On 25 Feb, 07:11, "Noozer" <dont.s...@me.here> wrote:
> Forget bits and binary... They aren't really related to the problem here...
>
> In English,

or maths !

> "kilo" means thousand, "mega" means million, giga means billion,
> "tera" means trillion, etc...
>
> A "five kilogram" bag of sugar weights 5,000 grams. "25 megawatts" of power
> is 25,000,000 watts. To a person, a megabyte is a million bytes. A gigabyte
> is a billion bytes.
>
> The reason for this is that 1,000 is a natural boundary for people to use.

it's easy to write in Base 10

> Would it make any sense that a kilo is 893 of something? No, because we can
> count to 999 before we need to add more digits.
>
> In computer terminology, "kilo" means 1,024, "mega" means
> 1024x1024=1,048,576, "giga" means 1024x1024x1024=1,073,741,824, "tera" means
> 1024x1024x1024x1024=1,099,511,627,776.
>
> The reason that computer terminology bases it's numbering system around
> 1,024 is because it's a natural boundary for computers. Since computers use
> base 2, their boundaries are numbers like 8, 16, 32...etc...1024,

I know you know what you mean by natural boudnary, but it's an
artificial term. I'll elaborate on what I think you mean. I woujldn't
invent a term like that.

What you mean by "natural boundary".. Is the range and max number you
can reach with x digits.

It's as natural as us being able to reference 10,000 values -
0....9999 if given 4 decimal digits. But it's not "natural" to be
limited to 4 digits. Infact, it's not natural or unnatural. The term
natural doesn't apply !

what you call "natural boundaries" is more corectly the range or max
num of different values you are limited to when using x digits.

Computer designers don't just say I want to address 1000 memory
locations or 1016 of them. They may say that, then they'll say,
that'll need a minimum of 10 bits , and lo and behold, they can
address 2^10=1024 different locations 0..1023.

it's only limited to a number of digits and looking at the full range
you can reach, and max number of different numbers you can produce,
that you get this.




> 2048...etc...1073741824, 2147483648, 4294967296...etc. Writing these in base
> 2 we can see the pattern... 1000 is 8, 10000 is 16, 100000 is 32, 1000000000
> is 1024, 10000000000 is 2048, 10000000000000000000 is 1073741824,
> 100000000000000000000 is 2147483648.
>



> So when you buy your drive at the store, the saleman tells you it has
> 100gigabytes, meaning it has 100 billion bytes of space.

indeed.
Giga=thousand mega (in byte or maths speak)
And HDD manufacturers use the mathematical meaning. So it's true to
say Giga=billion=thousand million.


<snip>