From owner-freebsd-advocacy Sat May 15 6:55:46 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Received: from hostigos.otherwhen.com (mavery-gw.pernet.net [205.229.2.17]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 08CB014D61 for ; Sat, 15 May 1999 06:55:41 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mavery@mail.otherwhen.com) Received: from mail.otherwhen.com (mail.2.229.205.in-addr.arpa [205.229.2.19] (may be forged)) by hostigos.otherwhen.com (8.8.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id JAA01597 for ; Sat, 15 May 1999 09:07:24 -0500 (CDT) Message-Id: <199905151407.JAA01597@hostigos.otherwhen.com> Received: from PORKY/SpoolDir by mail.otherwhen.com (Mercury 1.44); 15 May 99 08:55:39 -0600 Received: from SpoolDir by PORKY (Mercury 1.44); 15 May 99 08:44:49 -0600 From: "Mike Avery" To: freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Date: Sat, 15 May 1999 08:44:41 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: time for another upgrade? Reply-To: mavery@mail.otherwhen.com In-reply-to: <373D3065.EE7677B4@newsguy.com> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.10) Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 15 May 99, at 17:29, Daniel C. Sobral wrote: > Mike Avery wrote: > > > >1024^3 > 86400*10^8 > > Hmmm - should that be 1024^3 or 1000^3? I suspect it depends on > > who you talk to. The difference is between 1,073,741,824 and > > 1,000,000,000,000. Not a big difference - around 7%. > > It doesn't depend on anything. It is 1024^3, and everybody who says > otherwise is plain wrong. This is not a matter of opinion. Whether k, m, or g is based on a power of 1,000 or 1,024 often depends on what is being measured, and who is doing the measuring. And it isn't always consistent. Money is ALWAYS decimal because people normally use a decimal system. A gigabuck is 1,000,000,000 dollars. A megabuck is 1,000,000 dollars. Memory is ALWAYS binary, because current computers are binary systems, so a gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes, a megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes. Disk systems are problematical. Vendors prefer to specify their size in decimal numbers, as it makes their size appear larger. Users prefer to see sizes based on binary numbers, as it reflects memory sizes more closely.... important to people who care about virtual memory. However, the actual size difference isn't that great. Communications speeds seem to usually be expressed in decimal numbers. When you get a 9.6kbps modem, that's 9,600 bits per second. A 56k line is 56,000 bits per second. So, when someone says, "we transferred 960gb", what does he mean? In general, the number is going to be based on disk size. And will most likely be a decimal giga, not a binary giga. All in all, there's not much that's not open for debate, for good or ill. Mike ====================================================================== Mike Avery MAvery@mail.otherwhen.com (409)-842-2942 (work) ICQ: 16241692 * Spam is for lusers who can't get business any other way * A Randomly Selected Thought For The Day: Efficiency is a highly developed form of laziness. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message