why do computer scientists say 1KB=1024 bytes?!!

It exactly doesn't matter at all, since there is no such as a TOE. Since science is deader than Mercury. Since the only thing 'science" has done for the last 30 yeas is the quite trivial, trying to figure out how to glue Canadian tiles to South Pole weather stations that don't spontanously combust on Microslop's Stock Portfolia.

Correction. 279 gigabytes.

To make things easier to understand back in the day, the term megabyte and gigabyte were redefined by not those who use them but by those who sell the products to be in multiples of a thousand. In small drives that doesn't really matter but in the hundreds of gigs you get amounts of space dissapearing that is on the order of the average drive size not too long ago.

When specifying hard disk capacities, GB always means 10^9 bytes. A 300GB hard disk holds about 280 gibibytes. The filesystem does indeed add some overhead; 10 MiB of overhead for a 280 GiB partition is not unreasonable.

For RAM and ROM (including flash drives), GB means 2^30 bytes. Modem/network speeds are given in units of 10^n bits per second. A 1.44MB floppy actually holds exactly 1440 kibibytes, which is about 1.41 mebibytes or 1.47 million bytes.

Most software programs (including e.g. Windows Explorer) report all sizes in kiB, MiB and GiB.

-- Ben

Actually, the SI scaler is a lower case 'k'. The computerised scaler is an upper case 'K'. So the question should be why use the SI unit for temperature as a multiplication scaler? :-)

Do you mean 270GB available for the user? 30GB is a lot of space that has to be reserved for the OS....hmmm....10% I can't remember what the ratio is for housekeeping.

Try doing a directory of the hidden files and see how much they take up. Subtract from 300-270 and that may give you a very rough guesstimate w.r.t. how much space is needed to manage the disk geometry. My knowledge is based on olden days, so new thingies may have been created for bit managments.

/BAH

In my neck of the woods, it was octal.

One of the problems with numbers in the computing biz is that, if a figure has numbers below 8, you can't tell if it's octal or decimal. Somehow, in conversations, my guys did these conversions automatically and, it seemed, instantaneously.

We didn't have 2^9.96... addressing. We had octal which were dealt as integers.

If you really want a challenge, learn how computers count and do addition.

Start with an IBM 1620. It did decimal but with a table lookup. You can earn good money knowing this stuff.

/BAH

Comm counting is different.

/BAH

This convention [upper/lower case] is going to cause problems. People are very sloppy w.r.t. spelling and are not getting taught the importance of capitalization.

/BAH

This is a recent definition of a byte.

You are an idiot.

/BAH

This assumption is a design flaw. The architecture I worked with allowed the programmer to define the size of the byte.

We never did. I don't recall ever typing that word.

And what does a spell checker do with them?

/BAH

Sigh! We didn't. Once upon a time, there was no lower case. There are good reasons that SIXBIT is useful. This is one of them...mess prevention.

/BAH

Keep your F___ING ***TROLL*** pseudointellectual garbage off SED- damned good-for-nothing puke mental midget.

I remember the term. I think byte is simply a subdivision of a word, which can be any size.

greg

I didn't know hexidecimal was derived by IBM from sexadecimal!

greg

No it wasn't. It was 1 1/3 octets. :-)

You are completely nuts.

Have you considered donating your toe to science?

/BAH

Never used it. The first time I saw it was yakking in newsgroups with the bit gods.

A spellchecker would never be able to tell. You aren't thinking. Consider a spec that uses both words.

/BAH

Second of all, we didn't say KB; we used "word" not byte. Byte machines are new-fangled. [emoticon sticks tongue in cheek]

/BAH

The

going

simply

I believe you. We never used it. I can imagine the word was used later when the industry started using it.

Not to mention all those extra bits if a TTY is involved.

It can't barf if the user updated his dictionary. I was thinking of a science proposal that had SI term and then a procurement grocery list at the end.

/BAH