Noozer <dont.spam@me.here> wrote:

> Forget bits and binary... They aren't really related to the problem here...

> In English, "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. 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.

Wrong with cpu speed, comms speed, hard drive capacity, etc etc etc.

> The reason that computer terminology bases it's numbering system
> around 1,024 is because it's a natural boundary for computers.

Wrong with everything except memory which does have an
intrinsically binary organisation with most, but not all, memory.

> Since computers use base 2,

Not all do that either.

> their boundaries are numbers like 8, 16, 32...etc...1024, 2048...etc...
> 1073741824, 2147483648, 4294967296...etc. Writing these in base 2 we can see the pattern...

Pity there is no pattern with cpu speed, comms speed, hard drive capacity, etc etc etc.

> 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. When you put
> it in your computer, it will tell you that you have a 93gigabyte drive, meaning that you have
> 93x1024x1024x1024 bytes of space (93.1322... actually).

Not all computers do that either.

> Now, on top of this, the drive must be formatted before it can be
> used at all, so some space will always be used by your file system,
> even on an empty drive, to keep track of empty drive space,
> partitions, etc. Also, the manufacturer uses some of the drive to map sectors, etc. Any empty
> drive really isn't empty at all.