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

Speaking of *real* decimal gigabytes, what the heck does it mean for a digital camera to have "5 mexapixels (effective)", and why is "(effective)" in parentheses?

--
"Pain is temporary, quitting lasts forever" -- Lance Armstrong

You're complaining about marketing infiltration of hard drives when you're probably running an Intel processor? It doesn't seem widely known that clock speed doesn't tell the whole story. Also important are the number of ticks to execute an instruction, and the number of idle ticks because one unit is waiting for another to finish, or data just isn't getting through the plumbing fast enough. As I understand it, Intel has been to sacrifice potential performance in terms of, e.g. floating point operations per second, in order to get the clock speed up. Marketing determined not just the release time of the technology, but the development of it. Reference Uncle Al's rants on Intel versus AMD, or the Mac enthusiasts ranting about PowerPC.

--
"No one need be surprised that the subject of contagion was not clear to 
our ancestors."-- Heironymus Fracastorius, 1546

Ah, standards! If they could get away by shaving off less, the end user might feel cheated if his 2x4s aren't closer to 2" by 4". But who knows how many gadgets and engineering intuition is based on the standard planed size? Best keep the end user's dimension constant.

Pipes went through that. A 1/4" pipe used to have 1/4" inside diamater and 1/2" outside diameter. But metals improved so the walls could be made thinner, except there was a lot of existing hardware for it to fit into. So a modern 1/4" pipe has no dimension that is 1/4".

--
"\'No user-serviceable parts inside.\'  I\'ll be the judge of that!"

Speaking of spelling, s/mneumonics/mnemonics/

Cheers! Rich

Well, your first mistake is that a bushel isn't a unit of weight, it's a unit of volume.

Cheers! Rich

SI prefixes:

Y Z E P T G M k h da

---- multiply by 1 d c m mu n p f a z y

I wonder why they didn't make everything north of "1" capital and south of "1" lower.

--
"A few months in the laboratory will save a few hours in the library."

I was a little surprised to see... I think it was 12 MP (effective) claimed for Canon's new $3000 full-frame digital SLR. That's a serious price tag for serious photographers, and they're still pushing (effective) pixels.

--
"Outside the camp you shall have a place set aside to be used as a 
latrine.  You shall keep a trowel in your equipment and with it, when you 
go outside to ease nature, you shall first dig a hole and afterward cover 
up your excrement." -- Deuteronomy 23:13-14

It means the optics have perhaps 2 or 3 megapixels, but they interpolate in s/w on the camera, and pretend that they actually have more.

It's a fraud, in simple terms.

Phil

--
What is it: is man only a blunder of God, or God only a blunder of man?
-- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), The Twilight of the Gods

Yep.

Mati Meron | "When you argue with a fool, snipped-for-privacy@cars.uchicago.edu | chances are he is doing just the same"

Sometimes the fraud is smaller than others. They may have 2 green sensors to 1 blue one and 1 red one, and claim 2 pixels rather than one and a third. If they're outputting human-vision-modelled image files, then that's in some ways fair. However, I think that they should state their photodiode arrangement, and let the consumer judge from raw facts rather than processed ones.

Then again, the average consumer really doesn't give a toss what s/he's buying.

Phil

--
What is it: is man only a blunder of God, or God only a blunder of man?
-- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), The Twilight of the Gods

Ooh! Ooh! Do I get brownie points for being able to lay my hands on my notes in just minutes? I actually wrote this down at the keyboard maybe a decade after having first played.

Say, what did that other fellow mean about "getting a life"?

==============================================================================

That maze off the west end of Long Hall (the one with "all different" passages)

0=Entrance N E S W U D NE NW SE SW 1=TyLM 11 2 4 3 6 5 10 9 12 7 2=TgLM 12 1 7 9 6 3 11 5 4 6 3=TyML 6 11 1 12 5 2 9 7 10 4 4=TgML 7 3 6 5 11 12 2 10 9 1 5=LMTy 4 10 2 1 12 9 7 11 6 3 6=LMTy 5 4 *&N 7 9 10 3 2 1 12 7=LTyM 3 9 5 6 2 4 12 1 11 10 8=LTgM not used 9=MLTy 2 5 10 4 7 2 6 12 3 11 10=MLTg 1 12 3 2 4 11 5 6 7 9 11=MTyL 9 7 12 10 1 00! 4 3 2 5 12=MTgL 10 6 9 11 3 7 1 4 5 2

So we can go

S S E S N D D D West Long 11 12 6 D 6 10 10 West Long

==============================================================================

South from West End of the Hall of Mists: the maze with passages "all alike" (* = nothing happens) (letter = dead end; return with "letter")

N E S W U D

1 1 2 11 12 Mist * 2 * 11 3 1 * * 3 s 2 4 * * u 4 * 3 5 13 * 10 5 6 10 5 4 14 u 6 6 7 * 5 * u 7:brink 9 8 e 6 * Bird chamber 8 7 * * 9 * * NW = Pirate lair 9 * 8 7 e * * 10 * 5 14 13 4 * 11 2 w e 1 15 * 12 1 w 12 12 * * 13 * 4 * 10 * * 14 5 * w 10 * * 15 * * * * 11 11

All connections reversible except to bird chamber. This particular maze is planar. Marking X for various dead ends and O for loops, we get

S o E S x x S S x o N x o E x E NW Mist------1-------2------3------4-------5-------6------7-------8-------Pirate U /\\ W / E E / \\ W / \\ W W / \\ N / SE / \\ / / \\ / \\ / \\ / / \\ / / \\ / \\ / \\ / o12o 11---==15 13-----10------14-x Bird 9-x x x x

(I've marked the most economical motions to get to Pirate lair, but not any others.)

Oh, that's pretty widely known these days. Even Intel is ditching the P4 for the P3 (Pentium-M) core.

Actually, Intel does alright in the FPU area. The P4 sucks at integer arithmetic though. In particular they left off the integer mulitplier (requires two transits of the chip to the FPU to an IMUL) and the barrel-shifter. These may have been corrected in later releases, but the numbers don't show it. The Trace Cache (I-Cache) is a tad on the small side too. In general, it's a microarchitecture fuckup (though thought by some to be a management- directed fuckup).

Whatever.

--
  Keith

A 'byte' is *NOT* an SI unit. Neither are bits. Computers and their geeks are not required to abide by SI conventions.

In computer jargon, 1 K = 2^10 = 1024 *by definition*, and it is so defined for convenience.

1024 is close enough to 1000 for estimating purposes, and K-bytes are usually used for estimating memory allotments and file sizes.

If you have 10 phalanges (fingers + thumbs) on your hands and you know how to count in binary, then you can count to 1023 without taking your shoes off. Hard-core computer geeks wear sandals. You can get to

1,048,575 (one 'meg') that way.

;-d

Tom Davidson Richmond, VA

That explains a lot. Thanks.

Oh man...

A few moments' frustration at 1024 vs. 1000 (long enough for me to calculate 2^9.965784284662 = 1000 by trial and error on my calculator), a short rant cross-threaded to three newsgroups I believed relevant, and now 100+ responses to my original query. Unbelievable.

Apparently I'm running into the limits of my TI-85 calculator. It says

2^9.965784284662 through 2^9.965784284669 all equal 1000. Hmm...

I first saw this game at a friend's apartment. She was a civil-service programmer for a US Navy lab, and had a portable dial-up terminal (with built-in acoustic-coupler modem) that she could take home. After a couple of days of watching my frustration, she took a large sheet of paper from her briefcase that mapped out the whole game. It was no fun after that.

It has?

I may regret asking this but... where would I find it?

That one missed me.

Another time-waster on our campus PDP-10 was "real-time Star Trek", first real-time computer game I ever saw. This was pre video-game, and in fact almost pre-video-terminal. There were only a couple of CRT terminals on campus. So just imagine the number of trees killed by a game which every couple of seconds reprints a new copy of the grid.

A friend of mine reverse engineered the Star Trek game from a memory dump, disassembling the machine code by hand. Sane people might ask "why?" I know I did, though I make no claim to sanity where games are concerned.

Does anybody want a copy of "Lisa on a Stool" on paper tape? I'll trade you for the lunar landscape.

- Randy

I thought a bushel was a unit of instant coffee.

Ken

Oh geez. Everyone, male or female, can count at least up to 16,777,215 (8 fingers, 2 thumbs, 10 toes, 2 arms, 2 legs). Reserve the male part as an "overflow flag".

:)

FWIW, I get the following with Excel 2003:

2^9.965784284662 = 999.99999999994 2^9.96578428466209 = 1000 2^9.965784284669 = 1000.00000000479

Tom Davidson Richmond, VA