Bill, I suspect you may be a bit out of touch on the Byte/bit thing.
First off, the use of non-integral bits is quite correct, and certainly possible. This sort of thing is commonplace in mathematics. You can raise a number to a non-integral power. Ever wonder how do you multiply something times itself, e.g., 2.6 times? You can take the factorial of a non-integer. And you can have a non-integral number of bits. This situation often arises because computers are binary, but the real world isn't. Secondly, in English I've seen the symbol "b" used very consistently for bit and "B" for byte. The main exception seems to be non-technical people who don't completely understand the difference between a bit and a byte. I do appreciate your pointing out that this isn't an international standard. John On Thursday 25 December 2003 01:53, Bill Potts wrote: > Your 4.7004 bits example is impossible. There can only ever be an integral > number of on/off states.
