At 1:52 PM -0700 12/3/2009, Doug McNutt wrote: >At 10:24 -0500 12/3/09, Britt Dodd wrote: >>I think its more of a 'dumbing down' for the general public. >>Personally, I prefer the 1024 nomenclature to be called megabyte >>(or gigabyte, etc) rather than mebibytes, etc...
How does one undo Jobs' damage; switch OS X back to using real math? >The problem is that we scientists, as opposed to "computer >scientists", have serious difficulty figuring out which usage is in >vogue when the context is not clear. There are only 10 types of people in the world - those who understand binary and those who don't. >Even within the programmer's world mega means 10^6 when applied to a >frequency or bit rate but 2^20 when applied to memory. What does it >mean when calling out how many memory references per second a bus >can handle? Isn't it interesting that engineers and scientists can do more than just count on their fingers! I was taught *in grade school* to always use the units *and* base appropriate for the task at hand. Period. When you throw in marketing BS, you end up with satellites falling out of orbit because of metric vs engrish issues. And worse - this means that the Mac to my left is giving different size numbers than the Mac to my right. The result: That new Mac is banned from all laboratory work. Way to go Apple. >Do computer types call a bit a decibyte because [snip] Love what you wrote here but now my brain hurts. Should I mention that I like to measure time in microfortnights? At 4:28 PM -0500 12/3/2009, J. Alexander Jacocks wrote: >On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Scott Holder wrote: >>>Which is why all storage should be declared in bytes. >> >>But how many bits is it? The 8-bits-to-a-byte thing isn't really an >>established standard, it's just been used so long as to be assumed >>[snip] Some stuff used 4 and 6 bit bytes in the early days, IIRC. > >Anyone know of an extant computer that uses non-8-bit bytes? I >certainly can't think of one newer than the 1970s. Sure. My old PDP-8 used a 12-bit word, 3 bit bytes (read in octal), and used 6-bit characters. DECsystem-10 (PDP-10) used 36-bit words, 6-bit bytes. DECsystem-20 was a KL-10 processor (36-bit) with a PDP-11 (32-bit) front-end. Then there are the modern bit-slice processors, with variable length bytes and words... Who needs 64-bit processors when you can use a 4096-bit one. Note that's 4096 not 4000! Nap time. - Dan. -- - Psychoceramic Emeritus; South Jersey, USA, Earth. -- ----- You received this message because you are a member of the Vintage Macs group. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/vintagemacs.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To leave this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/vintage-macs Support for older Macs: http://lowendmac.com/services/
