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[kladner]

Originally Posted by blahpy

1024 only applies for binary values such as storage, frequency isn't a binary value so I'm pretty sure 1,000 is used here ^^

And, now that you mention it, storage companies specify that mega, giga, and tera -bytes refer to decimal values.

From a Western Digital Specs page:

As used for storage capacity, one megabyte (MB) = one million bytes, one gigabyte (GB) = one billion bytes, and one terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment. As used for buffer or cache, one megabyte (MB) = 1,048,576 bytes. As used for transfer rate or interface, megabyte per second (MB/s) = one million bytes per second, megabit per second (Mb/s) = one million bits per second, and gigabit per second (Gb/s) = one billion bits per second.

This may only apply to numbers used in advertising. I'm not sure what the consensus scientific standard is. Clearly, RAM is always in binary-derived values. I can only suppose that storage companies use the decimal values because they make everything look a little bit bigger and faster. (Countdown to genital-related witticisms, 5...4...3......:)

[TheMawn]

Have any of you ever wondered why your 1 TB hard drive has 931 GB of available space?

(1024³) / (1000³) * 931 * 10⁶ = 999653638.144 ~ 10⁹

In advertisements Tera is always 10⁹. An awful lot of people complain about the 931 GB but the manufacturer always gets to claim they gave you your One Trillion Bytes. The computer is calculating in base 2.

[TheMawn]

Further to this, there is such a thing as a Mibibyte or a Gibibyte which explicitly refers to powers of 1024 for the purposes of base 2.

Could you imagine how hugely different the world would be if you couldn't approximate 2^10 as 1000? It would be such a small thing for 2^10 to be 1244 or something, but would have such a massive impact on some of the things we do with computers.

[NBtarheel_33]

Originally Posted by TheMawn

Further to this, there is such a thing as a Mibibyte or a Gibibyte which explicitly refers to powers of 1024 for the purposes of base 2.

Could you imagine how hugely different the world would be if you couldn't approximate 2^10 as 1000? It would be such a small thing for 2^10 to be 1244 or something, but would have such a massive impact on some of the things we do with computers.

It might be a small thing for 2^10 to be 1244, but I don't know how much of a small thing it would be for 2^8 to be 311, which is odd *and* prime. (In that Universe, would Mersenne primes be 2^p instead of 2^p-1?)

It's also interesting that the speed of light is so close to 3E8 meters per second, or that the acceleration due to gravity on the surface of Earth is right around 32 feet per second per second, or that the sum of the reciprocals of the integers squared ought to involve pi. How about the number e showing up in so many places?

It makes you wonder: Do these sorts of things happen due to the way we "do" mathematics (e.g. base 10, our chosen scales of measurement, etc.), or are these values so inextricably woven into the Universe that they would come out "nicely" no matter how we described our world?

Might 2^10 ~= 1000 be a convenient gift from God? But then why might He make something as simple as the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter so hard to nail down?

[blahpy]

Originally Posted by kladner

And, now that you mention it, storage companies specify that mega, giga, and tera -bytes refer to decimal values.

From a Western Digital Specs page:
This may only apply to numbers used in advertising. I'm not sure what the consensus scientific standard is. Clearly, RAM is always in binary-derived values. I can only suppose that storage companies use the decimal values because they make everything look a little bit bigger and faster. (Countdown to genital-related witticisms, 5...4...3......:)

Well, it looks as though I were slightly wrong, I thought the "gibibytes" etc that Mawn mentioned were the decimal version. It does turn out that "gigabyte" can mean 2^10 or 10^3 megabytes, and no universal term applies. However, for anything calculated on your computer's the binary form will be used, and as far as I'm aware this is the usual form used when talking about data storage. The reason your terabyte hard drive has 931GB is more to do with the fact that the manufacturer can, by use of the terminology, get away with giving you 6.9% less than most would expect and thus increase their profit margins slightly.

[kladner]

Well slap my face and call me Charlie. Here I had been putting down at least some of the difference between the label size and usable size to space taken up by partitioning and formatting.

[Mini-Geek]

Originally Posted by NBtarheel_33

It might be a small thing for 2^10 to be 1244, but I don't know how much of a small thing it would be for 2^8 to be 311, which is odd *and* prime. (In that Universe, would Mersenne primes be 2^p instead of 2^p-1?)

Of course the power of 2 would still have the same value, but if we didn't use base 10, we probably would not have such a handy approximation.

Originally Posted by NBtarheel_33

It's also interesting that the speed of light is so close to 3E8 meters per second, or that the acceleration due to gravity on the surface of Earth is right around 32 feet per second per second, or that the sum of the reciprocals of the integers squared ought to involve pi. How about the number e showing up in so many places?

It makes you wonder: Do these sorts of things happen due to the way we "do" mathematics (e.g. base 10, our chosen scales of measurement, etc.), or are these values so inextricably woven into the Universe that they would come out "nicely" no matter how we described our world?

Might 2^10 ~= 1000 be a convenient gift from God? But then why might He make something as simple as the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter so hard to nail down?

"Meters", "seconds", and base 10 are all notions that we humans came up with. Occasionally some things come up as 'round' numbers, but this is either by our own design (e.g. 1 joule = 1 newton-meter, 1000 mm = 1 m), or by coincidence (e.g. 3E8 m/s ~= c). Our own biases probably make us think there are more coincidences than there are. E.g. you point out that the speed of light is ~3E8 m/s, and I'd point out that gravitational acceleration on earth is about 10 m/s^2 (better than 32 ft/s^2 IMO), but then there are things like Avogadro's number (~6.0221413E23) and the gravitational constant (6.67384E-11 m^3/(kg*s^2)).
Pi and e, on the other hand, are universal constants. However we might choose to represent them, they are there, and their value is fixed. And, as it turns out for us, they are about 3.14 and 2.72, and since they are irrational, we can't write them in our decimal system in a finite number of digits.

[ATH]

Kilo, Mega, Giga, Tera etc. are the proper scientific term for 10³, 10⁶, 10⁹, 10¹² but the computer industry always used it for 1024, 1024², 1024³, 1024⁴. Then in december 1998 IEC invented kibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte, tebibyte:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte#History
for the binary units, which almost no one uses and they sound like something from a childrens story.

Hard disk manufacturers eagerly switched to the proper scientific term for MB, GB, TB to save space, but for the rest of us it is harder to switch. Specifically because Windows still uses the old terminology for hard disk space.

[blahpy]

Less than 1000 double checks left now until proving M(30402457) is the 43rd Mersenne prime!

[Uncwilly]

All exponents below 26,114,633 have been tested and double-checked.
All exponents below 44,576,437 have been tested at least once.

Countdown to testing all exponents below M(57885161) once: 21,382

Countdown to proving M(30402457) is the 43rd Mersenne Prime: 924
Countdown to proving M(32582657) is the 44rd Mersenne Prime: 23,274

[NBtarheel_33]

Originally Posted by NBtarheel_33

There are now over 800,000 registered CPUs on PrimeNet.

And now there are over 850,000 registered CPUs. Just shy of 115,000 users.