realy realy need help about 5 days ago i let a frend on my comp to chek mail hes a good guy but hes a real noob and after that my blue ray drive went realy strange i place a 4.7gb dvd-r and it reads 4.38gb im useing maxwell 50 pack thare working fine but then boom it shows the same thing in over 8 disks but reads all others fine and reads cds fine pleas help sony was no help what so ever you guys are the top if you guys cant im dead and i did whipe all my c drive but i have another hd only movies and software that i havent installed think it might be something thare and yes i tryed new drives help... ^_^
It looks as though your frend wrecked your spell-check, too. If I decipher your message correctly, you are concerned that a 4.7 GB DVD now shows up as 4.38 GB. If that is correct, then nothing has changed on your computer. Computers read binary code. They count by twos: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256...and you start to see a pattern that appears on flash cards, RAM, etc. The closest a computer can get to the number 1,000 is 1,024 or two to the tenth power. Humans count by tens because we have ten fingers. Storage media have typically had their capacities expressed in decimal terms that humans can readily understand. IBM set that standard in the 1950s. So tapes, discs, and hard drives usually have decimal capacities. A "4.7GB" DVD has 4.7 billion bytes. That's true; but to a computer, the three "thousands" that get multiplied by each other to reach that billion number were "1,024s." 1,000 bytes is smaller than 1,024 bytes; but both are called "kilobytes." So a computer that thinks 1,024 is a thousand will see 1,000 as 97.6% of what it thinks a "thousand" should be (1000/1024). That difference increases as the multiples increase. The difference you are seeing is due to human terminology being misapplied to binary numbers that are close but not the same. Nothing is wrong with your computer or your discs.
but then why did it read 4.7 and now 4.38 and its not just in the disk specs in computer but in roxio when i tryed to copy a avi to dvd it promped me that i didnt have the space it asked for 4.6gb or so and every time it asked for something along those lines and copyed nowit wont even in roxio it reads 4.38 why?. if you explaned in the leter i didnt realy under stand becous i was runing the same kind of program one day it was working and then it it stoped even had a guy from sony take a look useing remote pc software he sed it was normell fo comps to show 4.38 insted of 4.7 like on the disk but mine allwas shows the same amount as the disk/card 4.7 billion bytes =4.7gb or at least vary close even my sd card shows 1gb and in bytes shows 1 billion bytes but useble is 945 mb i can under stad it being a little off do to human and comp math but not that much?? what do you think hapend.
I don't know why either your computer or the Roxio software would ever show 4.7GB because they only compute in binary terms. 4.7 billion bytes to them means 4.38GB because each "thousand" is 1,024. If everything else is working on the computer, then you have nothing to worry about. Flash cards work the same way except that they also leave some space for formatting, so you lose a little capacity due to the format requirements (the same is true for CD-RW and DVD+/-RW). The only time the difference might present a problem is when you have 4.4 to 4.7GB in video or data files and try to store that amount on a disc that can only hold 4.38 GB. Your software will tell you there is not enough capacity on the disc--or flash card/USB drive if you're trying to use one of those in their "1GB" or "2GB" capacities and trying to store a gigabyte or two of information. Remember that 4.7 billion bytes does not equal 4.7GB in binary terms. Each "1,000" is 97.6% short of 1,024; since a billion is a thousand to the third power, 97.6% of 97.6% of 97.6% amounts to 93%. The higher the amount in bytes, the more there is a difference between decimal and binary values. My guess is that you saw "4.7GB" in a Roxio screen, but Windows Explorer always showed 4.38GB, or "4.7 billion bytes." In computer binary terms, 4.38GB = 4,700,000,000 bytes.
well you seam to know what your talking about but when i looked on the web i found this disc is specified as capable of storing 4.7 gigabytes (4,700,000,000 bytes), or roughly 4.38 gibibytes.. the guy frome aol tryed to tell me something like you are but i think youre thinking of gibibytes and not gigabytes i looked up how much space is on a normell 4.7gb disk in bytes and then how maney bytes would make 4.7gb its the same it seams like the disk tells the truth 4.7 but youre right if you mean 3.8 gibibytes insted of gigabytes it shows on this site that 3.8 gibibytes would be the same as 4.7 gigabytes tell me what you think. and all comps i ever used sed the same as the disk be it cd or dvd btw im useing windows dont know if mack shows space in Binary insted of Decimal but take a look at this site pleas try to explain it a little more simple im a little noob lol heres the site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte
oh and i see in youre post you sed th comp would read in Binary but it sed in a web that 3.8 in Binary would be the same as 4.7 Decimal and im prety sure all the comps i ever used reads space in Decimal im sure of it but if thats true what virus would change the way my comp reads?? never heard of one like that
All computers, including MACs, read in binary terms. All digital products read in binary terms because they only understand two states, whether those states are on/off, change/no change, pulse/no pulse, light/no light, and so forth. That's why you see computer "talk" as zeros and ones: 0110, for example. The zero on the far right means that in the one-column there is nothing. The next number is a one, meaning there is one 2. The next column is a four-column, and there is one four there. The far left column is an eight-column, and there is nothing in the eight column. The binary 0110 = no eights + one four + one two + no ones = 6. It seems like a stretch to make a six with four digits, but remember that computers do the counting at the speed of electricity. Humans count differently. Each column has ten possibilities instead of just two. That's because of our ten fingers. "0110" equals "no ones (out of a possibility of 0-9 ones), one ten (out of a possibility of 0-9 tens), one hundred, and no thousands = one hundred ten = 110. Binary uses exponents of two for each column. That is: column 1 = 0 or 1; column 2 = 0 or 2; column 3 = 0 or 4; column 4 = 0 or 8; column 5 = 0 or 16; and so forth. In other words, the sequence is 0, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, etc. Each column is twice the one to its right. Notice that there is no thousand column. It's 1024. One thousand in binary would be = 01111101000 or 0+512+256+128+64+32+0+8+0+0+0; and that requires more than just one column. In the early days of computers, there were two problems: 1) the numbers were not very big, and 2) the computer people were not linguists. They took Greek for "thousand/big/giant" ("kilo/mega/giga") and applied them to binary numbers, forever leaving 1,000 as only 97.6% of a binary "kilo." The Wikipedia article describes an attempt to create new words for the binary terms such as "kibi" instead of "kilo" since "kilo" has meant 1,000 since Homeric times (for 2,800 years) and both 1,000 and 1,024 for only the past 60 years. In the new terminology, a "kilobyte" would be 1,000 bytes; and a "kibibyte" would be 1,024 bytes, the correct amount a computer sees in binary terms. It's a mess that confuses a lot of people. Words mean something. When they are misused, confusion sets in. Newscasters describe Galveston as "decimated." That literally means reduced by 10% or 10% destroyed (from the Romans practice of killing 1 in 10 offenders for psychological and practical reasons). What the newscasters want to say is "90% destroyed," but they are saying just the opposite because they studied journalism, not English. (They are part of the news media, a plural word meaning "carriers." Radio is a medium. Print is a medium. TV is a medium. Together they are "media," plural. This is another example of the misuse of language by people who don't know and don't care.)
