Group, There have at various times been discussions and debates about binary vs. decimal expressions in the computing and networking industries. I've waded deep into several of them. In the last that I recall, I was musing how some hard drives now seem to be marketed in decimal form (1,000,000 bytes = 1 MB instead of 1024 x 1024 = 1,048,560 = 1 MB), presumably in order to gain some silly perceived advantage. Well...
I recently returned from an extended overseas assignment. I had finally declared one evening in my hotel room that I was through with lugging around old, scratched CDs and would finally join the digital revolution (MP3) upon my return to the States. Well, I went straight out and bought a "20 GB" MP3 player from Arcos. This is essentially an external hard drive (plus an LCD display, a few buttons, and a headphone jack) that shows up in Windows Exploder as a new drive once attached to a computer's USB port. Interestingly enough, it shows up in Windows as an 18.6 GB hard drive. Since Microsoft doesn't sell hard drives, they have no incentive to stretch the truth. Of course, 20 "GB" / 1024 = 19.531 / 1024 = 19.073 / 1024 = 18.626. So it's really a "20 gB" hard drive after all. Or, more appropriately, it's an 18.6 GB hard drive. What I really, really got a kick out of was the file utility on the Arcos box itself. It declares (via the LCD) that you have xx,xxx number of available MB out of a possible 19,060 MB. Of course, 19,060 / 1024 = ~18.6. Perhaps a compromise between Engineering and Marketing was struck? Message Posted at: http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=71659&t=71659 -------------------------------------------------- FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
