At 10:41 -0400 9/5/08, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >1 GB = 1024 MB I thought & not 1028,or am I wrong?
For those non-professionals who remain confused by the use, in computer "science", of the terms kilo (k), mega (M), giga (G), and tera (T) to mean ratios of 2^10 = 1024(10) instead of their well defined meanings that have been around since 1875 or so these web sites are instructive: <http://www.physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html> (Note Gi, Mi, and the like) <http://www.physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix> <rant> The computer folks use M for 10^6 when they're talking about bit rate or bandwidth in Hz but somehow they expect us to understand that M means 2^20 when they're talking about bytes on a disk. When they're talking about bits per second it's 10^6 - or is it? What was the transfer rate for that file in kBytes per second when each byte, as transmitted, was a 10 bit item after adding a start and stop bit? When they know they're talking to their peers in a closed session it doesn't matter much but when they're trying to help us poor folks that learned metric in engineering or real science classes they need to explain what they mean. So do the dialog boxes in the GUIs. Finder is getting better at that but DiskUtility is still not precise enough for me. And a K is a unit of temperature, a kelvin, as in "The noise level of this ethernet receiver is 100K". Lower case k is the abbreviation for the metric prefix kilo. And m means 1/1000 or a milli. When you mean one of those Mega thingies it just isn't good enough to use all lower case in your message. Using i when you mean I can be tolerated as computer lingo but using m for M is downright confusing. I'm pretty sure that milli is always 1/1000 and never 1/1024 but whonoze? </rant> Yes. We'd all be better off if the Babylonians had ignored their thumbs when they learned to count higher than 20(10) - a score. -- --> Marriage and kilo are troubled words. Turmoil results when centuries-old usage is altered in specialized jargon <--. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
