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Guest
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 Posted:
Mon Dec 12, 2005 5:24 pm Post subject:
Re: why do computer scientists say 1KB=1024 bytes?!! |
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In article <pan.2005.12.12.03.53.19.817453@att.bizzzz>,
Keith <krw@att.bizzzz> wrote:
| Quote: | On Sun, 11 Dec 2005 11:58:58 -0500, Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz wrote:
In <dn6t88$4ib$1@usenet01.srv.cis.pitt.edu>, on 12/07/2005
at 02:57 PM, szekeres@pitt.edu (GregS) said:
I remember the term.
The term "nybble" came from a humorous article in Datamation. I never
expected anybody to take it seriously.
It was, and was a usefull term to describe a bucket to put a BCD number
into.
I think byte is simply a subdivision of a word,
A byte is a string of consecutive bits, and could cross word boundaries.
No, that's an architectural definition. A "byte" has no real meaning
outside a specific architecture.
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That's bullshit. How the hell do you think we did cross-
architectural specs?
| Quote: |
Some computers, e.g., IBM 7030, had hardware to support bytes crossing
words, while others, e.g., PDP-6/PDP-10, did not.
Exactly. A "could" and "size" are built into the architecture.
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No, that's merely how you get a string of bits from here to there.
Your confusion is why I would put "copyable" in the definition.
Just because a PDP-10 load/deposit byte instruction didn't cross
word boundaries didn't prevent us from concantenating bits and
MOVEing them into an location. It just took two instructions
instead of one. How do you think we implemented copying bits
from/to a fucking VAX?
/BAH
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slebetman@yahoo.com
Guest
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| Posted:
Mon Dec 12, 2005 5:35 pm Post subject:
Re: why do computer scientists say 1KB=1024 bytes?!! |
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jmfbahciv@aol.com wrote:
| Quote: | In article <1134363685.898312.126630@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
"slebetman@yahoo.com" <slebetman@gmail.com> wrote:
jmfbahciv@aol.com wrote:
Over here lawyers are still fond of using mechanical typewriters. But I
suspect a lot of the tender documents I've been getting are written in
M$ Word.
snip
So I guess they adopted kiB to be less
confusing. Which helps a little because tender documents tend to be
vague and confusing anyway.
I thought the EU is extremely specific and contrained when
tenders are submitted to anything in its juisdiction.
So far this pickiness is the only thing keeping Micshit
in line.
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I'm not in the EU, I'm in Malaysia. |
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Guest
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| Posted:
Mon Dec 12, 2005 5:35 pm Post subject:
Re: why do computer scientists say 1KB=1024 bytes?!! |
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In article <1134391210.382103.195360@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
"slebetman@yahoo.com" <slebetman@gmail.com> wrote:
| Quote: | jmfbahciv@aol.com wrote:
In article <1134363685.898312.126630@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
"slebetman@yahoo.com" <slebetman@gmail.com> wrote:
jmfbahciv@aol.com wrote:
Over here lawyers are still fond of using mechanical typewriters. But I
suspect a lot of the tender documents I've been getting are written in
M$ Word.
snip
So I guess they adopted kiB to be less
confusing. Which helps a little because tender documents tend to be
vague and confusing anyway.
I thought the EU is extremely specific and contrained when
tenders are submitted to anything in its juisdiction.
So far this pickiness is the only thing keeping Micshit
in line.
I'm not in the EU, I'm in Malaysia.
|
I thought a large part of your economic improvment plans
was to start doing a lot of business with European Union
countries? To export anything to them, stuff has to
be within specs. They've spec'ed the size of cucumbers
for goodness' sake! ISTR the specs for bananas are
controversial.
/BAH
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Guest
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| Posted:
Mon Dec 12, 2005 5:35 pm Post subject:
Re: why do computer scientists say 1KB=1024 bytes?!! |
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In article <1134363685.898312.126630@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
"slebetman@yahoo.com" <slebetman@gmail.com> wrote:
| Quote: |
jmfbahciv@aol.com wrote:
In article <1134239932.971121.221660@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
"slebetman@yahoo.com" <slebetman@gmail.com> wrote:
jmfbahciv@aol.com wrote:
In article <1133957672.066443.219040@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
"slebetman@yahoo.com" <slebetman@gmail.com> wrote:
.. That's why a lot of older
documentation talked about 'octets'.
We never did. I don't recall ever typing that word.
The basis of the internet. Almost all RFCs use octet instead of byte:
RFC791 - IP
RFC1332 - PPP
RFC1731 - IMAP
RFC1962 - SOCKS
RFC2251 - LDAP
RFC2279 - UTF-8
etc...
On our machine achitecture (PDP-10), I could define my byte
sizes with instructions. I could have 0-36 bits/byte.
Exactly why such important specifications were written with 'octets'
instead of 'byte'. When the documents were written, PDPs were still
popular and made up a significant portion of the internet.
Despite criticisms, kiB, MiB, GiB are catching on. I've started seeing
them in tender documents and specifications.
And what does a spell checker do with them?
Nothing mainly because tender documents and specifications come in
printed form on thick bundles of paper. But it makes the client's
lawyers happy.
This is a flip answer. Lawyers use spellcheckers. What's
worse is they probably use Micshit's spellcheckers. When
I was executrix, the lawyer said that Micshit often changed
the sense of a sentence by erasing or inserting a "not".
I told him about file comparing. The procedures they used
when working on contracts were horrifying.
Over here lawyers are still fond of using mechanical typewriters. But I
suspect a lot of the tender documents I've been getting are written in
M$ Word.
The clients use the funny new i-units to prevent us from "cheating".
But they could have easily specified kB=1024 in the definitions page or
an appendix. Except that kb also usually is 1000 bits when talking
about transmission medium.
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And then there is Baud.
| Quote: | So I guess they adopted kiB to be less
confusing. Which helps a little because tender documents tend to be
vague and confusing anyway.
|
I thought the EU is extremely specific and contrained when
tenders are submitted to anything in its juisdiction.
So far this pickiness is the only thing keeping Micshit
in line.
/BAH |
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Guest
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| Posted:
Mon Dec 12, 2005 5:35 pm Post subject:
Re: why do computer scientists say 1KB=1024 bytes?!! |
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In article <1134340997.366413.153270@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
"mensanator@aol.compost" <mensanator@aol.com> wrote:
| Quote: |
jmfbahciv@aol.com wrote:
In article <1134228772.879024.316260@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
"mensanator@aol.compost" <mensanator@aol.com> wrote:
jmfbahciv@aol.com wrote:
In article <1134147969.609373.291690@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
"Randy Poe" <poespam-trap@yahoo.com> wrote:
Does anybody want a copy of "Lisa on a Stool" on paper
tape? I'll trade you for the lunar landscape.
Boo-hoo. Nobody ever made a male pinup. It was a couple
years later (after that printer paper phase) that Burt
Reynolds was the centerfold. It caused a huge sensation
in my group which was 100% female at the time. Even
then they wouldn't let me look and I was too cheap to
buy a magazine.
Ah, the difference between men and women.
Do you think the development of GUI was driven by men's
never ending desire to get better pinups? If women were
in charge, would we still be using TTY interfaces?
Good grief, absolutely not. Video terminals increased
production by reducing the time waiting for the mechanical
TTY innards to adjust themselves.
I actually meant text displays versus graphic, not mechanical
versus electronic.
|
Ah, in my work, graphic just wasn't what we prep'ed.
Most work input is text-based. The guys used those
pinups to rest their eyes.
| Quote: |
Not that
there's anything wrong with that, I am currently working on
making yet another port (3rd or 4th) of the 25 year old
Apple ][ text adventure game THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF EAMON
to Python so I can still play it without mucking about with
an emulator.
Why did you choose Python?
Mainly because I needed unlimited precision integers.
I have legitimate problems where the operands can
exceed 50,000 decimal digits.
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Good grief. Ain't modern tech wonderful? :-)
| Quote: |
Luckily for me, of the many languages where you can
get such math, Python was the first I tried. It fit very
well with my programming needs so I use it for just
about everything even when there's no danger that
Conan's coin purse will ever collect more than
2 billion gold pieces.
|
The economy in your games will be very limited. ;-)
| Quote: |
Or is it what you have on-line right now?
Of course, I'm somewhat nostalgic having written my first
program with BASIC on a Teletype. It was interesting
watching the Teletype s..l..o..w..l..y print out the results
of your MIRV warhead cluster detonating over the computer's
cities and waiting for it's retaliation. It was so slow you could
add up the numbers in your head before the totals were printed
to see who won that exchange (and whether 3 independently
targeted 1 megaton warheads were better in the long run
than single 5-10 megaton warheads). But the novelty of that
wore off quickly.
I was banned from using ASR33s because I broke them from typing
too fast.
The company I worked for wanted to hang a CRT onto one of
the machines but, for hardware compatability, it had to still have
a 20ma current loop.
|
That was so a person could kick the machine if all the other
comm didn't come up. JMF and TW used a VT06 (I can never recall
what the real name was) to do their stand-alone debugging.
I don't remember what kind of hardware tweaking had to be done
for that.
| Quote: | They called it a Glass Teletype, which I
always got a kick out of.
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That's not a 33. Those glass teletypes were very robust
but very expensive. Ours never had glass in them. We had
a monitor developer who kept smashing them whenever he
lost a wrestling match with the computer. Field Service
finally refused to replace new glass. We could always tell
where this guy had been working. The glass also had the
feature that I could lay my hands on the glass to warm them
up.
| Quote: |
But I guess Iron Teletypes weren't as rugged as I thought.
|
The iron TTYs were rugged. It's the plastic ones (33) that had
a limited mechanical usage. Whenever I had to use one, I slowed
my typing speed to about 30 WPM with a 3-4 characters' worth of
waiting whenever I hit <CR>. I always screw this one up but I
think the iron ones with glass were called ASR35s. Or the
number was 36; for some strange reason the wrong number keeps
popping out of my fingers.
/BAH |
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Keith Williams
Guest
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| Posted:
Mon Dec 12, 2005 5:35 pm Post subject:
Re: why do computer scientists say 1KB=1024 bytes?!! |
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In article <dnjmlt$8ss_002@s833.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com says...
| Quote: | In article <pan.2005.12.12.03.53.19.817453@att.bizzzz>,
Keith <krw@att.bizzzz> wrote:
On Sun, 11 Dec 2005 11:58:58 -0500, Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz wrote:
In <dn6t88$4ib$1@usenet01.srv.cis.pitt.edu>, on 12/07/2005
at 02:57 PM, szekeres@pitt.edu (GregS) said:
I remember the term.
The term "nybble" came from a humorous article in Datamation. I never
expected anybody to take it seriously.
It was, and was a usefull term to describe a bucket to put a BCD number
into.
I think byte is simply a subdivision of a word,
A byte is a string of consecutive bits, and could cross word boundaries.
No, that's an architectural definition. A "byte" has no real meaning
outside a specific architecture.
That's bullshit. How the hell do you think we did cross-
architectural specs?
|
No, it's not bullshit. You had to look at both architectures to
find out what they defined a "byte" to be and then do the
translation. There is no universal definition of "byte".
| Quote: | Some computers, e.g., IBM 7030, had hardware to support bytes crossing
words, while others, e.g., PDP-6/PDP-10, did not.
Exactly. A "could" and "size" are built into the architecture.
No, that's merely how you get a string of bits from here to there.
Your confusion is why I would put "copyable" in the definition.
Just because a PDP-10 load/deposit byte instruction didn't cross
word boundaries didn't prevent us from concantenating bits and
MOVEing them into an location. It just took two instructions
instead of one. How do you think we implemented copying bits
from/to a fucking VAX?
|
What _are_ you rambling on about?
--
Keith |
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Guest
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| Posted:
Mon Dec 12, 2005 5:35 pm Post subject:
Re: Since when have geeks concerned themselves with the laym |
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r.e.ballard@usa.net wrote:
| Quote: | You are correct, the average person thinks in base 10. Even IBM tried
to make computers which did computations in base 10 and used "Binary
Coded Decimal" but eventually, as computers became cheap enough for
"humans" to buy for themselves, the world of Binary had to merge with
the world of Decimal. No, most people really don't care that 1 kbyte
is really 1024 bytes instead of 1000. Most people don't even know the
differences between a byte and a character.
|
I thought a 'byte' is an 'unsigned char'. Is this definition flawed?
OneHappyMadman
"Only a madman would pursue chemistry as a career. The folks who do it
right are happy madmen, many of the remainder become alcoholics." -
"Uncle Al" |
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neon
Joined: 25 Feb 2006
Posts: 590
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| Posted:
Thu Mar 09, 2006 1:09 pm Post subject:
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i did not read all of the garbage but nobody nailned yet i think.
1024 comes about for the machine language that all computer understand true-false 1-0 and the binary coded system . 1.2.-.64. 256.1024.4048 and so on
1024 therefore is close to 1k=1024byte 1,048,576=1 gigabyte in binary notetion. |
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neon
Joined: 25 Feb 2006
Posts: 590
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| Posted:
Tue Aug 29, 2006 4:17 am Post subject:
Re: why do computer scientists say 1KB=1024 bytes?!! |
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| Pooh Bear wrote: | Ralph Wade Phillips wrote:
| Quote: | Howdy!
onehappymadman@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1133931290.510746.187120@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
And don't even get me started on kb (kilobytes) vs kb (kilobits)! My
laptop has a USB 1.1 (not 2.0) port, and I'm trying to calculate how
fast I can transfer data. I google it, and discover it can handle 12
mbps! Oh, wait a second, that's megaBITS per second, only 1.5
megaBYTES per second. Geez!
Because kb or Kb is KiloBITs - KB is KiloBYTES.
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And to be totally pedantic, the k prefix for 1000 is always lower case.
Upper case K means degrees Kelvin in the SI sytem of units. I can see how
American with their funny measures get confused though.
k or K MEANS ONE THING AND ONE THING ONLY an inpirical multiplier of a 1000. has nothing to do with degrees miles resistance or anything else. all of this comes from the greek alphabet and modified accordingly. 1millamp. 1 microamp 1 fantoamp. the size is so small that for all practical purposes it cannot be measured. there are all kind of notetion BITS, DECIMAL, OCTAL, WORD, FRAME,BCD, GREYCODE and so on. if anybody understand the difference then.THE PROBLEM DISSAPEAR.
Graham |
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