What is a gigabyte

[Gjest]

Please tell me this ; what is a gig ? OR is it 1000 kb ? , in
otherwords
IS 1.2 gig the sames as 1200kb , or something else ? , like 100,000kb ,
I need to know so I get the correct processor for my pc , Phil

[Jeff]

"Jeff" <[email protected]> wrote in

OOps Supercript didn't work - 2 to the power of 30. NOT 230

[Jeff]

<[email protected]> wrote in message
news:01c801c6365d$190d5380$56898843@y9w6c2...

Please tell me this ; what is a gig ? OR is it 1000 kb
? , in
otherwords
IS 1.2 gig the sames as 1200kb , or something else ? ,
like 100,000kb ,
I need to know so I get the correct processor for
my pc , Phil

A unit of computer memory or data storage capacity equal to
1,024 megabytes (230 bytes).
One billion bytes. (U.S. Billion - 1,000 million)

[Steve Hayes]

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 20:30:59 +0000 (UTC), [email protected] wrote:

Please tell me this ; what is a gig ? OR is it 1000 kb ? , in
otherwords
IS 1.2 gig the sames as 1200kb , or something else ? , like 100,000kb ,
I need to know so I get the correct processor for my pc , Phil

1 phone = 1000 microphones

1 megaphone = 1000 phones.

1 Gigabyte = 1024 Megabytes

1 Megabyte = 1024 Kilobytes

1 Kilobyte = 1024 bytes

1 byte = 8 bits (usually)

1 bit = 0 or 1


--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/stevesig.htm
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

[Joe User]

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 20:30:59 +0000, joe2phil wrote:

Please tell me this ; what is a gig ? OR is it 1000 kb ? , in
otherwords
IS 1.2 gig the sames as 1200kb , or something else ? , like 100,000kb ,
I need to know so I get the correct processor for my pc , Phil

In the past few years, standards groups have begun using 'gibi', 'mibi',
and 'kibi' prefixes to indicate 2^30, 2^20, and 2^10. So, nowadays, a
megabyte should be 10^6 bytes, and a gigabyte should be 10^9 bytes. A
gibibyte is 2^30 bytes.

Previously, referring to a gigabyte was ambiguous, because it could refer
to 10^9 bytes or 2^30 bytes.

Use of gibi, mibi and kibi will not become common until about 50% of the
currently-working computer engineers retire.

--
I don't practice what I preach because I'm
not the kind of person I'm preaching to.

-- "Bob" in 'Newsweek'

[Robert Heiling]

Steve Hayes wrote:

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 20:30:59 +0000 (UTC), [email protected] wrote:

Please tell me this ; what is a gig ? OR is it 1000 kb ? , in
otherwords
IS 1.2 gig the sames as 1200kb , or something else ? , like 100,000kb ,
I need to know so I get the correct processor for my pc , Phil

1 phone = 1000 microphones

1 megaphone = 1000 phones.

1 Gigabyte = 1024 Megabytes

1 Megabyte = 1024 Kilobytes

1 Kilobyte = 1024 bytes

1 byte = 8 bits (usually)

1 bit = 0 or 1

Unless you have an account with Giganews-newsgroups and the 2 gigabyte download
cap. Then
1 gigabyte = 1000000 bytes

Bob

[Steve W. Jackson]

In article <F%pKf.6839$_62.3118@edtnps90>, "Jeff" <[email protected]>
wrote:

[email protected]> wrote in message
news:01c801c6365d$190d5380$56898843@y9w6c2...
Please tell me this ; what is a gig ? OR is it 1000 kb
? , in
otherwords
IS 1.2 gig the sames as 1200kb , or something else ? ,
like 100,000kb ,
I need to know so I get the correct processor for
my pc , Phil


A unit of computer memory or data storage capacity equal to
1,024 megabytes (230 bytes).
One billion bytes. (U.S. Billion - 1,000 million)

What? What's the "230 bytes" about? What's a "U.S." anything got to do
with this?
--
Steve W. Jackson
Montgomery, Alabama

[Steve W. Jackson]

In article <[email protected]>,
Robert Heiling <[email protected]> wrote:

Steve Hayes wrote:

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 20:30:59 +0000 (UTC), [email protected] wrote:

Please tell me this ; what is a gig ? OR is it 1000 kb ? , in
otherwords
IS 1.2 gig the sames as 1200kb , or something else ? , like 100,000kb ,
I need to know so I get the correct processor for my pc , Phil

1 phone = 1000 microphones

1 megaphone = 1000 phones.

1 Gigabyte = 1024 Megabytes

1 Megabyte = 1024 Kilobytes

1 Kilobyte = 1024 bytes

1 byte = 8 bits (usually)

1 bit = 0 or 1

Unless you have an account with Giganews-newsgroups and the 2 gigabyte
download
cap. Then
1 gigabyte = 1000000 bytes

Bob

Not that I have any idea what "phones" have to do with anything...

There's another "unless" involved here, too. The 1024-based values
above are technically correct. But there's a second value that I
usually call a "marketing gigabyte". A marketing gigabyte is 1 billion
bytes. Go shopping for a 100GB drive and it is 100 billion bytes.

= Steve =
--
Steve W. Jackson
Montgomery, Alabama

[Denis Beauregard]

Le Mon, 20 Feb 2006 17:22:13 -0600, "Steve W. Jackson"
<[email protected]> écrivait dans soc.genealogy.computing:

A unit of computer memory or data storage capacity equal to
1,024 megabytes (230 bytes).
One billion bytes. (U.S. Billion - 1,000 million)

What? What's the "230 bytes" about? What's a "U.S." anything got to do
with this?

No idea for the 230, but keep in mind that in French, we have:

1 million = 1,000,000
1 milliard = 1,000,000,000
1 billion = 1,000,000,000,000

while in English:

1 million = 1,000,000
1 billion = 1,000,000,000

No idea for other languages, but perhaps someone who knew that the
billion can be defined differently depending on the language.


Denis

[Denis Beauregard]

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 20:30:59 +0000 (UTC), [email protected] wrote
in soc.genealogy.computing:

Please tell me this ; what is a gig ? OR is it 1000 kb ? , in
otherwords
IS 1.2 gig the sames as 1200kb , or something else ? , like 100,000kb ,
I need to know so I get the correct processor for my pc , Phil

The size you need will really depend on heavy use you make or
not.

I purchased a new hard disk last week end, for a laptop. I had
the choice between 40 and 80 gig, which are roughly 40,000,000,000
and 80,000,000,000 characters.

For a typical genealogist that is using his/her computer for data
entry and to have some photos on the computer, 20 or 30 gig are
quite enough and in 2006, it can be less than the smaller disk
you can find anyway.

But if you are a heavy genealogist, download every computer book
on the net, take photos of every record, every book you have in
your home (in case you need them when travelling), etc., then you
may need more. For example, all Quebec's vital records are about
1,000 gig (for 2300 reels). I was told that rootsweb had 3,000 gig
of data space 5 years ago.

For comparison:

1 floppy disk = 0.0014 gig (1.44 meg)
1 full CD-ROM = 0.7 gig
1 full DVD-ROM = 4.7 gig
1000 photocopies legal size = 0.5 gig to 2 gig (roughly)

The exact value of 1 gig is something else. But anyway, a hard disk
is some plates x some tracks x some bytes and this is usually not a
flat number. 1 gig can be 0.9.


Denis

[Steve Hayes]

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 19:17:58 -0500, Denis Beauregard <[email protected]>
wrote:

Le Mon, 20 Feb 2006 17:22:13 -0600, "Steve W. Jackson"
[email protected]> écrivait dans soc.genealogy.computing:

A unit of computer memory or data storage capacity equal to
1,024 megabytes (230 bytes).
One billion bytes. (U.S. Billion - 1,000 million)

What? What's the "230 bytes" about? What's a "U.S." anything got to do
with this?

No idea for the 230, but keep in mind that in French, we have:

1 million = 1,000,000
1 milliard = 1,000,000,000
1 billion = 1,000,000,000,000

while in English:

1 million = 1,000,000
1 billion = 1,000,000,000

No idea for other languages, but perhaps someone who knew that the
billion can be defined differently depending on the language.

Dunno about French, but in English "billon" has been "skunked" and just means
"a lot" (or in American English, "alot").

According to our metircation board, a milliard is 10^9, and a billion 10^12,
but in any given text a billion may be a billion or a milliard, and there's
usually no way of knowing which it is supposed to be.

But that has nowt to do with gigabytes, which are 1024 megabytes.

--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/stevesig.htm
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

[Steve Hayes]

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 14:56:27 -0800, Robert Heiling <[email protected]>
wrote:

Steve Hayes wrote:
1 Gigabyte = 1024 Megabytes

1 Megabyte = 1024 Kilobytes

1 Kilobyte = 1024 bytes

1 byte = 8 bits (usually)

1 bit = 0 or 1

Unless you have an account with Giganews-newsgroups and the 2 gigabyte download
cap. Then
1 gigabyte = 1000000 bytes

Like the butcher with his thumb on the scales, eh?


--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/stevesig.htm
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

[Steve Hayes]

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 17:28:46 -0600, "Steve W. Jackson"
<[email protected]> wrote:

In article <[email protected]>,
Robert Heiling <[email protected]> wrote:

Steve Hayes wrote:

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 20:30:59 +0000 (UTC), [email protected] wrote:

Please tell me this ; what is a gig ? OR is it 1000 kb ? , in
otherwords
IS 1.2 gig the sames as 1200kb , or something else ? , like 100,000kb ,
I need to know so I get the correct processor for my pc , Phil

1 phone = 1000 microphones

1 megaphone = 1000 phones.

1 Gigabyte = 1024 Megabytes

1 Megabyte = 1024 Kilobytes

1 Kilobyte = 1024 bytes

1 byte = 8 bits (usually)

1 bit = 0 or 1

Unless you have an account with Giganews-newsgroups and the 2 gigabyte
download
cap. Then
1 gigabyte = 1000000 bytes

Bob

Not that I have any idea what "phones" have to do with anything...

Just an illustration of the difference between counting in powers of 10 and
counting in powers of 2 (which is what is normally used in the world of
digital computers).

There's another "unless" involved here, too. The 1024-based values
above are technically correct. But there's a second value that I
usually call a "marketing gigabyte". A marketing gigabyte is 1 billion
bytes. Go shopping for a 100GB drive and it is 100 billion bytes.

And no doubt they sell their snake oil in US rather than imperial gallons.;


--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/stevesig.htm
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 17:28:46 -0600, "Steve W. Jackson"
<[email protected]> declaimed the following in
soc.genealogy.computing:

usually call a "marketing gigabyte". A marketing gigabyte is 1 billion
bytes. Go shopping for a 100GB drive and it is 100 billion bytes.

And then, that is typically the "unformatted" (not that hard-drives

get user formatting these days) size -- add the overhead for a file
system, bad block remapping, etc. and the size goes down again...

That "100GB" (decimal) drive ends up with only about 95GB (binary)
of usable space.
--

==============================================================
[email protected] | Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber KD6MOG
[email protected] | Bestiaria Support Staff
==============================================================
Home Page: <http://www.dm.net/~wulfraed/
Overflow Page: <http://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 19:30:04 -0500, Denis Beauregard
<[email protected]> declaimed the following in
soc.genealogy.computing:

For a typical genealogist that is using his/her computer for data
entry and to have some photos on the computer, 20 or 30 gig are
quite enough and in 2006, it can be less than the smaller disk
you can find anyway.

<shudder> I couldn't live in that small a space... The desktops at

work have 40GB drives, but they are restricted to only a small set of
corporate standard software...

My home machine, OTOH, is equipped with a 400GB drive internally,
has a 160GB Maxtor FireWire drive attached, and when doing video
editing, I hooked up the 300GB FireWire drive originally purchased for
my laptop. Yes -- that comes to only 140GB shy of a terabyte of storage.

I have 28GB of OS and application software ALONE (there is no data
stored on my C: partition).
--

==============================================================
[email protected] | Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber KD6MOG
[email protected] | Bestiaria Support Staff
==============================================================
Home Page: <http://www.dm.net/~wulfraed/
Overflow Page: <http://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/

[Mark Brader]

A unit of computer memory or data storage capacity equal to
1,024 megabytes (230 bytes).
One billion bytes. (U.S. Billion - 1,000 million)

What? What's the "230 bytes" about?

See below.

What's a "U.S." anything got to do with this?

Just a way of referring to the "small" billion (1,000,000,000) as opposed
to the "large" billion of 1,000,000,000,000.

No idea for the 230...

Simple. The 30 was supposed to be a superscript -- perhaps the message
was composed in HTML and then flattened to normal text with the loss of
the <SUP> tag. It's 2^30 bytes. The exact value is 1,073,741,824.
This is the common usage of "gigabyte" in computing, even though it
annoys some people because "giga-" usually means exactly a billion.
--
Mark Brader, Toronto | "...and if sooner or later your revels must be ended,
[email protected] | well, at least you reveled." --Roger Ebert

My text in this article is in the public domain.

[Peter]

[email protected] wrote:

Please tell me this ; what is a gig ? OR is it 1000 kb ? , in
otherwords
IS 1.2 gig the sames as 1200kb , or something else ? , like 100,000kb ,
I need to know so I get the correct processor for my pc , Phil

The mega, giga, tera prefixes are used in the SI system to denote multiples
of 1,000.
That is, a MJ is 1,000,000 J and 1 MW = 1,000,000 W.
Similarly, 1 GB = 1,000 MB.

If you want to talk in multiples of 1,024, you should use the prefixes mebi,
gibi, tebi, etc.

More detail at wikipedia ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte


HTH


Peter

[the Omrud]

Steve Hayes <[email protected]> had it:

Dunno about French, but in English "billon" has been "skunked" and just means
"a lot" (or in American English, "alot").

That's not my experience. Billion is a term used in large company
finances and has an exact meaning.

--
David
=====
replace usenet with the

[Bob Martin]

in 82814 20060221 095349 the Omrud <[email protected]> wrote:

Steve Hayes <[email protected]> had it:

Dunno about French, but in English "billon" has been "skunked" and just means
"a lot" (or in American English, "alot").

That's not my experience. Billion is a term used in large company
finances and has an exact meaning.

It has an exact meaning to the person using it. When used by a USAian you
can rely on it meaning 10**9 but used by a Brit it is less certain. I still think
of a billion as being 10**12 as it was when I was at school.

[Stephen Calder]

the Omrud wrote:

Steve Hayes <[email protected]> had it:


Dunno about French, but in English "billon" has been "skunked" and just means
"a lot" (or in American English, "alot").


That's not my experience. Billion is a term used in large company
finances and has an exact meaning.

But, and although this is changing, a billion in the UK means 1000 times
a US billion.

--
Stephen
Lennox Head, Australia

[the Omrud]

Stephen Calder <[email protected]> had it:

the Omrud wrote:

Steve Hayes <[email protected]> had it:

Dunno about French, but in English "billon" has been "skunked" and just means
"a lot" (or in American English, "alot").

That's not my experience. Billion is a term used in large company
finances and has an exact meaning.

But, and although this is changing, a billion in the UK means 1000 times
a US billion.

I think that news must travel slowly to the Antipodes. I reckon this
difference was lost 30 years ago. I have not met the UK Billion
since I was at school.

--
David
=====
replace usenet with the

[Stephen Calder]

the Omrud wrote:

Stephen Calder <[email protected]> had it:


the Omrud wrote:


Steve Hayes <[email protected]> had it:


Dunno about French, but in English "billon" has been "skunked" and just means
"a lot" (or in American English, "alot").

That's not my experience. Billion is a term used in large company
finances and has an exact meaning.

But, and although this is changing, a billion in the UK means 1000 times
a US billion.


I think that news must travel slowly to the Antipodes. I reckon this
difference was lost 30 years ago. I have not met the UK Billion
since I was at school.

Oh shit I better tell everybody.

--
Stephen
Lennox Head, Australia

[Peter Duncanson]

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 08:36:28 -0000, [email protected] (Mark Brader) wrote:

A unit of computer memory or data storage capacity equal to
1,024 megabytes (230 bytes).
One billion bytes. (U.S. Billion - 1,000 million)

What? What's the "230 bytes" about?

See below.

What's a "U.S." anything got to do with this?

Just a way of referring to the "small" billion (1,000,000,000) as opposed
to the "large" billion of 1,000,000,000,000.

No idea for the 230...

Simple. The 30 was supposed to be a superscript -- perhaps the message
was composed in HTML and then flattened to normal text with the loss of
the <SUP> tag. It's 2^30 bytes. The exact value is 1,073,741,824.
This is the common usage of "gigabyte" in computing,

Except when hard disks are being bought and sold, in which case 1GB =
1,000,000,000 bytes.

The PC I'm using at the moment has two disks each with a nominal
capacity of 80GB. According to MS Windows the actual capacities are:

81,936,580,608 bytes 76.3GB
80,004,153,344 bytes 74.5GB

even though it
annoys some people because "giga-" usually means exactly a billion.
--

Peter Duncanson
UK (posting from a.u.e)

[Graham P Davis]

the Omrud wrote:

Steve Hayes <[email protected]> had it:

Dunno about French, but in English "billon" has been "skunked" and just
means "a lot" (or in American English, "alot").

That's not my experience. Billion is a term used in large company
finances and has an exact meaning.

That's because the idiots in the EU decided that, for monetary purposes,
they would adopt the US billion. That means that a million widgets, costing
a pound apiece, cost a million pounds, whilst a billion widgets cost a
trillion pounds.

Perhaps the US and EU monetary billions should be renamed mini-billions?

Graham

[Hairy Lethal]

1 million = 1,000,000
1 milliard = 1,000,000,000
1 billion = 1,000,000,000,000

while in English:

1 million = 1,000,000
1 billion = 1,000,000,000

Almost the same in Scandinavia, except they are spelled differently in
Sweden:

1 miljon = 1,000,000
1 miljard = 1,000,000,000
1 biljard = 1,000,000,000,000

But that has nowt to do with gigabytes, which are 1024 megabytes.

Are you all wrong? A Megabyte can have several interpretations, consider:

1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes - Ok!

1 Megabyte = 1024 kilobytes. This can be interpreted as:
1,000,000 bytes
or 1,024,000 bytes (1000 x 1024 bytes)
or 1,048,576 bytes (1024 x 1024 bytes)

1 Gigabyte = 1024 Megabytes. Then surely this can be interpreted as:
1,000,000,000 bytes
or 1,024,000,000 bytes
or 1,048,576,000 bytes
or 1,073,741,824 bytes

1 Tetrabyte = 1024 Giggabytes. Then surely this can be interpreted as:
1,000,000,000,000 bytes
or 1,024,000,000,000 bytes
or 1,048,576,000,000 bytes
or 1,073,741,824,000 bytes
or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes (almost 10% difference)

Computing is such an exact subject!

[Iskandar Baharuddin]

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 22:18:10 +1100, Stephen Calder <[email protected]>
wrote:

the Omrud wrote:

Stephen Calder <[email protected]> had it:


the Omrud wrote:


Steve Hayes <[email protected]> had it:


Dunno about French, but in English "billon" has been "skunked" and just means
"a lot" (or in American English, "alot").

That's not my experience. Billion is a term used in large company
finances and has an exact meaning.

But, and although this is changing, a billion in the UK means 1000 times
a US billion.


I think that news must travel slowly to the Antipodes. I reckon this
difference was lost 30 years ago. I have not met the UK Billion
since I was at school.


Oh shit I better tell everybody.

Not necessary. They already know.
--
Shalom & Salam

Izzy

K ~ 1/H

- Kelly's Law

(H: altitude in the hierarchy)
(K: knowledge of what the hell is going on.)

[Lars Enderin]

Hairy Lethal wrote:

1 million = 1,000,000
1 milliard = 1,000,000,000
1 billion = 1,000,000,000,000

while in English:

1 million = 1,000,000
1 billion = 1,000,000,000


Almost the same in Scandinavia, except they are spelled differently in
Sweden:

1 miljon = 1,000,000
1 miljard = 1,000,000,000
1 biljard = 1,000,000,000,000

No, biljard is the game of billiards. In Sweden, we use 1 biljon=10^12,

and we are consistent: triljon = 10^18, kvadriljon = 10^24, etc - six
more zeros per level starting with biljon.

[Dave Mayall]

<[email protected]> wrote in message
news:01c801c6365d$190d5380$56898843@y9w6c2...

Please tell me this ; what is a gig ? OR is it 1000 kb ? , in
otherwords
IS 1.2 gig the sames as 1200kb , or something else ? , like 100,000kb ,
I need to know so I get the correct processor for my pc , Phil

OK, after dozens of posts looking at the difference between 1000 and 1024
multipliers in determining the number of bytes, we should probably return to
the question!

It appears that you are actually talking about the *PROCESSOR*, rather than
memory/disk.

Whilst you will see "gig" used when talking about both things (because
that's what techies do), it is actually being used as a contraction of two
different terms;

1) Gigabyte (2^30 bytes) - a measure of the amount of disk/memory storage
2) Gigahertz (10^9 clock pulses per second) - a measure of processor speed

Each instruction passed to a CPU takes a certain number of clock cycles to
run (typically 1-6 cycles, depending on the instruction), so a 2GHz
processor (of the same model) will run programs twice as fast as a 1GHz
processor.

[Jerald H. Mathews]

[email protected] wrote:

Please tell me this ; what is a gig ? OR is it 1000 kb ? , in
otherwords
IS 1.2 gig the sames as 1200kb , or something else ? , like 100,000kb ,
I need to know so I get the correct processor for my pc , Phil

kilo - 10 with 3 zeros
mega - 10 with 6 zeros
giga - 10 with 9 zeros
tera - 10 with 12 zeros
peta - 10 with 15 zeros
exa - 10 with 18 zeros
zetta - 10 with 21 zeros
yotta - 10 with 24 zeros
[ That is yotta not Yoda ]

Regards,
Jerry M.
This E-Mail server is a text only server, NO HTML. Attachments will be
downloaded to a non-Windowz system.

[Charlie Hoffpauir]

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 13:04:29 +0000, Graham P Davis
<[email protected]> wrote:

the Omrud wrote:

Steve Hayes <[email protected]> had it:

Dunno about French, but in English "billon" has been "skunked" and just
means "a lot" (or in American English, "alot").

That's not my experience. Billion is a term used in large company
finances and has an exact meaning.


That's because the idiots in the EU decided that, for monetary purposes,
they would adopt the US billion. That means that a million widgets, costing
a pound apiece, cost a million pounds, whilst a billion widgets cost a
trillion pounds.

Perhaps the US and EU monetary billions should be renamed mini-billions?

Graham

No, thats the result of simply counting "wrong". A billion widgets
should be 1 x 10^9, not 1 x 10^12.
Charlie Hoffpauir
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~charlieh/

[Allen]

Jerald H. Mathews wrote:

[email protected] wrote:

Please tell me this ; what is a gig ? OR is it 1000 kb ? , in
otherwords
IS 1.2 gig the sames as 1200kb , or something else ? , like 100,000kb ,
I need to know so I get the correct processor for my pc , Phil


kilo - 10 with 3 zeros
mega - 10 with 6 zeros
giga - 10 with 9 zeros
tera - 10 with 12 zeros
peta - 10 with 15 zeros
exa - 10 with 18 zeros
zetta - 10 with 21 zeros
yotta - 10 with 24 zeros
[ That is yotta not Yoda ]

Regards,
Jerry M.
This E-Mail server is a text only server, NO HTML. Attachments will be
downloaded to a non-Windowz system.

I would like to make two points:

1. For practical purposes, in sizing HDs, what difference does it make
whether the terms are ten-based or 2-based? Who calculates an exact
number of bytes the are going to place on a drive with such precision?
2. Although the European method is certainly one standard, the
tousand-million-billion-trillion-quadrillion-quintillion-sextillion-septillion-
octillion-noninillion-decillion etc is much easier to follow. In the
European system, what is the name of what, in the US is one quintillion?
Allen

[Jerald H. Mathews]

Jerald H. Mathews <[email protected]> wrote:

[email protected] wrote:
Please tell me this ; what is a gig ? OR is it 1000 kb ? , in
otherwords
IS 1.2 gig the sames as 1200kb , or something else ? , like 100,000kb ,
I need to know so I get the correct processor for my pc , Phil

kilo - 10 with 3 zeros
mega - 10 with 6 zeros
giga - 10 with 9 zeros
tera - 10 with 12 zeros
peta - 10 with 15 zeros
exa - 10 with 18 zeros
zetta - 10 with 21 zeros
yotta - 10 with 24 zeros
[ That is yotta not Yoda ]

Oops, these should read"

kilo - 1 with 3 zeros
mega - 1 with 6 zeros
etc...

--
Regards,
Jerry M.

This E-Mail server is a text only server, NO HTML. Attachments will be
downloaded to a non-Windowz system.

[Everett M. Greene]

Dennis Lee Bieber <[email protected]> writes:

Denis Beauregard <[email protected]> declaimed

For a typical genealogist that is using his/her computer for data
entry and to have some photos on the computer, 20 or 30 gig are
quite enough and in 2006, it can be less than the smaller disk
you can find anyway.

<shudder> I couldn't live in that small a space... The desktops at
work have 40GB drives, but they are restricted to only a small set of
corporate standard software...

My home machine, OTOH, is equipped with a 400GB drive internally,
has a 160GB Maxtor FireWire drive attached, and when doing video
editing, I hooked up the 300GB FireWire drive originally purchased for
my laptop. Yes -- that comes to only 140GB shy of a terabyte of storage.

I have 28GB of OS and application software ALONE (there is no data
stored on my C: partition).

For those who work mostly with textual tools and data
and don't use M$ bloatware, megabytes of disk space is
quite enough. For these people, the smallest drives
available today are tremendous overkill. My OS in its
entirety currently fits in a 20 megabyte partition.

[Dave Mayall]

<[email protected]> wrote in message
news:000401c63705$8a655a20$cb988843@y9w6c2...

Hello group yesterday I aske this question , WHICH was worded wrong !!
Here it is in a different form , Is 1.3 GB the sames as 1333MB ? ,
Phil
or 1.4 gig is 1400Mb ?

No,

1.3 GB = 1331.2 MB
1.4 GB = 1433.6 MB

[Gjest]

Hello group yesterday I aske this question , WHICH was worded wrong !!
Here it is in a different form , Is 1.3 GB the sames as 1333MB ? ,
Phil
or 1.4 gig is 1400Mb ?
----- Original Message -----
From: <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, February 20, 2006 12:33 PM
Subject: What is a gigabyte

Please tell me this ; what is a gig ? OR is it 1000 kb ? , in
otherwords
IS 1.2 gig the sames as 1200kb , or something else ? , like 100,000kb ,
I need to know so I get the correct processor for my pc , Phil

[Denis Beauregard]

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 08:12:48 PST, [email protected] (Everett
M. Greene) wrote in soc.genealogy.computing:

For those who work mostly with textual tools and data
and don't use M$ bloatware, megabytes of disk space is
quite enough. For these people, the smallest drives
available today are tremendous overkill. My OS in its
entirety currently fits in a 20 megabyte partition.

But how many genealogy softwares are supported by your amiga ?


Denis

[Denis Beauregard]

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 17:25:02 +0000 (UTC), [email protected] wrote
in soc.genealogy.computing:

Hello Dave , Your message is a ' breath of fresh air ' , consise and to
the point , You are the only person that really read my message , I AM
TALKING ABOUT The processor , , I need to purchase a faster one for my PC ,

Why didn't you write that at first ?

the ONLY Place I can get it is E-Bay , I see them listed as 1.3 Gig and OR
1333MB . Are these the exact same unit or not ??? , I believe they are ,
the different terms being nothing but a Marketing Ploy ,

No one with some technical knowledge will list a computer faster than
a 1 GHz with MB. So, if it says 1333 MB, you can presume it is the
hard disk size and it is very small for genealogy.


Denis

[Gjest]

Hello Dave , Your message is a ' breath of fresh air ' , consise and to
the point , You are the only person that really read my message , I AM
TALKING ABOUT The processor , , I need to purchase a faster one for my PC ,
the ONLY Place I can get it is E-Bay , I see them listed as 1.3 Gig and OR
1333MB . Are these the exact same unit or not ??? , I believe they are ,
the different terms being nothing but a Marketing Ploy ,
Please and Thanks , Phil
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Mayall" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2006 6:03 AM
Subject: Re: What is a gigabyte

[email protected]> wrote in message
news:01c801c6365d$190d5380$56898843@y9w6c2...
Please tell me this ; what is a gig ? OR is it 1000 kb ? , in
otherwords
IS 1.2 gig the sames as 1200kb , or something else ? , like 100,000kb ,
I need to know so I get the correct processor for my pc , Phil

OK, after dozens of posts looking at the difference between 1000 and 1024
multipliers in determining the number of bytes, we should probably return
to
the question!

It appears that you are actually talking about the *PROCESSOR*, rather
than
memory/disk.

Whilst you will see "gig" used when talking about both things (because
that's what techies do), it is actually being used as a contraction of two
different terms;

1) Gigabyte (2^30 bytes) - a measure of the amount of disk/memory storage
2) Gigahertz (10^9 clock pulses per second) - a measure of processor speed

Each instruction passed to a CPU takes a certain number of clock cycles to
run (typically 1-6 cycles, depending on the instruction), so a 2GHz
processor (of the same model) will run programs twice as fast as a 1GHz
processor.

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 14:03:44 -0000, "Dave Mayall"
<[email protected]> declaimed the following in
soc.genealogy.computing:

Each instruction passed to a CPU takes a certain number of clock cycles to
run (typically 1-6 cycles, depending on the instruction), so a 2GHz
processor (of the same model) will run programs twice as fast as a 1GHz
processor.

Only if the entire program and data can fit within the processor

cache.

Doesn't do much good to have a really fast CPU if every other memory
reference has to flush the cache and load from slow RAM (what is current
top-end -- an 800MHz front-side bus with double-data-rate access?). A
program that is comparing the first byte from each Megabyte of memory is
going to be limited to the memory access speed, even if the code itself
is totally within the fast cache...
--

==============================================================
[email protected] | Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber KD6MOG
[email protected] | Bestiaria Support Staff
==============================================================
Home Page: <http://www.dm.net/~wulfraed/
Overflow Page: <http://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 08:36:28 -0000, [email protected] (Mark Brader) declaimed
the following in soc.genealogy.computing:

Just a way of referring to the "small" billion (1,000,000,000) as opposed
to the "large" billion of 1,000,000,000,000.

US UK
thousand thousand
million million
billion thousand million (as I recall)
trillion billion
--

==============================================================
[email protected] | Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber KD6MOG
[email protected] | Bestiaria Support Staff
==============================================================
Home Page: <http://www.dm.net/~wulfraed/
Overflow Page: <http://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/

[T.M. Sommers]

Peter Duncanson wrote:

The PC I'm using at the moment has two disks each with a nominal
capacity of 80GB. According to MS Windows the actual capacities are:

81,936,580,608 bytes 76.3GB
80,004,153,344 bytes 74.5GB

Some disk space is lost to file system overhead.

--
Thomas M. Sommers -- [email protected] -- AB2SB

[Peter Duncanson]

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 13:39:27 -0500, "T.M. Sommers" <[email protected]> wrote:

Peter Duncanson wrote:

The PC I'm using at the moment has two disks each with a nominal
capacity of 80GB. According to MS Windows the actual capacities are:

81,936,580,608 bytes 76.3GB
80,004,153,344 bytes 74.5GB

Some disk space is lost to file system overhead.

That is true. However, the two disks were advertised and sold as 80GB
disks. The two capacities quoted in bytes are approx 80GB where Giga =
1,000,000,000,000. The values given as 76.3 and 74.5 are representations
of those numbers of bytes using giga = 1,073,741,824.
--
Peter Duncanson
UK (posting from a.u.e)

[Donna Richoux]

Peter Duncanson <[email protected]> wrote:

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 13:39:27 -0500, "T.M. Sommers" <[email protected]> wrote:

Peter Duncanson wrote:

The PC I'm using at the moment has two disks each with a nominal
capacity of 80GB. According to MS Windows the actual capacities are:

81,936,580,608 bytes 76.3GB
80,004,153,344 bytes 74.5GB

Some disk space is lost to file system overhead.

That is true. However, the two disks were advertised and sold as 80GB
disks. The two capacities quoted in bytes are approx 80GB where Giga =
1,000,000,000,000. The values given as 76.3 and 74.5 are representations
of those numbers of bytes using giga = 1,073,741,824.

Peter, I'm sure you didn't mean to confuse matters further by typing
three extra zeroes.

--
Trillions, schmillions -- Donna Richoux

[Mike Lyle]

Graham P Davis wrote:
[...]

That's because the idiots in the EU decided that, for monetary
purposes, they would adopt the US billion. That means that a million
widgets, costing a pound apiece, cost a million pounds, whilst a
billion widgets cost a trillion pounds.

Perhaps the US and EU monetary billions should be renamed
mini-billions?

I bet it's really nice and peaceful in your hermitage. Any chance I
could crash there some time when you're away for the weekend? I'd make a
donation, of course: I know even anchorites have to balance the books
these days.

--
Mike.

[Steve W. Jackson]

In article <[email protected]>,
Denis Beauregard <[email protected]> wrote:

Le Mon, 20 Feb 2006 17:22:13 -0600, "Steve W. Jackson"
[email protected]> écrivait dans soc.genealogy.computing:

A unit of computer memory or data storage capacity equal to
1,024 megabytes (230 bytes).
One billion bytes. (U.S. Billion - 1,000 million)

What? What's the "230 bytes" about? What's a "U.S." anything got to do
with this?

No idea for the 230, but keep in mind that in French, we have:

1 million = 1,000,000
1 milliard = 1,000,000,000
1 billion = 1,000,000,000,000

while in English:

1 million = 1,000,000
1 billion = 1,000,000,000

No idea for other languages, but perhaps someone who knew that the
billion can be defined differently depending on the language.


Denis

A good day is one in which I learn something new. I had no idea that
the French used billion any differently than I already knew. Thanks for
enlightening me.

= Steve =
--
Steve W. Jackson
Montgomery, Alabama

[Steve W. Jackson]

In article <[email protected]>,
"T.M. Sommers" <[email protected]> wrote:

Peter Duncanson wrote:

The PC I'm using at the moment has two disks each with a nominal
capacity of 80GB. According to MS Windows the actual capacities are:

81,936,580,608 bytes 76.3GB
80,004,153,344 bytes 74.5GB

Some disk space is lost to file system overhead.

Not so. It's simply that the gigabyte to which packaging refers is
indeed 1,000,000,000 bytes rather than what we computer geeks (and our
computers) use, which is based on the earlier cited premise that 1,024
bytes is one KB, and on upward.
--
Steve W. Jackson
Montgomery, Alabama

[Steve W. Jackson]

In article <[email protected]>,
the Omrud <[email protected]> wrote:

Steve Hayes <[email protected]> had it:

Dunno about French, but in English "billon" has been "skunked" and just
means
"a lot" (or in American English, "alot").

That's not my experience. Billion is a term used in large company
finances and has an exact meaning.

Also in US Government finances and meaning "more than we have".
--
Steve W. Jackson
Montgomery, Alabama

[Steve W. Jackson]

In article <[email protected]>,
Steve Hayes <[email protected]> wrote:

[ snip ]

Not that I have any idea what "phones" have to do with anything...

Just an illustration of the difference between counting in powers of 10 and
counting in powers of 2 (which is what is normally used in the world of
digital computers).

Since I've been a professional software developer for 25 years, I'm
pretty familiar with "digital computers" -- but I still have no idea
what the term "phones" means. Perhaps you could enlighten me.

There's another "unless" involved here, too. The 1024-based values
above are technically correct. But there's a second value that I
usually call a "marketing gigabyte". A marketing gigabyte is 1 billion
bytes. Go shopping for a 100GB drive and it is 100 billion bytes.

And no doubt they sell their snake oil in US rather than imperial gallons.;

A gallon of snake oil is still snake oil, regardless of whose unit of
measure is involved.

= Steve =
--
Steve W. Jackson
Montgomery, Alabama

[Spehro Pefhany]

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 17:20:33 -0600, the renowned "Steve W. Jackson"
<[email protected]> wrote:

In article <[email protected]>,
"T.M. Sommers" <[email protected]> wrote:

Peter Duncanson wrote:

The PC I'm using at the moment has two disks each with a nominal
capacity of 80GB. According to MS Windows the actual capacities are:

81,936,580,608 bytes 76.3GB
80,004,153,344 bytes 74.5GB

Some disk space is lost to file system overhead.

Not so. It's simply that the gigabyte to which packaging refers is
indeed 1,000,000,000 bytes rather than what we computer geeks (and our
computers) use, which is based on the earlier cited premise that 1,024
bytes is one KB, and on upward.

You can calculate the second number from the first simply by dividing
by 2^30 (and rounding to a single decimal place).

81,936,580,608/2^30 = 76.309387207031250
80,004,153,344/2^30 = 74.509674072265625

ObAUE: Dimensional analysis is left as an exercise. In the olden days
they sometimes advertised the unformatted capacity of storage media.


Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
--
"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
[email protected] Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com

[John O'Flaherty]

Donna Richoux wrote:

Peter Duncanson <[email protected]> wrote:

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 13:39:27 -0500, "T.M. Sommers" <[email protected]> wrote:

Peter Duncanson wrote:

The PC I'm using at the moment has two disks each with a nominal
capacity of 80GB. According to MS Windows the actual capacities are:

81,936,580,608 bytes 76.3GB
80,004,153,344 bytes 74.5GB

Some disk space is lost to file system overhead.

That is true. However, the two disks were advertised and sold as 80GB
disks. The two capacities quoted in bytes are approx 80GB where Giga =
1,000,000,000,000. The values given as 76.3 and 74.5 are representations
of those numbers of bytes using giga = 1,073,741,824.

Peter, I'm sure you didn't mean to confuse matters further by typing
three extra zeroes.

--
Trillions, schmillions -- Donna Richoux

He's just trying to terafy everyone.
--
john

[Robert Bannister]

the Omrud wrote:

Stephen Calder <[email protected]> had it:


the Omrud wrote:


Steve Hayes <[email protected]> had it:


Dunno about French, but in English "billon" has been "skunked" and just means
"a lot" (or in American English, "alot").

That's not my experience. Billion is a term used in large company
finances and has an exact meaning.

But, and although this is changing, a billion in the UK means 1000 times
a US billion.


I think that news must travel slowly to the Antipodes. I reckon this
difference was lost 30 years ago. I have not met the UK Billion
since I was at school.

It also changed in Australia - officially - some time in the 70s; in

fact, a couple of years after the official change in the UK. However,
older people (like me) get confused, and whilst young people seem to
know the "new" meaning, the generation in between is even more muddled.

Summary: "billion" means "a lot" and "trillion" is rarely used in either
Australian or English publications except when quoting Americans.

Personally, I would have liked to see "milliard" adopted, but that is
extremely unlikely, so I wish newspapers would use the 10 + superscript
style.

--
Rob Bannister

[Peter Duncanson]

On 21 Feb 2006 15:47:43 -0800, "John O'Flaherty" <[email protected]>
wrote:

Donna Richoux wrote:
Peter Duncanson <[email protected]> wrote:

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 13:39:27 -0500, "T.M. Sommers" <[email protected]> wrote:

Peter Duncanson wrote:

The PC I'm using at the moment has two disks each with a nominal
capacity of 80GB. According to MS Windows the actual capacities are:

81,936,580,608 bytes 76.3GB
80,004,153,344 bytes 74.5GB

Some disk space is lost to file system overhead.

That is true. However, the two disks were advertised and sold as 80GB
disks. The two capacities quoted in bytes are approx 80GB where Giga =
1,000,000,000,000. The values given as 76.3 and 74.5 are representations
of those numbers of bytes using giga = 1,073,741,824.

Peter, I'm sure you didn't mean to confuse matters further by typing
three extra zeroes.

Quite right. That's three zeroes and one comma to be put back into the

box for reuse.

--
Trillions, schmillions -- Donna Richoux

He's just trying to terafy everyone.

Including myself.
--
Peter Duncanson
UK (posting from a.u.e)

[Evan Kirshenbaum]

Stephen Calder <[email protected]> writes:

the Omrud wrote:

Steve Hayes <[email protected]> had it:
Dunno about French, but in English "billon" has been "skunked" and
just means "a lot" (or in American English, "alot").
That's not my experience. Billion is a term used in large company
finances and has an exact meaning.

But, and although this is changing, a billion in the UK means 1000
times a US billion.

The last time I looked, I believe that I was unable to find any uses
of "billion" in British news sources with any meaning other than a
thousand million.

--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |Bullwinkle: You sure that's the
1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 | only way?
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |Rocky: Well, if you're going to be
| a hero, you've got to do
[email protected] | stupid things every once in
(650)857-7572 | a while.

http://www.kirshenbaum.net/

[Steve Hayes]

On Wed, 22 Feb 2006 08:25:32 +0800, Robert Bannister <[email protected]> wrote:

Personally, I would have liked to see "milliard" adopted, but that is
extremely unlikely, so I wish newspapers would use the 10 + superscript
style.

Here in South Africa "milliard" *was* officially adopted in the 1970s for
10^9, and we were all told that we *must* use it, and there was a great deal
of publicity to that effect from the metrication board. Newspapers were not
allowed to use the old terms in advertising land -- acres and morgen were out,
hectares were in.

But at some point English newspapers began using "billion" for "milliard",
while Afrikaans newspapers did not, so there doesn't seem to have been
anything "official" about it. Certainly the changw was not announced with
great fan fare, as the instruction to use "milliard" was. Oc course the
Afrikaans newspapers were always more politically correct, and tended to be
early adopters of official lines, while English newspapers changed their house
syles at whim -- they decided to switch from -ize to -ise zt different times,
mostly in the 1980s.

But that is why I regard "billion" is skunked. It was *officially* announced
in the 1970s that it meant 10^12, and there was an official announcement
substituting it for "milliard" I missed it. So when I see it in print, I'm
never sure what it means.

I have a copy of a family letter from a relation who married a German,
describing the hyperinflation in Germany in the 1920s, "Millions are a thing
of the past, and milliards will be the same soon. One only reckons in
billions".

--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/stevesig.htm
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

[Steve Hayes]

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 17:24:56 -0600, "Steve W. Jackson"
<[email protected]> wrote:

In article <[email protected]>,
Steve Hayes <[email protected]> wrote:

[ snip ]

Not that I have any idea what "phones" have to do with anything...

Just an illustration of the difference between counting in powers of 10 and
counting in powers of 2 (which is what is normally used in the world of
digital computers).

Since I've been a professional software developer for 25 years, I'm
pretty familiar with "digital computers" -- but I still have no idea
what the term "phones" means. Perhaps you could enlighten me.

It's a joke. *J*O*K*E*

joke. n. 1. a humorous anecdiote.


--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/stevesig.htm
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

[Leif B. Kristensen]

Joe User skrev:

Use of gibi, mibi and kibi will not become common until about 50% of
the currently-working computer engineers retire.

Or when the Americans convert to the metric system and besides stop to
write the months and days in reverse order.
--
Leif Biberg Kristensen
http://solumslekt.org/

[Richard Maurer]

Evan Kirshenbaum wrote:
The last time I looked, I believe that I was unable
to find any uses of "billion" in British news sources
with any meaning other than a thousand million.


Did the old style UK billion ever appear in a British news
article -- one not fantasizing about the cost of future wars.

-- ---------------------------------------------
Richard Maurer To reply, remove half
Sunnyvale, California of a homonym of a synonym for also.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 17:25:02 +0000 (UTC), [email protected] declaimed
the following in soc.genealogy.computing:

Hello Dave , Your message is a ' breath of fresh air ' , consise and to
the point , You are the only person that really read my message , I AM
TALKING ABOUT The processor , , I need to purchase a faster one for my PC ,
the ONLY Place I can get it is E-Bay , I see them listed as 1.3 Gig and OR
1333MB . Are these the exact same unit or not ??? , I believe they are ,
the different terms being nothing but a Marketing Ploy ,

The problem though, is that "Gig" is just short for "Giga" and tells
us nothing about what unit is being measured. On the other hand, MB is
MegaByte, and is a measure of storage (disk or memory); Neither tell us
you are interested in CPU SPEED. You could have been referring to
motherboard RAM limits.

As for needing a faster processor? What type of processing do you
do, and how much (and what type) of memory do you have.

Putting in a 3GHz processor on a motherboard with only 256MB of RAM,
and expecting to do PhotoShop work on high-end digital camera images
will be futile. Your lack of memory would result in lots of page
faulting and swapping of data out to disk (which is slower than memory).

Genealogy programs are I/O heavy -- Moving from one person to
another typically requires writing the person to disk, and then finding
the next person to read. Depending on the underlying database, this
could require writing and reading from 10 or more files (TMG's VFP has
an index file, a fixed width table file, and a variable width text
file... just for individual names! It uses something like 22 SETS of
files for the full data system) Having very fast disks, with lots of
very fast RAM that the OS can do buffering through, is more important
than having a top end CPU.
--

==============================================================
[email protected] | Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber KD6MOG
[email protected] | Bestiaria Support Staff
==============================================================
Home Page: <http://www.dm.net/~wulfraed/
Overflow Page: <http://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/

[Graham P Davis]

Charlie Hoffpauir wrote:

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 13:04:29 +0000, Graham P Davis
[email protected]> wrote:

the Omrud wrote:

Steve Hayes <[email protected]> had it:

Dunno about French, but in English "billon" has been "skunked" and just
means "a lot" (or in American English, "alot").

That's not my experience. Billion is a term used in large company
finances and has an exact meaning.


That's because the idiots in the EU decided that, for monetary purposes,
they would adopt the US billion. That means that a million widgets,
costing a pound apiece, cost a million pounds, whilst a billion widgets
cost a trillion pounds.

Perhaps the US and EU monetary billions should be renamed mini-billions?

Graham

No, thats the result of simply counting "wrong". A billion widgets
should be 1 x 10^9, not 1 x 10^12.
Charlie Hoffpauir
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~charlieh/

In the US a billion widgets might be 10^9 but elsewhere it is (or more
likely "was" unfortunately) 10^12. Think of the name "billion". It's
obvious that "two" is involved somewhere. The answer is that a billion is a
million raised to the power of two. Similarly a quadrillion is a million
raised to the power 4. Simple isn't it?

Graham

[Graham P Davis]

Mike Lyle wrote:

Graham P Davis wrote:
[...]
That's because the idiots in the EU decided that, for monetary
purposes, they would adopt the US billion. That means that a million
widgets, costing a pound apiece, cost a million pounds, whilst a
billion widgets cost a trillion pounds.

Perhaps the US and EU monetary billions should be renamed
mini-billions?

I bet it's really nice and peaceful in your hermitage. Any chance I
could crash there some time when you're away for the weekend? I'd make a
donation, of course: I know even anchorites have to balance the books
these days.

I'm afraid the war for the real billion may be lost but that's no reason for
me not to enjoy a few little skirmishes now and again.

Graham

[Don Aitken]

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 17:50:01 -0800, Evan Kirshenbaum
<[email protected]> wrote:

Stephen Calder <[email protected]> writes:

the Omrud wrote:

Steve Hayes <[email protected]> had it:
Dunno about French, but in English "billon" has been "skunked" and
just means "a lot" (or in American English, "alot").
That's not my experience. Billion is a term used in large company
finances and has an exact meaning.

But, and although this is changing, a billion in the UK means 1000
times a US billion.

The last time I looked, I believe that I was unable to find any uses
of "billion" in British news sources with any meaning other than a
thousand million.

Might you have been responding to the challenge I issued asking for
any use of "billion" meaning 10^12 in any UK printed source of the
last fifty years? I don't think anybody found one. Maybe I should make
it 75 years.

In any case, it is clear that the statement, still frequently found in
non-British sources, that that is what "billion" means in BrE is
simply wrong. It is just possible that some (though not many, and not
including any mainstream publishers) may still be avoiding it because
they fear others might think it ambiguous

--
Don Aitken
Mail to the From: address is not read.
To email me, substitute "clara.co.uk" for "freeuk.com"

[Everett M. Greene]

Denis Beauregard <[email protected]> writes:

[email protected] (Everett M. Greene) wrote:

For those who work mostly with textual tools and data
and don't use M$ bloatware, megabytes of disk space is
quite enough. For these people, the smallest drives
available today are tremendous overkill. My OS in its
entirety currently fits in a 20 megabyte partition.

But how many genealogy softwares are supported by your amiga ?

3 or 4 the last time I looked. Why do you ask?

[Denis Beauregard]

Le Wed, 22 Feb 2006 08:29:36 PST, [email protected] (Everett
M. Greene) écrivait dans soc.genealogy.computing:

Denis Beauregard <[email protected]> writes:
[email protected] (Everett M. Greene) wrote:

For those who work mostly with textual tools and data
and don't use M$ bloatware, megabytes of disk space is
quite enough. For these people, the smallest drives
available today are tremendous overkill. My OS in its
entirety currently fits in a 20 megabyte partition.

But how many genealogy softwares are supported by your amiga ?

3 or 4 the last time I looked. Why do you ask?

Just kidding

By the way, there is a lot of Linux softwares, but when you try
to find them, you find mostly vaporware. I would have liked to try
LAF (Linux Ancestral File) but it seems to be a future project.



Denis

[Dave Hinz]

On Wed, 22 Feb 2006 12:00:33 -0500, Denis Beauregard <[email protected]> wrote:

By the way, there is a lot of Linux softwares, but when you try
to find them, you find mostly vaporware. I would have liked to try
LAF (Linux Ancestral File) but it seems to be a future project.

For instance? What exactly do you consider "vaporware" in this context?
Can you give some specific examples?

[T.M. Sommers]

Graham P Davis wrote:

In the US a billion widgets might be 10^9 but elsewhere it is (or more
likely "was" unfortunately) 10^12. Think of the name "billion". It's
obvious that "two" is involved somewhere. The answer is that a billion is a
million raised to the power of two. Similarly a quadrillion is a million
raised to the power 4. Simple isn't it?

A million is 1000**1 * 1000.
A billion is 1000**2 * 1000.
A trillion is 1000**3 * 1000.
A quadrillion is 1000**4 * 1000.
And so on. Simple, isn't it? And it doesn't leave huge gaps in
the names, as your scheme does.

--
Thomas M. Sommers -- [email protected] -- AB2SB

[Denis Beauregard]

On 22 Feb 2006 17:03:21 GMT, Dave Hinz <[email protected]> wrote in
soc.genealogy.computing:

On Wed, 22 Feb 2006 12:00:33 -0500, Denis Beauregard <[email protected]> wrote:

By the way, there is a lot of Linux softwares, but when you try
to find them, you find mostly vaporware. I would have liked to try
LAF (Linux Ancestral File) but it seems to be a future project.

For instance? What exactly do you consider "vaporware" in this context?
Can you give some specific examples?

No, sorry.

Someone posted, maybe last year, a very long list of Linux genealogy
softwares in the news:soc.culture.quebec newsgroup. He was not a
genealogist, but a Linux addict challenging the Windows addict who
told him there were almost no Linux genealogy software (the other was
neither a genealogist). Unfortunately, I can't find that message
(which was in French but nearly all softwares were in English).

I remember the list was very long but when I installed Linux on my
portable computer (I am posting from my desktop computer), I tried
to locate them on sourceforce or in the Debian gpackage command
(the package installer). All I find were, as I remind it, geneweb
and lifelines. I remember I saw an entry for LAF for example, but
could not find it (and I would consider this as vaporware).

When the guy posted the list, I was not yet using Linux so I didn't
pay attention to the message even if I read it.


Denis

[Joe User]

On Wed, 22 Feb 2006 13:15:26 -0500, Denis Beauregard wrote:

Someone posted, maybe last year, a very long list of Linux genealogy
softwares in the news:soc.culture.quebec newsgroup. He was not a
genealogist, but a Linux addict challenging the Windows addict who told
him there were almost no Linux genealogy software (the other was neither a
genealogist). Unfortunately, I can't find that message (which was in
French but nearly all softwares were in English).

I remember the list was very long but when I installed Linux on my
portable computer (I am posting from my desktop computer), I tried to
locate them on sourceforce or in the Debian gpackage command (the package
installer). All I find were, as I remind it, geneweb and lifelines. I
remember I saw an entry for LAF for example, but could not find it (and I
would consider this as vaporware).

The only full package for Linux I found was Gramps. It works fine, and is
what I use. There are other utilities for genealogy usable on Linux.
Search freshmeat.net. Anything written in Java will works on all
platforms, pretty much.

With the WINE program (windows application layer), I imagine that you
could install most Windows genealogy software on Linux. I haven't tried
any, since I use Gramps, but most Windows applications are usable on
Linux, now. I installed Microsoft Office 98 and the Progeny SSDI disk on
Linux, and they were meant for Windows. Wine is not perfect, but it works
OK.

--
Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place.

-- Billy Crystal

[Steve W. Jackson]

In article <[email protected]>,
"Leif B. Kristensen" <[email protected]> wrote:

Joe User skrev:

Use of gibi, mibi and kibi will not become common until about 50% of
the currently-working computer engineers retire.

Or when the Americans convert to the metric system and besides stop to
write the months and days in reverse order.

My, that's a rather large paintbrush you're using on all of us
(Americans) at once...

I remember being told in school that we were going to switch to the
metric system back in the mid-1970s. I must have blinked and missed it.
I still wonder why we never did.

But it's only American *civilians* who insist on putting the dates out
of order. Those of us with military backgrounds don't use slashes in
our dates at all and always put the day before the month.

= Steve =
--
Steve W. Jackson
Montgomery, Alabama

[Bob Martin]

in 82895 20060223 001518 "Steve W. Jackson" <[email protected]> wrote:

My, that's a rather large paintbrush you're using on all of us
(Americans) at once...

I remember being told in school that we were going to switch to the
metric system back in the mid-1970s. I must have blinked and missed it.
I still wonder why we never did.

We in the UK are officially a metric nation (traders fined for selling in pounds etc)
but when the metrication board recently recommended changing road signs
(still showing distances in miles) the government replied that it had no plans
to change because of "the cost to the taxpayer". Belly laughs all round.

[Everett M. Greene]

"Steve W. Jackson" <[email protected]> writes:

"Leif B. Kristensen" <[email protected]> wrote:
Joe User skrev:

Use of gibi, mibi and kibi will not become common until about 50% of
the currently-working computer engineers retire.

Or when the Americans convert to the metric system and besides stop to
write the months and days in reverse order.

My, that's a rather large paintbrush you're using on all of us
(Americans) at once...

I remember being told in school that we were going to switch to the
metric system back in the mid-1970s. I must have blinked and missed it.
I still wonder why we never did.

Officially and legally, the U.S. has been on the metric
standard since 1800-something. Why it hasn't been adopted
for everyday use is a mystery.

[Don Kirkman]

It seems to me I heard somewhere that Steve W. Jackson wrote in article
<[email protected]>:

In article <[email protected]>,
"Leif B. Kristensen" <[email protected]> wrote:

Or when the Americans convert to the metric system and besides stop to
write the months and days in reverse order.

My, that's a rather large paintbrush you're using on all of us
(Americans) at once...

.. . .

But it's only American *civilians* who insist on putting the dates out
of order. Those of us with military backgrounds don't use slashes in
our dates at all and always put the day before the month.

I assume you mean the format with numeral days, text months, and numeral
years, as inthe 28 Jan 53 on my separation papers. But I wonder if Leif
is commenting on the slashed format?
--
Don
A KIRKMAN Tree: home.covad.net/~donkirk/gen/index.html
Updated March 1, 2003 - added a number of individuals and sources

[Dave Mayall]

<[email protected]> wrote in message
news:011301c6370c$473c30a0$cb988843@y9w6c2...

Hello Dave , Your message is a ' breath of fresh air ' , consise and to
the point , You are the only person that really read my message , I AM
TALKING ABOUT The processor , , I need to purchase a faster one for my PC
,
the ONLY Place I can get it is E-Bay , I see them listed as 1.3 Gig and
OR
1333MB . Are these the exact same unit or not ??? , I believe they are ,
the different terms being nothing but a Marketing Ploy ,

Well, if they describe a processor as 1333MB, they are using the wrong
units. If they describe it as 1333MHz, then it is exactly the same as
1.333GHz/Gig

[Dave Mayall]

"Dennis Lee Bieber" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 14:03:44 -0000, "Dave Mayall"
[email protected]> declaimed the following in
soc.genealogy.computing:

Each instruction passed to a CPU takes a certain number of clock cycles
to
run (typically 1-6 cycles, depending on the instruction), so a 2GHz
processor (of the same model) will run programs twice as fast as a 1GHz
processor.

Only if the entire program and data can fit within the processor
cache.

Indeed there are limits, but I'm trying to keep it simple.

I can talk about predictive fetch and stuff, but it's too involved for the
question!

[Steve W. Jackson]

In article <[email protected]>,
Don Kirkman <[email protected]> wrote:

It seems to me I heard somewhere that Steve W. Jackson wrote in article
[email protected]>:

In article <[email protected]>,
"Leif B. Kristensen" <[email protected]> wrote:

Or when the Americans convert to the metric system and besides stop to
write the months and days in reverse order.

My, that's a rather large paintbrush you're using on all of us
(Americans) at once...

. . .

But it's only American *civilians* who insist on putting the dates out
of order. Those of us with military backgrounds don't use slashes in
our dates at all and always put the day before the month.

I assume you mean the format with numeral days, text months, and numeral
years, as inthe 28 Jan 53 on my separation papers. But I wonder if Leif
is commenting on the slashed format?

I felt fairly certain that he was referring to the way that Europeans
(and probably others) use slashed dates, which is why I specifically
pointed out my military habit of dating things as you indicate. I've
always done it and won't likely break the habit any time soon. But
having spent some time in Europe while in service, I definitely stopped
making assumptions about the order of slashed dates.

= Steve =
--
Steve W. Jackson
Montgomery, Alabama

[Leif B. Kristensen]

Don Kirkman skrev:

I assume you mean the format with numeral days, text months, and
numeral years, as inthe 28 Jan 53 on my separation papers. But I
wonder if Leif is commenting on the slashed format?

I just meant what I wrote. The American habit of writing dates as eg.
"June 7th 1865" is just weird. If by "slashed format" you're implying
someting like 6/7/1865 and assumes that to mean the same date as the
former, that's even weirder. The rest of the world would probably
interpret it as 6th of July.
--
Leif Biberg Kristensen
http://solumslekt.org/

[Robert M. Riches Jr.]

On 2006-02-24, Leif B. Kristensen <[email protected]> wrote:

Don Kirkman skrev:

I assume you mean the format with numeral days, text months, and
numeral years, as inthe 28 Jan 53 on my separation papers. But I
wonder if Leif is commenting on the slashed format?

I just meant what I wrote. The American habit of writing dates as eg.
"June 7th 1865" is just weird. If by "slashed format" you're implying
someting like 6/7/1865 and assumes that to mean the same date as the
former, that's even weirder. The rest of the world would probably
interpret it as 6th of July.

Well, if you want get rid of all weirdness, you need to
write dates as year, then month, then day, similar to
"2006.02.24" for the year 2006, month of February, 24th day.
Only in that format are digits in strictly descending order
of significance. Oh, and make sure to include the leading
zero digits in the month and day fields.

--
Robert Riches
[email protected]
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)

[Steve Hayes]

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 20:52:59 +0100, "Leif B. Kristensen"
<[email protected]> wrote:

Don Kirkman skrev:

I assume you mean the format with numeral days, text months, and
numeral years, as inthe 28 Jan 53 on my separation papers. But I
wonder if Leif is commenting on the slashed format?

I just meant what I wrote. The American habit of writing dates as eg.
"June 7th 1865" is just weird. If by "slashed format" you're implying
someting like 6/7/1865 and assumes that to mean the same date as the
former, that's even weirder. The rest of the world would probably
interpret it as 6th of July.

It's not "American". Most newspapers in the English-speaking world use that
format on their mastheads, in spite of the efforts of metrication boards to
change it.

What's weird and peculiarly American and date-skunking is the habit of writing
the *numerical* date as 6/7/1865, when in most other places it would be
written 7/6/1865. That is a recipe for confusion, which is why the only
numerical date format I use is the metric one of 1865-06-07, which has the
advantage of being easier to sort in databases too.


--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/stevesig.htm
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

[Paul Blair]

Robert M. Riches Jr. wrote:

On 2006-02-24, Leif B. Kristensen <[email protected]> wrote:
Don Kirkman skrev:

I assume you mean the format with numeral days, text months, and
numeral years, as inthe 28 Jan 53 on my separation papers. But I
wonder if Leif is commenting on the slashed format?
I just meant what I wrote. The American habit of writing dates as eg.
"June 7th 1865" is just weird. If by "slashed format" you're implying
someting like 6/7/1865 and assumes that to mean the same date as the
former, that's even weirder. The rest of the world would probably
interpret it as 6th of July.

Well, if you want get rid of all weirdness, you need to
write dates as year, then month, then day, similar to
"2006.02.24" for the year 2006, month of February, 24th day.
Only in that format are digits in strictly descending order
of significance. Oh, and make sure to include the leading
zero digits in the month and day fields.

Have a look at the unthinking confusion on http://www.origamiproject.com/1/

Paul

[Everett M. Greene]

Steve Hayes <[email protected]> writes:

"Leif B. Kristensen"<[email protected]> wrote:
Don Kirkman skrev:

I assume you mean the format with numeral days, text months, and
numeral years, as inthe 28 Jan 53 on my separation papers. But I
wonder if Leif is commenting on the slashed format?

I just meant what I wrote. The American habit of writing dates as eg.
"June 7th 1865" is just weird. If by "slashed format" you're implying
someting like 6/7/1865 and assumes that to mean the same date as the
former, that's even weirder. The rest of the world would probably
interpret it as 6th of July.

It's not "American". Most newspapers in the English-speaking world use that
format on their mastheads, in spite of the efforts of metrication boards to
change it.

What's weird and peculiarly American and date-skunking is the habit of writing
the *numerical* date as 6/7/1865, when in most other places it would be
written 7/6/1865. That is a recipe for confusion, which is why the only
numerical date format I use is the metric one of 1865-06-07, which has the
advantage of being easier to sort in databases too.

Any all-numeric representation has the prospect of being
ambiguous. Today is 2/25/6 or 6/25/2 or 25/2/6 or...
Using the mnemonic form for the month removes much of
the ambiguity and writing the full year takes care of
the rest -- 2006 Feb 25.

My Rexx manual lists six different date formats one can
choose and I'm guessing that none of them is "sacred".

[Robert M. Riches Jr.]

On 2006-02-25, Paul Blair <[email protected]> wrote:

Robert M. Riches Jr. wrote:
On 2006-02-24, Leif B. Kristensen <[email protected]> wrote:
Don Kirkman skrev:

I assume you mean the format with numeral days, text months, and
numeral years, as inthe 28 Jan 53 on my separation papers. But I
wonder if Leif is commenting on the slashed format?
I just meant what I wrote. The American habit of writing dates as eg.
"June 7th 1865" is just weird. If by "slashed format" you're implying
someting like 6/7/1865 and assumes that to mean the same date as the
former, that's even weirder. The rest of the world would probably
interpret it as 6th of July.

Well, if you want get rid of all weirdness, you need to
write dates as year, then month, then day, similar to
"2006.02.24" for the year 2006, month of February, 24th day.
Only in that format are digits in strictly descending order
of significance. Oh, and make sure to include the leading
zero digits in the month and day fields.


Have a look at the unthinking confusion on http://www.origamiproject.com/1/

A 'whois' query on the domain told me a lot. The domain is
owned by Micro$~1. I can imagine there's a lot of
unthinking confusion at that site. However, mostly all I
saw was a black background and a white rectangle toward the
top. It appears the page needs the Macromedia Flash player,
and the EULA for that player would require me to admit
Macromedia into my home for an "audit" of my computers, and
I refuse to submit to that unreasonable clause.

--
Robert Riches
[email protected]
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)

[Peter Moylan]

Steve W. Jackson wrote:

In article <[email protected]>, "T.M. Sommers"
[email protected]> wrote:

Peter Duncanson wrote:
The PC I'm using at the moment has two disks each with a nominal
capacity of 80GB. According to MS Windows the actual capacities
are:

81,936,580,608 bytes 76.3GB 80,004,153,344 bytes 74.5GB
Some disk space is lost to file system overhead.

Not so. It's simply that the gigabyte to which packaging refers is
indeed 1,000,000,000 bytes rather than what we computer geeks (and
our computers) use, which is based on the earlier cited premise that
1,024 bytes is one KB, and on upward.

The confusion started long before disk sizes got up into the gigabyte
range. Everyone in the computing world understood that one megabyte
meant 1024*1024 bytes, and therefore a 20 megabyte hard disk ought to
hold 20971520 bytes. Except that in reality it held about 5% less than
this. Some people put this down to system overhead - which is what the
disk vendors wanted them to think - but a system overhead of nearly a
million bytes was a bit hard to swallow. And anyway, that 5% loss was
_before_ the system overhead.

It was out-and-out fraud, taking advantage of the ambiguous meaning of
"megabyte" and taking advantage of the fact that a lawyer's megabyte is
smaller than the size that common usage had established. Unfortunately
that fraud continues today, and is growing in magnitude as the disks get
bigger. The makers of memory chips still, as far as I know, stick to the
"common usage" meaning.

In an attempt to get around the confusion, the standards people have
introduced a new set of prefixes:
1 kilobyte = 1 kB = 1,000 bytes
1 kibibyte = 1 kiB = 1,024 bytes
1 megabyte = 1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes
1 mibibyte = 1 MiB = 1,048,576 bytes
and so on. This isn't working very well. Many people haven't even heard
of the new notation, and those who have often can't be bothered to use
it. In addition, everyone feels silly saying the new "kibi" and "mibi"
and "gibi" prefixes because of their rarity and because it's still hard
to remember what they are. In fact, I'm not entirely sure that I've
written these correctly, and I couldn't tell you the next one in the
series (teri? tibi?).

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org

Please note the changed e-mail and web addresses. The domain
eepjm.newcastle.edu.au no longer exists.
My e-mail addresses at newcastle.edu.au will probably remain "live"
for a while, but then they will disappear without warning.
The optusnet address still has about 5 months of life left.

[Gjest]

Hairy Lethal wrote:

Are you all wrong? A Megabyte can have several interpretations, consider:

1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes - Ok!

1 Megabyte = 1024 kilobytes. This can be interpreted as:
1,000,000 bytes
or 1,024,000 bytes (1000 x 1024 bytes)
or 1,048,576 bytes (1024 x 1024 bytes)

But you've already defined 1 kilobyte as 1024 bytes, so if you
define 1 Megabyte as 1024 kilobytes, then that automatically
defines 1 Megabyte as 1024 * 1024 bytes.

My house style is:

The single letter 'K' is a unit being 1024 bytes.
The single letter 'M' is a unit being 1024*1024 bytes.
The single letter 'G' is a unit being 1024*1024*1024 bytes.
32K is 32768 bytes. 2G is 2147483658 bytes.

The prefix 'k-' is a multiplier meaning 1,000*.
The prefix 'M-' is a multiplier meaning 1,000,000*.
The prefix 'G-' is a multiplier meaning 1,000,000,000*.
32km is 32,000 metres. 2GW is 2,000,000,000 Watts.

--
JGH

[Blue Hornet]

Steve Hayes wrote:

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 19:17:58 -0500, Denis Beauregard <[email protected]
wrote:

Le Mon, 20 Feb 2006 17:22:13 -0600, "Steve W. Jackson"
[email protected]> écrivait dans soc.genealogy.computing:

A unit of computer memory or data storage capacity equal to
1,024 megabytes (230 bytes).
One billion bytes. (U.S. Billion - 1,000 million)

About a dollar at your local CompUSA store. Unless you're looking for
flash memory, which is still pretty dear.

[Everett M. Greene]

Peter Moylan <[email protected]> writes:

It was out-and-out fraud, taking advantage of the ambiguous meaning of
"megabyte" and taking advantage of the fact that a lawyer's megabyte is
smaller than the size that common usage had established. Unfortunately
that fraud continues today, and is growing in magnitude as the disks get
bigger. The makers of memory chips still, as far as I know, stick to the
"common usage" meaning.

A bit over the top, aren't we? Since most uses of the
values are to one decimal place, it is irrelevant as
to whether a GiB or GB is meant. The 4GB hard drive
on one of my computers is actually about 4.5, but who
cares and it definitely doesn't make any difference
as to whether it's GB or GiB.

[Steve Hayes]

On Thu, 02 Mar 2006 21:20:12 +1100, Peter Moylan
<[email protected]> wrote:

The confusion started long before disk sizes got up into the gigabyte
range. Everyone in the computing world understood that one megabyte
meant 1024*1024 bytes, and therefore a 20 megabyte hard disk ought to
hold 20971520 bytes. Except that in reality it held about 5% less than
this. Some people put this down to system overhead - which is what the
disk vendors wanted them to think - but a system overhead of nearly a
million bytes was a bit hard to swallow. And anyway, that 5% loss was
_before_ the system overhead.

And some vendors used to sell stiffy disks as "2 Mb" -- "unformatted". How you
can measure an unformatted disk in megabytes escapes me.

It was out-and-out fraud, taking advantage of the ambiguous meaning of
"megabyte" and taking advantage of the fact that a lawyer's megabyte is
smaller than the size that common usage had established. Unfortunately
that fraud continues today, and is growing in magnitude as the disks get
bigger. The makers of memory chips still, as far as I know, stick to the
"common usage" meaning.

In an attempt to get around the confusion, the standards people have
introduced a new set of prefixes:
1 kilobyte = 1 kB = 1,000 bytes
1 kibibyte = 1 kiB = 1,024 bytes
1 megabyte = 1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes
1 mibibyte = 1 MiB = 1,048,576 bytes
and so on. This isn't working very well. Many people haven't even heard
of the new notation, and those who have often can't be bothered to use
it. In addition, everyone feels silly saying the new "kibi" and "mibi"
and "gibi" prefixes because of their rarity and because it's still hard
to remember what they are. In fact, I'm not entirely sure that I've
written these correctly, and I couldn't tell you the next one in the
series (teri? tibi?).

--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/stevesig.htm
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

[Evan Kirshenbaum]

"Blue Hornet" <[email protected]> writes:

A unit of computer memory or data storage capacity equal to
1,024 megabytes (230 bytes). One billion bytes. (U.S. Billion
- 1,000 million)

About a dollar at your local CompUSA store. Unless you're looking
for flash memory, which is still pretty dear.

$4.50 a DVD? You're getting robbed. Fry's is advertising them for
12¢. According to the same newspaper ads, a gig of disk is 33¢ (300
GB for $100). Secure digital: $35, USB drive: $40.00, compact flash
$45.00, RAM: $60 (2 GB for $120).

--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |It does me no injury for my neighbor
1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |to say there are twenty gods, or no
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |God.
| Thomas Jefferson
[email protected]
(650)857-7572

http://www.kirshenbaum.net/

[Robert M. Riches Jr.]

On 2006-03-02, Steve Hayes <[email protected]> wrote:

And some vendors used to sell stiffy disks as "2 Mb" -- "unformatted". How you
can measure an unformatted disk in megabytes escapes me.

It's easy, at least with a floppy. You take the bits per
degree and multiply by 360 degrees, or you take the bits per
second transfer rate at the head and multiply that by the
rotation time in seconds. Either of those methods gives you
the number of bits per track. Multiply that number by the
number of surfaces (2 with modern floppies) and the number
of tracks per surface. That give you the total number of
bits. Then, divide by 8 to get the number of bytes.

Those calculations give you the raw, unformatted capacity of
the disk. If it weren't for sector overhead, you could put
that much data on the disk. If you used one sector per
track, you could store _very_ close to that figure on the
disk. The floppies normally sold as 2MB unformatted and
1.44MB formatted to the IBM PeeCee standard can store
something around 1.7MB if formatted to the original
Macintosh standard or about 1.8 or 1.88MB if formatted to
the old Amiga standard, IIRC on the exact numbers.

By the way, "2 Mb" would be 2 mega_bits_ according to the
convention I'm familiar with. 2 megabytes would be "2 MB".

--
Robert Riches
[email protected]
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)

[Evan Kirshenbaum]

Dennis Lee Bieber <[email protected]> writes:

On Thu, 30 Mar 2006 20:24:03 -0500, Jeffrey Turner
[email protected]> declaimed the following in
soc.genealogy.computing:

Yeah, well, if you're gonna say something stupid it's always
best to shout it, eh? Chalk one up to me getting distracted by
the /x/ and not cogitating about what a parsec is.

I couldn't remember the exact number; so use the slashes to
represent /italics/...

An old Usenet/Email convention... smarter clients will
actually display text marked

*bold*
/italic/
_underlined_

in those modes

I think this was the original MIME "rich-text" format

Nope. It (long) predates richtext. Bill Janssen and I worked for a
while on a MIME format called Simplemail that tried to formalize a
number of the existing conventions back in '92 and '93:

http://www.kirshenbaum.net/evan/publica ... il-rfc.pdf

but it never went anywhere. Richtext is/was an HTML-like markup.

--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |I need to get a new colander. My
1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |old one has holes in it.
Palo Alto, CA 94304

[email protected]
(650)857-7572

http://www.kirshenbaum.net/

[Jukka Aho]

Evan Kirshenbaum wrote:

Bill Janssen and I worked for a while on a MIME format called
Simplemail that tried to formalize a number of the existing
conventions back in '92 and '93:

http://www.kirshenbaum.net/evan/publica ... il-rfc.pdf

but it never went anywhere.

Interesting. I've been wondering if anyone ever tried this, especially
as pertains to the machine-parsability. (The obvious practical problem
with that is the need to escape the formatting characters when they're
not being used for markup. Doubling them is, in my opinion, not all that
desirable, but the suggested backtick solution seems quite nice.)

A closely-related present-day phenomenon are the various styles of wiki
markup, which, too, try to make the formatting "noise" as unobtrusive as
possible, retaining the "source" plain-text-alike.

--
znark