes, mibibytes, gibibytes etc. as seen on the right column of the table above. These are meant to remove confusion surrounding the 1000/1024 fiasco, but it looks unlikely to catch on. Until either side lets up, this disparity seems set to continue.

From what I gather, MacOS has adopted the manufacturers version of a megabytes and mostly uses these. When it does use binary bases, it uses the proper name - mibibyte etc.

...and I thought something that was intended to alleviate confusion, would simplify things. For the punchline, see yesterdays XKCD
:

Here we... Here we...

It's been a few weeks since Scotland's biggest music festival. This means I'm finally getting days where I don't have to listen to someone talking about it! Even those with no interest in music will have found it impossible to avoid the constant reminders of its presence.

I didn't attend the festival of course; if I had, this article would be a bit more enthusiastic on the topic!

Instead I spent the weekend about a mile from the site. The swathes of people hobbling around trying to find a ticket, their camp, their breakfast or something to shag make it a pretty undesirable place to be for all but the festival-goers.

This was precisely the reason my dad chose to flee his home in Milnathort to spend the weekend in Orkney and leave me to cat-sit for him as the festival went on ... It wasn't all bad- I got to steal his car for the weekend!

I was a bit miffed to be sat in his house that Saturday night as some bands I'd like to have seen played nearby but this was overshadowed as the unofficial camp site right outside the back garden began blasting 'unn-tss unn-tss' from midnight til 3am. Overall though the noise and the traffic jams were pretty tame considering 60,000 people had moved into the area for the weekend! If one thing really wound me up that weekend, it was that people were talking about it.

The ones who spend £200+ to go and party in a field for a weekend are naturally going to do all they can to enjoy themselves. Ignoring a few low points to make the financial blow seem a bit more worthwhile. It was not uncommon for attendees to throw superlatives around when recalling their weekend. Good for them if it truly has been the best of their lives. The trouble is I wouldn't rule out the possibility of them seeing through rose coloured glasses to defend their investment.

Those that went were not half as bad as some people who didn't even bother! Some were over eager to talk about it and had the tendency to get a defensive when asked why they weren't in attendance. I heard tales of new found hatred for everything they could think of: the bands, the mud, the booze, the crowds and pretty much anything synonymous with a music festival. I heard at least one go as far as to say "I wouldn't go if you paid me."

I couldn't shake the feeling that some of these people had gone in the recent past and had at that time, spoken of it was the best weekend of their life!

There ought to be a middle ground here. If you go you should keep a lid on your bragging, leave the chants behind, and oh god, please take off your wristband!* Those who didn't should have a clear and un-stupid stance on why; work commitments or being too skint to buy tickets are acceptable.
*I say this despite going 3 years in a row '06-'08 and keeping my wristbands until the first broke... but cut me some slack- I was nineteen!

The only other complaints I have are the line-up compared to the ticket price. If, like me, you're going for the music, you're paying to go to one big gig. I could be being picky but I'd have real trouble making up £200 worth of bands over the weekend. A ticket to see a main-stage headliner (~£40) and another lower down the bill on the main stage (~£20) each day (calling the rest support bands) over 3 days and you've pretty much made up the ticket price, but that's the only way. Stray from the top 3 stages and you're likely to be hugely overspending!

I'm not someone who thinks the atmosphere makes up the rest of the value. I might well feel better next year if there are a few more £20+ bands I'd like to see. This year I might have made up about £120 worth of bands but there would of course be clashes. Here I go being hypocritical and complaining publicly, but I don't think the mud makes up the remainder of the bill.

I don't think I'd ever go so far as to say I wouldn't go if you paid me. The money was the issue for me- I actually counted all the money I could afford to spend the day before the festival and told myself if I could find a weekend ticket for that price, I'd go! Despite threats of downpours which were only partially delivered, I couldn't find a ticket reduced in price by that much. Some were half price, but nobody was willing to go as low as £45!

The closest I was to T this year

Keyboard shortcut of the day: Shift-Ctrl-T

Scenario: You are mindlessly browsing away and before you realize it, you have 40 tabs open. Reluctantly, you start to pick and choose which pages you want to keep and which ones you can let go. You get impatient and you're probably clicking quicker than you really ought to and boom, you hit X on a tab you were halfway through reading.

It's all fine and well if you know you have the page bookmarked or somebody tweeted the link 10 minutes ago but more sods law dictates that it was about 8 links deep and you'll never be able to retrace those steps.

Wait! It'll be in my history!
Erm... What was it called again?

Reading this back to myself I feel like I'm trying to sell something, but really I'm just trying to share a simple shortcut I was dumbfounded to have discovered more recently than I'd like to admit. Shift-Ctrl-T will reopen the most recently closed tab (at least in Firefox & Chrome) and it usually works quite a few times (i.e. you can open the 2nd most recently closed tab and so on)

I hope like me you benefit from knowing this extremely minor thing- every little second helps waste time more efficiently!

Lying on the internet

I always hated the ads on the internet but Facebook has always been one of the worst offenders. They knew I was a white male aged 18-25 who lives near Edinburgh, they know what I talk about and what links I share to my wall, they know that I liked pages for Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy, a bunch of bands, and "Tranny Grannies" (thanks frapists), they know where I went to school and my religious views and worst of all, they knew I was single.

Thanks to all of this information that I blindly shared, they tailored the ads for me. It was really annoying to see ads for dating sites all the time, ads for "the best deals in Edinburgh!", and the worst of all "Seduce any woman by asking 3 simple questions!" 

There are a few reasons to click on them

• You're an idiot
• Clicking ironically
• Thinking the ad may well have been placed by a misunderstood genius
• For science

In any case, it's all too tempting to do so and inevitably you feel stupid after even a minute wasted on what turned out to be an obvious gimmick. 

There was an obvious solution that I'm obviously getting at here, so here is my pre-diddly-ictable conclusion.

I'm not condoning lying on the internet. There are too many of old weirdos posing as teenagers, malicious pieces of software under a false guise, and people who reply to lost & found ads on gumtree in the hope of getting a free watch. guilty.

Anyway, there is a victimless (million dollar companies cannot be victims) way of lying on the internet for a small benefit - Lying to Facebook! Lying by omission doesn't even count anyway!

So from simply hiding my relationship status and telling the site I live in Tunisia, the adverts became completely irrelevant to me. Another plus is that they're amusing enough in themselves so as not to demand any further attention.

I wound up with this. Was that predictable?

Thank you, and goodnight.

"I read your blog"

I'm pleasantly surprised to have heard these words on a few occasions.

I started with the unambitious impression that I was essentially sending letters into a black hole but I was taken by surprise that actual physical people sat and read something on here then told me about it. Unfortunately, I guess that means I should keep writing. One for each reminder that this does see the light of day? I'll keep to that within reason (this one doesn't count!)

Long story short - cheers guys. I'll probably post another one or two this week. If not, next Tuesday since that seems to be the day of the week I've devoted this most time thus far.

The odd reminder that there are people on the other end of this is always welcome, and there's a comment box too if you're feeling adventurous.

"Digital Music"

I don't have anything against audiophiles or analog purists in general. Just the stupid ones.

First: the anecdote:

I was flipping around on TV when after a few minutes of some kind of 'making the album' style documentary about the new offering from a big band* I found myself infuriated about the crap they were saying. I wouldn't really have had high hopes for a new album but i think if i'd hadn't caught this documentary, I wouldn't really have had any strong opinion on the album.

*The name of the band** and the title of their awful new album is pretty irrelevant.
** I'd be a foo' to name names

What annoyed me was that it was recorded on tape.... No, wait.. I don't really care about that either.

What really got annoying was their insistence that this had any effect on the finished product at all. The frontman preached that digital recording is "everything that is wrong with rock 'n' roll" and that recording on good old fashioned way was the right way to do it.

Really- who gives a fuck? However an album is recorded, whether it be using pro tools, one of those portable combo 16-track recording studio/CD burner/toastie maker machines or indeeed on oldfashioned tape, the main objective is to get music out of the musicians heads into some kind of distributable medium. The shortcuts of digital recording give and take very little.

It all started to stew in my head and I started picking on the other major flaw in their ethos. The frontman also insisted that analog recording gave the recording some kind of warmth that could only be delivered through analogue electronics. That's all fine and well, but you're making a commercial album here. Millions will buy the album, but will any of them benefit from the fact it was recorded in analogue? There are people who swear by analogue and still buy all their music on vinyl but it'd be interesting to see who (if anyone) falls under both camps- fans of the band who listen to their music on vinyl.
The fact is that the music is going to be digitized before 99% of the people listen to it (Not an actual statistic). So to me, that makes the 2 possible arguments for recording this album on analogue tape into moot points. (Except for the 4 people who bought the album on vinyl and actually opened the cellophane)
 
So while I'm at it, I might as well make a similar point about analogue and digital formats.

People are entitled to their opinions, but they sometimes they should give wikipedia a quick read before doing something like announce their hatred for digital music. I'll be doing my best to avoid hypocrisy here because I do prefer to buy a physical format when I can. Vinyl is appealing to me because it actually feels like you have something for your money. It's square foot of artwork you can hold in your hands put on display along with your collection, something to read while you are giving an album that all-important first listen.. or to some people who are trying to keep with the times it's now just become a frisbee after you've recorded it into an mp3.

One worry I imagine keeps all anti-digital audiophiles up at night if they're sticking to vinyl but listening to newer music is that the album might well be recorded digitally then made to vinyl later, which sort of defeats the purpose, doesn't it? 

When people try to argue the case for CD's over what gets called digital music- that's when it gets properly stupid. As the labels on CD's themselves will tell you, Compact Discs are a digital format. Compact disc digital audio. So people who think CD's are superior in quality to an MP3... well... they're right. But not half as right as they think you are!

It's all about bitrates, (if you're confused already, you have my permission to stop reading now). A CD is about 1400 kilobits per second (kbps) That means that there are 1.4 million ones or zeros to make up every second of audio. MP3 is a compressed version of the same audio which brings it down to anything from 32-320kbps. The main ways that it does this are:

• Cutting out information representing sound which is not there
  

  CD's hold information for all frequencies at all times on the recording, whether that frequency is there or not. MP3's only encode what frequencies are there

• Cutting out sound we can't hear
  

  You (if you're human) can hear sounds from roughly 20-20,000 Hz. This is a huge range which starts narrow out by your twenties. Even though you can hear high pitched sounds above 15,000 Hz, nothing interesting really happens way up there.

  CD's hold information on sound from 0-22,050 Hz and MP3 cuts out some useless parts and only represents (roughly) 20-16,000 Hz.

• Computery magic
  

  There are people (if you call mathematicians people) who devote their lives creating algorithms which allow data to be compressed by representing information in a shortened way.
  The simplest way to think about it is if you were to write the word "fudge" a million times in a notepad document, it would take up the space 5 million characters.
  If you were then to zip that document, A compression algorithm would step in and write it just like I did there - "fudge a million times" (except in computer language), then when reading the document back it's returned to it's original form.
  
  This is of course a very simplistic explaination, and in reality an mp3 is not transformed back into an identical copy of the source it was created from. It is as good a representation of data that can be made at the bitrate chosen. It's this "loss" during compression that causes most offence to audiophiles.
  
  Despite all of the information that is lost during compression, it really can be difficult to notice. This is the product of the years those people spend working on their algorithms.

The standard for "near CD quality" mp3 downloads is usually 128-192kbps, which is about 4-6 megabytes for a 4 minute song. Despite these files taking up 10-15% of the space they did on a CD, it is still a good enough representation and this is good enough for most people.


Why does music come in a compressed format?
It's all about storage space. We want all our music on the hard drive of our computer (because we can!) and as much as we can carry in on an mp3 player when we're on the go. Modern players only have a certain amount of storage (NOT memory- see the earlier blog!) so in order to fit as much as possible in the space available the files are compressed. Music downloads are traditionally around 128-192kbps which is a fair trade-off between file size and quality.

Online download stores are beginning to sell mp3's at higher qualities because this demand is changing. The lower bitrates were chosen when portable players had very little capacity. My first mp3 player held 64MB which was only enough for one album! And this point in time, we dialled up to the internet, download speeds were nothing by todays standards

"you could be up all night and only see eight women"

So as players grow in capacity and our connection to the internet gets ever speedier, the audiophiles may well get their way, simply because measures intended to cope with these constraints are no longer necessary.

I talked mostly of MP3, but there are of course other formats, including the audiophiles fave, FLAC. The "L" is for lossless, so a track ripped from a CD into a .flac file is completely unchanged in audio content, yet the file size compared to the cd track is still significant. 

This sounds brilliant and all, but I don't use it for the simple fact that I don't have an MP3 player that'll play FLAC. Until all the big companies see the light and build their products to play a variety of formats, flac and formats like it are unlikely to gain much ground, because at the end of the day, most people just take what they're given.


That was maybe a bit of a bit tangent but The Point is that You're Wrong- cd's are digital music! Your music does not neccisarily sound better on CD and when you say "digital music", you really mean "downloads" or "mp3's"

As I was saying, MP3 isn't going to be the format that's stuck to, but it's likely that the name has stuck. If another format were to become the standard format, I doubt people would pat their pockets as they leave the house and say to themselves "wallet, keys, phone, ogg player" mp3 player may well be the 'brand name' that gets used for all products like it. Though in saying that, Apple have done quite well and some people call any old player an iPod.


Despite all this, I still buy most of my music on CD. I feel cheated to spend £8 to download an album, when I could go out (or go on amazon), get the CD for pretty much the same price, rip it to mp3 and have both!

On blogs

This is my first time I've written a blog that had more than one entry since bebo (which most people don't know stands for blog early blog often (not that you're necessarily part of the subset "most people")) and I guess only time will tell whether I stick with it or not. A couple of people who read the first 2 posts of this blog said it was alright. I'm not sure whether to be offended that they seemed surprised that I can string two sentences together or just take it at face value.

For whatever reason, its in my nature to just do things in one go. Whenever I used to write, I'd go start to finish in one sitting. This was pretty much my strategy through school and college for essays and just about anything that it could be applied to. Impatience and a short attention span were major reasons for it but in many cases it the simple fact that I'd left myself only a matter of hours to meet a deadline.

So that was it, straight through, a quick once-over for wee mistakes and submit. This was a pretty wasteful way of working. If I got to a point where I didn't like where it was going, I'd start over, or just stop completely.

Only now have I decided to start doing things differently. I've been writing this blog for longer than I'm letting on, although you see three posts on this blog, there are twice as many more saved as drafts. Now I'm writing down everything that's in my head as quickly as possible for a first draft. (I could call it automatic writing but that would be wank!) At this point I barely have any idea what form the published article will be like; I only begin to think about this after the first draft is finished. This way is so much easier than before. I would make the final decisions as I went, never looking further back than a paragraph.

So under the new regimen I'll go back over this first draft (hours of days) later, making sure it makes sense, cutting the crap (sticking to the point is NOT my strong suit!), adding in afterthoughts and giving it a vague sense of flow. Then I'll come back to it at odd intervals and do it all over again. The post isn't finished until I can read it through without the urge to change something.

I know writing a blog is different to analyzing literature or writing a lab report and it's a bit late to improve any of those grades but better learning a lesson late than never. There are plenty other things I've never been very good at- perhaps I should adopt this new strategy to writing job applications, maybe finishing a song I've started writing or the script for that porno I'm making with the real story and everything.

Concise whining on Boxsets

When you hear the words "Box Set" what do you think of? A physical box containing a number of dvd's, right?

The best of them come in a decorated box with odd little extra collectors items which are guarunteed* to increase in value. Something like Biffy Clyro including a piece of the flag depicted on their album cover, the "OUTATIME" license plate that came with the Back to the Future 25th Anniversary box set. Extreme cases are like Rammsteins Liebe ist fur Alle Da which came with... uh- Google it. Also note that amazon have listings of this as "used"

*until the hoarders are done touting off boxes they never intended to keep in the first place.


The least I'd expect would be like the Friends boxset I picked up in HMV for £40 - Every episode on a bunch of DVD's which fit neatly into a box, plus a simple booklet with a paragraph on each episode.



Then there's the kind that pisses me off- like an ad that's been runnving for Sky Anytime for a few months where you can watch entire series on demand.

The whole point of a box set is that it comes in a box!
Sure, you could argue that in order to get sky you do in fact need a set top box, but i think it's devaluing the idea of the boxed set, and (a theme I know I will forever be moaning about) the idea of a physical format.

Next time, please just advertise it as "watch entire series on demand"

Memory / Storage

At least once a day I'll hear someone say something about a computer that makes them sound stupid. As much as I want to, I don't just correct them then and there. This is because it's difficult to do so without:

• Sounding like a geek
• Confusing them and having to explain it 4 times
• The possibility that they think you're an arsehole
• Them going away thinking you give a shit

"I've got too much music on my laptop, I'll have to buy more memory!"
-The last such statement I challenged


As difficult as it is to cope with two commodities being measured in the same units, I'm sure that since many manage it for money and weight, memory and storage shouldn't be too much of a stretch!


Admittedly, "memory" is a bit of an ambiguous word in computing and technically storage is a type of memory but the girl who I'm quoting above did not know that, so that doesn't excuse her mistake!


I'm here now, so this is the technical bit...
The difference is the volatility- i.e. "will it still be there when i switch it off and on again?"


Non-volatile memory- the kind that stores it's contents when the power goes out is storage. Everything that you can save then bring back later goes on some kind of non-volatile memory, such as hard drives, CD's, tapes, menory cards and flash drives.


Volatile memory (RAM) is the kind that it's acceptable to simply call memory. It is volatile because it loses its contents when there is no power connected. This makes it pretty useless for storing files that you want to keep! It's much quicker than storage and is only used to store programs and files while they're in use. So a program is stored in storage, copied to memory to be used and then removed from memory when you close it.


As I told the girl who thought she needed more memory, buying more memory wouldn't let you store have any more files on the computer. Replacing the hard drive with a bigger one, or adding another would be the way to get more space for music. Adding memory allows for more programs to run simultaneously without things slowing to a halt when you switch between them.