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

In sci.physics, snipped-for-privacy@aol.com

wrote on Wed, 07 Dec 05 15:54:51 GMT :

Heh.

And precisely what would scientists do with his toe? :-)

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#191, ewill3@earthlink.net -- insert random weird question here
It\'s still legal to go .sigless.

Calvin: "A bushel is a unit of weight equal to four pecks." What's a peck? Hobbes: A quick smooch. [beat] Calvin: You know, I don't understand math at all.

-- Ben

WE? Do you have a mouse in your pocket?

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?

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

Oops. :-( !

I get 300000000/1048576 = 286.102294921875, so either somebody's pitching, or it's that dreaded FS overhead. :-)

My first "big" drive was 40 MB - 40 "Mebibytes" (I really hate those new binary prefices), and it was 3" tall, and cost $400.00, which ca. 1986 was significant money.

Wait a minute. You said, "GIGABYTES". OK, sorry:

300000000000/1073741824 = 279.3967723846435546875

Yeah. I missed a decimal by three.

Never mind. :-)

Cheers! Rich

I solved that one. But there was a much more elaborate game called "dungeo" that I never solved.

It included a Hall of the Programmers (or something like that) with a teletype terminal, a mountain of printout and a pile of empty Coke bottles. Practically anything you did in that room led to instant death. Rumor had it that you had to write a (Lisp?) program to get out. I never did manage to survive that room.

- Randy

was

We still have one of those big harddrives, we don't use it but there is archival data so the drive has to stay.

It has nothing to do with marketing but with bookkeeping. The file information takes up space. This information tells where the file is, which directory, how big, all the date-time stamps that are needed to bookkeep the files, etc. We called this storage overhead. In our scheme, for each file, there were about 100 words (36bits/word) that were needed to just maintain the file system. There was another set of files maintained by the OS that managed the physical bits of each disk.

Note also that a directory is also a file from the point of view of the operating system. So, if you have 10,000 files on your disk at installation time, you have to multiply 10,000 by the number of bytes it takes to retain information about each file.

EVen for teensy little storage media, there had to be data for bookkeeping purposes.

For instance, in our scheme, each block had a bit reserved in a file. Thus, if there were 80,000 blocks on the disk, there was file that contained 80,000 bits. Whenever a block went "bad" (cosmic rays were always a convenient explanation), the operating system would mark the corresponding bit in this BADBLK.SYS file and the OS used this info to avoid trying to write good data over a block that couldn't be written.

This is another task that we called bookkeeping.

/BAH

Oh, you are young. The drives I used had 20,000 blocks (128words/block, 36 bits/word), were the size of a US clothes washer. I don't remember how much they cost--only very large institutions, like universities or big business or government, had the money to buy them. I'd guess $20K-$30K.

The medium I used to carry bits around had 576 blocks on it.

Before that system, my storage was cards. 80 characters/card. Do your math and figure out the capacity and horsepower of the vehicle you would need to carry the equivalent of what is needed to run your computer system. Just to make it all easy, use the figure of 10 GB.

/BAH

The

going

hmmm...It must be stored in something smaller than your toe.

/BAH

I was wrong. His computing power isn't stored in his toe.

/BAH

Good grief! You don't know the difference between the spelling of TOE and toe? This is exactly why having mneumonics of k and K in the computing biz would be a disaster.

/BAH

As with all GUIshit, you need to be able to run a maze of twisty little passages, all like; and the only tool you are allowed to use is the f****ng rat device, also known as The User Device From Hell. I'm looking forward to the day when computer scientists rediscover typing again. Isaac Asimov wrote a short story about this only the subject was arithmetic.

/BAH

Yup. We. The original computer gods are just starting to die.

/BAH

A lot of our nomenclature had multiple meanings depending on which manufacturer you were talking about. Every once in a while, I wonder at the discussions the ancients had to name science things. Ours could get very bloody.

/BAH

/BAH

It's a lot of limas to shuck.

I didn't learn of this definition until college. It hurt to have a hen peck you.

/BAH

This box is an AMD box. Specifically, AMD64 3200 Venice. Sorry to ruin your assumption :)

While I have a less-than-firm grasp on the whole clock speed debate, I know AMD is superior to intel through personal experience and relayed personal experience from others I trust. AMD's overclock nice too, the

3200 runs at 2ghz stock and is stable at 2.55 ghz. It doesn't even run that much hotter at load compared to when it is at 2ghz. SuperPi completes 1M digits about 10 seconds faster when it is overclocked, so it is a real performance gain.

Unlike a lot of people, I *do* care about what is inside of my box. On a related note, I will *NOT* use Maxtor drives nor will Intel - barring a serious shift towards quality - ever grace my systems again.

Whoa, flashback. And I never did find where that f****ng pirate hid all my treasure :-( (No, I don't want anybody to tell me now, thanks.)

"The feeling of power," if I recall correctly.

A lot of people are restoring old gear and software. There has been a remarkable increase in interest of [what I think of as] youngsters within the last two years.

/BAH