1. Hard disks (not euphoria)
This message has nothing to do with Euphoria, but possible someone may
have an answer to my question:
I just bought a 2.5 GB hard disk (Micropolis Mustang) and while
partitioning it noticed it wasn't 2.5 GB, but about 2.38 GB... after
some time I found that the drive could hold exactly 2,500,000,000
bytes! I know this is cheating, but made me think about numerical
conventions... I know that 1 KB is 1024 bytes, but:
a) Does 1 MB = 1000 KB or 1024 KB?
b) Does 1 GB = 1000 MB or 1024 MB?
c) Does all hard disk are catalogued with 1,000-bytes KiloBytes, and
1,000-KB Megs, and 1,000-Megs Gigas? In other words, do they all cheat?
I also couldn't made one single partition on the disk, the biggest
partition i could made was of about 2.09 GB... I used the fdisk in my
Windows 95 start floppy, and DOS 6.22 fdisk. How do people with 9
Gigs drives work! they should have about 5 partitions per drive!!!
Any ideas besides getting Win NT?
Regards,
Daniel Berstein
danielberstein at usa.net
http://www27.pair.com/daber/architek
2. Re: Hard disks (not euphoria)
On Fri, 24 Oct 1997, Daniel Berstein wrote:
> This message has nothing to do with Euphoria, but possible someone may
> have an answer to my question:
>
> a) Does 1 MB = 1000 KB or 1024 KB?
>
> b) Does 1 GB = 1000 MB or 1024 MB?
>
> c) Does all hard disk are catalogued with 1,000-bytes KiloBytes, and
> 1,000-KB Megs, and 1,000-Megs Gigas? In other words, do they all cheat?
1024. But only if you're talking pure binary (1024 = power(2,10) to try to
put things back on topic ;) ). If you're a computer-selling type, you
try to get away with saying the next step up is 1000 ( = power(10,3) )
which is rather cruel.
Incidentally, those of you with Windows 3.11, check how much space there
is on a 1.44Mb floppy. It'll say 1.38Mb, which is in fact the space in
bytes on the disk, divided by 1048576 (= power(2,20) ), not 1.44Mb, which
is the space on the floppy divided by 1012000 !!!
[ = (power(2,10) + power(10,3)) / 2) * power(10,3) ]
We live in a mad world. :)
PS. The reason power(2,x) is so close to power(10,3*x/10) has quite a lot
to do with the fact that log10(2) = 0.30103 = 3/10 (approx).
PPS. /Lots-of-mad-cackles... iiihihihihiiiii. muahahahahaaaa. etc. :)
--
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