On Thu, 14 Jun 2012 08:40:27 +0100, Matthew Seaman wrote: > On 14/06/2012 07:11, Polytropon wrote: > > Even school taught that in the 80's: When dealing with > > computers, 1 kB != 1000 B, but 1 kB = 1024 B. That is > > considered basic knowledge. > > Schools teach a lot of things that are so glossed over or so > over-simplified as to be basically wrong. They have been known to teach > things that were common knowledge at the time and were later shown to be > simply incorrect[*].
That's why you never can stop learning in IT, and fighting bad habits in all imaginable areas. :-) > > Every IT person should be aware of this. It's common to "abuse" > > the SI units with the (known!) deviant interpretation. > > Really? If I said the bandwidth usage was 10Mb/s would you immediately > understand that was 10,000,000,000 bits per second? Yes, bandwidth is > always denoted in strict SI powers-of-1000 scale modifiers, always has > been, but the corrosive effect of muddling 2^10 vs 10^3 in computing > just leads to confusion and error. In that case, it's simple: The base unit is b (bit), not B (byte), so M = *1000*1000 as the normal SI interpretation. The abuse of M as in *1024*1024 (SI: Mi) only happens to bytes. :-) > > Sometimes, you find hardware vendors "forgetting" the factor > > mismatch 1024 vs. 1000 when they tell you how many GB the new > > shiny hard disk has. :-) > > Oh dear. It is so galling to realise that the sales people were > actually right all along isn't it? Does one's geek credibility no good > at all to realise that we've been out pedanted by some suits... And it becomes even more funny when an "IT aware" advertising manager says: "Hey, there's this cool Gi prefix, why not just say the disk is 800 GiB instead of 800 GB? Then more geeks will buy our products!" :-) (No, I won't try to even mention the fun of usable file system capacity vs. gross disk "hardware-only" capacity.) -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ... _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
