At 2:32 PM -0600 9/5/2008, Doug McNutt wrote: >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
powers of two, not ratios. ><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? yea. It can be confusing. In general - something computed, which ultimately is used by a processor, will be in base two (binary). Everything electrical (frequencies, data transmission, etc) are base 10 (decimal). This is because processors only "think" in binary. heh. Just wait - trinary is coming! Storage, because it's addressed thru buses controlled by processors, is done in binary; blocks of 8 bits. Hence, the binary base to the traditional metric names. Wanna be more confused? Back in the day, there were 36 bit processors, not just 32-bit (and multiples thereof). Their bytes were only 6 bits, instead of 8. >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. yea. It can be confusing. K and k and KB and kB and Kb. Bytes vs bits. >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. Acronyms and abbreviations are often case sensitive. Of course, all this has to be, um, translated by the Marketing Department. They're the wackos that brought us the 14" diagonal monitors, that were only 12.something. And hard drives that say their capacity in raw decimal instead of usable binary notations. >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? pffft. Real men use microFortnights. - Dan. -- - Psychoceramic Emeritus; South Jersey, USA, Earth --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
