i.e. 6.962e17 mm^2

cellocgw · 2013-04-29 Reply Admin

tharpa:
ammoQ:
Funny fact: An asteroid the size of Texas would kill all fleas, worldwide.

Well, it depends. Do we define Texas as a cone that goes down to the center of the earth, or do we define it as just a surface area? If we define it as just a surface area, then an asteroid the size of Texas would be just one molecule thick, I suppose, and so wouldn't damage much of anything.

Ok, first of all, for all you area-impaired folks, when a land area is given as "X km^2" that means "X square km" , NOT "X km by X km." Now, then, #km^2 to mm^2 696200*1000^2 * 1000^2

i.e. 6.962e17 mm^2

medium sized molecule is around 1nm in length, per http://h2g2.com/approved_entry/A791246

Hence, converting the land size to nm^2, 6.6962e17*1e6^2 = 6.692e29 molecules

1 mole = 6.023e23, so 1.16e6 moles of material. I'll let you decide on the density, and hence molar mass, of the 1.16 megamole asteroid.

Some Damn Yank · 2013-04-29 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
And for all those of you thinking that all-decimal versus all-binary is the end of the matter, consider telecoms.
A 2 megabit-per-second connection: is that mebibits or megabits?

Answer: neither. It's two kibikilobits, 2KiKb for short.

Yes, but everyone knows the telecoms are liars, even the telecoms. I used to work for one, and believe me, they all know they're lying. I was part of a team who's job was to devise new "features" we could implement for free with the existing hardware and then charge the customer extra for it. Giving it away as an inducement to reduce churn or attract new customers never occurred to them, it was all about squeezing more money from the existing suckers.

Some Damn Yank · 2013-04-29 Reply Admin

gnasher729:
Steve The Cynic:
And for all those of you thinking that all-decimal versus all-binary is the end of the matter, consider telecoms.
A 2 megabit-per-second connection: is that mebibits or megabits?

Answer: neither. It's two kibikilobits, 2KiKb for short.

2 Megabit per second is and always was two million bits per second or 2,000,000 bits per second. It never has been anything else. Just like 2 Megahertz is and always was two million cycles per second. And there is a slow process on the way convincing the very last retards that when you copy data at a speed of 2 Megabit per second for eight seconds, you'll have copied eight Megabyte. Not some strange number of pseudo-Megabytes.

I have Comcast. When I transfer data at "2 Megabit per second" for eight seconds, I've transferred about three Megabytes, maybe less.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

Its embedded, so no filesystem, so no swap space, so no virtual memory.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

Java: it used to be you compile once and wtf on one OS. Now you compile once and wtf on every OS!

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

Pero perić:
In the QBASIC, an ancient languages targeting 16 bit environment, one could specify an array with up to 60 dimensions. Is it even possible to use half of that (without trivial, one element dimensions) withing 64 kB?

I almost failed my algorithm analysis class because I used an i-86 Intel chip for my final project. We were to test a very large Quicksort array, and the Intel memory mapper has to do special tricks to read the array; the SUN workstations in the lab had no such problem.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

Some Damn Yank:
Zemm:
Remy Porter:
Oh, don't be a pedant. 2^(10*n) is close enough to 10^(n+2) and as n gets larger, the percentage of the difference shrinks relative to the number.

Don't you mean 2^(10n) ~ 10^(3n)?

And it doesn't.

One binary kilobyte is 2.4% higher, so it is pretty close. One binary terabyte is 1,099,511,627,776 bytes which is almost 10% higher than the "metric terabyte". It gets worse as you go higher.
No, it stays the same. 1024 KB = 1 MB; 1024 MB = 1 GB, etc. The lies by the hard disk marketing guys are what get worse as you go higher.

(1024 - 1000) / 1000 = 2.4% (1048576 - 1000000) / 1000000 = 4.9% (1073741824 - 1000000000) / 1000000000 = 7.4%

So yes, they do diverge. Obviously. I can't tell if you were serious.

In any case, I think it was a big mistake to start using the same prefixes to mean different things. But by now, I don't know how we can ever get people to change. Especially when the alternatives being offered sound so stupid. Who wouldn't feel embarrassed uttering the word "tebibyte?"

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

alexgieg:
Mike:
The only people who use decimals in the same context are the liars in the HD marketing departments, who probably have no idea about anything computer or science related anyhow, they just know how to lie to their customers to boost sales.
It is inaccurate to say HDD makers do this for marketing purposes alone, unless they were extremely prescient back when only huge corporations' technical departments (people who knew what they were doing) used to purchase MB-sized, rack-sized disk cabinets, bidding their time for the age, decades later, when clueless non-technical folk would start purchasing their stuff. That's because -- AFAIK at least -- HDDs have always been measured in powers of ten. If anything, it's Windows who lies when, contrary to industry's standard practices since forever, it insists on using powers of two to report HDD sizes. MacOSX, on the other hand, does the right thing and shows space in powers of ten.

MacOS user:

oh, my HDD can hold a 24GB file, let's dump this 24GB BD rip on it!

... "Not enough room?" WAIT A MINUTE!!!

Some Damn Yank · 2013-04-29 Reply Admin

Welch:
Some Damn Yank:
Zemm:
Remy Porter:
Oh, don't be a pedant. 2^(10*n) is close enough to 10^(n+2) and as n gets larger, the percentage of the difference shrinks relative to the number.

Don't you mean 2^(10n) ~ 10^(3n)?

And it doesn't.

One binary kilobyte is 2.4% higher, so it is pretty close. One binary terabyte is 1,099,511,627,776 bytes which is almost 10% higher than the "metric terabyte". It gets worse as you go higher.
No, it stays the same. 1024 KB = 1 MB; 1024 MB = 1 GB, etc. The lies by the hard disk marketing guys are what get worse as you go higher.

(1024 - 1000) / 1000 = 2.4% (1048576 - 1000000) / 1000000 = 4.9% (1073741824 - 1000000000) / 1000000000 = 7.4%

So yes, they do diverge. Obviously. I can't tell if you were serious.

In any case, I think it was a big mistake to start using the same prefixes to mean different things. But by now, I don't know how we can ever get people to change. Especially when the alternatives being offered sound so stupid. Who wouldn't feel embarrassed uttering the word "tebibyte?"

As someone pointed out earlier, there's no confusion. K=1024; k=1000. As you point out, the problem is using the word "kilo" for both. But I have never seen RAM sold as "MiB", so for me the hard disk marking guys are liars.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

Tasty:
Pero perić:
In the QBASIC, an ancient languages targeting 16 bit environment, one could specify an array with up to 60 dimensions. Is it even possible to use half of that (without trivial, one element dimensions) withing 64 kB?

I almost failed my algorithm analysis class because I used an i-86 Intel chip for my final project. We were to test a very large Quicksort array, and the Intel memory mapper has to do special tricks to read the array; the SUN workstations in the lab had no such problem.

What do you mean? The relative efficiency of any particular sorting algorithm should not depend on the quirks of the memory controller.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

Some Damn Yank:
As someone pointed out earlier, there's no confusion. K=1024; k=1000. As you point out, the problem is using the word "kilo" for both. But I have never seen RAM sold as "MiB", so for me the hard disk marking guys are liars.

That has almost nothing to do with what I said. But, K versus k is the only one that works like that. All the others are capital in both binary and SI.

I do find the labeling on HDDs to be somewhat disingenuous. But to the average consumer, it really doesn't matter. As long as "1TB" is more than "750GB", it's accurate enough to make a choice.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

Welch:
Tasty:
Pero perić:
In the QBASIC, an ancient languages targeting 16 bit environment, one could specify an array with up to 60 dimensions. Is it even possible to use half of that (without trivial, one element dimensions) withing 64 kB?

I almost failed my algorithm analysis class because I used an i-86 Intel chip for my final project. We were to test a very large Quicksort array, and the Intel memory mapper has to do special tricks to read the array; the SUN workstations in the lab had no such problem.

What do you mean? The relative efficiency of any particular sorting algorithm should not depend on the quirks of the memory controller.

It probably had to do with the data set size being larger than what fits in a normal 640K DOS executable.

If this was in the early 90s or maybe late 80s, you likely had to tell the compiler to build for "huge model" as a protected mode executable, and run it with the aid of a DOS extender and EMM386.

Nothing to do with Quicksort at all, but rather everything to do with the limited address space of real mode executables and the lack of a large linear virtual address space.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

d.k.ALlen:
Anonymouse:
There are 8 bits in a byte, yes? This is not a matter of debate.

No... but it is a matter of architecture. On some systems, a byte is either 6 or (sometimes) 9 bits, because the addressing resolution is in words, and the words are 36 bits. (Or 12, 18, etc).

Since System/360 it's 8 bits. (But to be correct: that's an octet and not a byte.)

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

modifiable lvalue:
In C, a byte is CHAR_BIT bits in width, so in the context of the article, a megabyte would be a multiple of whatever value that is (most commonly 8, but could be greater). Would you believe a byte used to be 7 bits? Which side does this fact favour in the discussion at hand?

The PDP-10 had 36 bit words, and you could have 6, 7, 8, or 9 bit characters as you preferred -- all in the same program. The serial ports could also handle 5 bits per character, but IIRC you stored them as 6 bits internally. (Or you converted the BAUDOT to 7 bit ASCII.)

Conversion between the different sizes was mostly automatic in ALGOL. I have no idea if anybody ever tried to write a C compiler for it.

Coyne · 2013-04-29 Reply Admin

One big flee:
The largest flee is about four millimeters. 4mm^2 is probably excessively generous but will work for the calculation.
Texas is 696,200 km^2 or 696,200,000,000mm^2

So we could fit 174,050,000,000 of the largest hypothetical flee's shoulder to shoulder, so to speak, on the surface of Texas.

The 10K of data however would only fit in the assigned space 6,553 times.

For the statement "trying to kill a flea with an asteroid the size of Texas" to be approximately accurate the flee would need to be 106241416mm^2 or 106.241416m^2... as the average human stands 1.8m... the flee if it could move would be a massive beast. I do not want to know what it would need to eat.

Obviously, you just don't understand the fine arts of hyperbole and exaggeration.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

herby:
ammoQ:
Funny fact: An asteroid the size of Texas would kill all fleas, worldwide.
But would it kill Texas? (or to put it a bit more locally for me California?).
Now where was that asteroid we wanted to land on?

Well according to wikipedia the average diameter of Texas is 1200 km, assuming an spherical rock with this diameter and a density of normal rocks and a velocity of 17 km/s (typical asteroid velocities when impacting earth), the effects would be 'interesting'

By using the simulator on http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/cgi-bin/crater.cg I get the following result: Depending on angle, the length of the day could be changed by half an hour! and even at the other side of the earth the thermal effect would be more than 130 times that of the sun (meaning everything ignites) and would last for 50 hours.... So at a guess, no California would not be a good place to stay, and yes it WOULD kill Texas (and the whole North America as well as the crater would have a final diameter of more than 7000 km..., yes comparable to the radius of the Earth :-)

Yazeran

Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

Texas is 696,200 km^2 or 696,200,000,000mm^2

No. We're talking about area. There are 10001000 millimeters in a kilometer. There are (10001000)^2 mm^2 in a km^2

Texas is 696,200,000,000,000mm^2.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL:
Geoff:
Oh just stop it all ready. You MiB people are the problem.
Hey, can you look over here for a moment?

FLASH <<<

Uh, you were... sucking on a coax when you thought that programming is the job for you. Newsflash, it ain't bro. You saw that... on like CNN or something. Go find something else to do, but not at the post office... and... marry her and move out of your mom's basement.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

cellocgw:
1 mole = 6.023e23, so 1.16e6 moles of material. I'll let you decide on the density, and hence molar mass, of the 1.16 megamole asteroid.

Not density, but chemical formula. The weight of a mole of material depends on the weight of each atom or molecule. So one mole of hydrogen weighs about 1 gram, while 1 mole of Helium about 4 grams.

If the asteroid was pure iron (atomic weight 55.845), it would weigh about 64780 kg. If it were instead solid iron III oxide (i.e., rust, Fe2O3, ) it would be considerably heavier (about 185261 kg). Not because it was more dense (in fact, it would be less dense), but because each individual molecule was heavier (molecular weight 159.7).

Captcha: plaga: A plaga pun your houses!

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

joeyadams:
Linux uses optimistic memory allocation by default. This shouldn't take up a full 64MB unless you access several pages of that array.
If the device's CPU doesn't support this, it probably doesn't have a memory management unit (MMU). If this is the case, how is it even running Linux?

They could be using uClinux or something like that... (http://www.uclinux.org/)

Loren Pechtel · 2013-04-29 Reply Admin

Pero perić:
In the QBASIC, an ancient languages targeting 16 bit environment, one could specify an array with up to 60 dimensions. Is it even possible to use half of that (without trivial, one element dimensions) withing 64 kB?

If you don't have trivial dimensions it's not possible to use that on any modern system, period.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

Geoff:
acne:
Jens:
It's 68 MB if you know one specification or 64 MiB if use the other. It is 64 MB if you don't know what you are talking about or if you are stuck in the 90s.
You were too fast for me... Here are the details for those who still do not know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

Oh just stop it all ready. You MiB people are the problem. MB has been expressed as a power of two in our field since um forever. Computer science is hardly the only field to have things that mean something else in common parlance mean something specific and different in the domain specific context. Nobody was confused until the "SI has to powers of 10" thought police came along. So I just like to say go curl up in the corner with a nice dictionary if that makes you happy; but leave the rest of us alone.

I'm just glad that the grammar nazis have something else to keep them busy. Watching for a missing or extraneous comma, looking for poor usage, et al. must just get really boring.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

Anonymouse:
I think I would be safe in saying that the vast majority of architecture is either Intel, or Intel clones.

I don't think that's actually true. There is a lot of ARM and PowerPC out there that you don't see, because it's controlling your transmission, your wi-fi router, your phone, your cable box, your game console or your coffee pot.

In terms of desktop PCs, Intel rules, but there are a lot more random devices with chips in them than desktop PCs.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

Every page in the heap of a Linux process is virtual until written.

captcha: immitto -- always, but duplicatto never.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

anon:
Anonymouse:
I think I would be safe in saying that the vast majority of architecture is either Intel, or Intel clones.
I don't think that's actually true. There is a lot of ARM and PowerPC out there that you don't see, because it's controlling your transmission, your wi-fi router, your phone, your cable box, your game console or your coffee pot.
In terms of desktop PCs, Intel rules, but there are a lot more random devices with chips in them than desktop PCs.

Most desktop PCs have several ARM cores in them as well. WiFi chipsets are typically ARM these days, as is Bluetooth. Nevermind the drive controller in your hard drive may be ARM based, or the optical drive.

For every Intel chip sold as the main processor, there's several ARM-based cores used as controllers for the main processor.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

Oh, wait, you mean you DON'T use asteroids the size of Texas to kill fleas? Why not? I've never seen any point in taking halfway measures.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

I don't really see the point of the whole "mibi" thing.

If the idea is that IT professionals get confused and think that a "kilometer" is 1024 meters, I can only say: No. Anyone who is confused by that is unlikely to be enlightened by the invention of new terms.

If the idea is that the average lay person thinks that 1 KB of RAM means exactly 1,000 bytes: (a) It is unlikely that he really cares about the difference anyway. He's looking for a rough measure of how big a RAM card he's buying. He's not counting individual bits. (b) It is not likely that anyone who carefully calculates the memory requirements of an application and compares it to the available RAM does not know what the prefixes mean.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

If someone really struggles with confusion because size prefixes in computer memory mean something different than size prefixes in metric measurement, I can only say that this person must find the world a baffling place.

How is he supposed to insert his new Dodge RAM pickup truck into the RAM slot on his motherboard?

Why is the board game he bought from Milton Bradley, clearly labeled "MB", not one megabyte?

Why did Hormel put a spam filter on their email system? How will they send messages about their flagship product?

Why did his English teacher tell him that his paper should have used bullet points, when school rules specifically prohibit bringing firearms or ammunition on campus?

One could play this game all day long.

Lots of words mean different things in different contexts. Sometimes a person unfamiliar with the alternative meanings is confused. This can usually be cleared up with a 30-second explanation. Sometimes we get a moment's amusement when we notice a double meaning. (Especially if one of the possible meanings has to do with sex.) Most often we don't even notice, shifting from one context to another effortlessly.

This mibi stuff is a solution in search of a problem. People who understand the difference between k=1024 and k=1000 aren't confused now. People who don't understand the difference won't understand the new terms.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

d.k.ALlen:
Anonymouse:
There are 8 bits in a byte, yes? This is not a matter of debate.

No... but it is a matter of architecture. On some systems, a byte is either 6 or (sometimes) 9 bits, because the addressing resolution is in words, and the words are 36 bits. (Or 12, 18, etc).

Ah, this brings back fond memories of the PDP-10, where byte size was a parameter in certain instructions.

But I think today the "8" faction has pretty much won the war. If there are systems out there using a byte size other than 8, I haven't heard of them in quite a while.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
Um, no, a 2 megabit ADSL line was always 2048000 bits per second, because the telecoms industry uses decimal thousands -

God, the stupidity. Bandwidth was _always_ measured with Kilo = thousand, Mega = million, and never, ever, any different way. Never.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

jay:
d.k.ALlen:
Anonymouse:
There are 8 bits in a byte, yes? This is not a matter of debate.

No... but it is a matter of architecture. On some systems, a byte is either 6 or (sometimes) 9 bits, because the addressing resolution is in words, and the words are 36 bits. (Or 12, 18, etc).

Ah, this brings back fond memories of the PDP-10, where byte size was a parameter in certain instructions.

But I think today the "8" faction has pretty much won the war. If there are systems out there using a byte size other than 8, I haven't heard of them in quite a while.

http://www.unisys.com/unisys/theme/index.jsp?id=1120000970018010225

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
And for all those of you thinking that all-decimal versus all-binary is the end of the matter, consider telecoms.
A 2 megabit-per-second connection: is that mebibits or megabits?

Answer: neither. It's two kibikilobits, 2KiKb for short.

When I was doing telecom hardware in NZ, we were using synchronous E1, which was described as 2.048Mb/s, and consisted of 32 timeslots of 64kb/s (64000, to carry 8000 audio samples per second coded into 8 bits each for a 4kHz bandwidth). In casual speech it was a 2meg connection, and was nearly always an aggregation of multiple customers. 2 timeslots could be used on a voice line for control, but only one was needed for data. You had to have a really big wallet to get a connection with more than 128kb.

herby · 2013-04-29 Reply Admin

Yes, bytes have had different sizes. On one machine I worked on the size of a byte was two digits (name that machine!).

As for arrays, just accessing the data differently can cause all sorts of (in)efficiencies! I was told (take it for a grain of salt!) that someone was accessing weather data by (in Fortran) holding the first subscript constant and varying the last ones in rapid order. On the VM machine (a Vax?) this made for ALL sorts of swapping. Changing the order of processing to the other way around yielded a speedup of many orders of magnitude.

Of course this is one of those days when you can say "Dimension 1000 you can't lose", back in the day when this would eat up almost ALL your available space (it was a smallish machine, and it was also the 60's).

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

moving through space:
Nagesh:
Obvious WTF is programming in low level languages. Best stick to language like Java and you see less and less WTF every day.
That may be true for a lot of programmers, but if someone didn't use giant printing presses and cutters and packagers to begin with, what would you use to build your house of cards?

Lisp, preferably running on a Lisp machine. A high level language targeting a high-level architecture. Lovely.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

Mike:
MB is a binary erm, end of. The crass stupidity that has led to mibi tibi junk just needs to die. I for one am very stuck in the 90s over this and proud; I will never buckle to the tibi brigade, who will be the first up against the wall come the revolution.
The only people who use decimals in the same context are the liars in the HD marketing departments, who probably have no idea about anything computer or science related anyhow, they just know how to lie to their customers to boost sales.

btw, when it comes to flash drives it's back to good old binary, you would think? But no, those binary sizes are a complete lie too, even a binary array on a silicon chip doesn't work, take a look at the actual number of bytes on any flash drive. They ALL lie.

So, mibi and tibi were invented by liars!

/rant

If you are going to rant about it, at least get it right. The binary prefixes replace the second syllable with "bi" for binary, so they are kibi (you got that one right), mebi, gibi, tebi, pebi, etc.

Coyne · 2013-04-29 Reply Admin

jay:
If someone really struggles with confusion because size prefixes in computer memory mean something different than size prefixes in metric measurement, I can only say that this person must find the world a baffling place.
How is he supposed to insert his new Dodge RAM pickup truck into the RAM slot on his motherboard?

Why is the board game he bought from Milton Bradley, clearly labeled "MB", not one megabyte?

Why did Hormel put a spam filter on their email system? How will they send messages about their flagship product?

Why did his English teacher tell him that his paper should have used bullet points, when school rules specifically prohibit bringing firearms or ammunition on campus?

One could play this game all day long.

Lots of words mean different things in different contexts. Sometimes a person unfamiliar with the alternative meanings is confused. This can usually be cleared up with a 30-second explanation. Sometimes we get a moment's amusement when we notice a double meaning. (Especially if one of the possible meanings has to do with sex.) Most often we don't even notice, shifting from one context to another effortlessly.

This mibi stuff is a solution in search of a problem. People who understand the difference between k=1024 and k=1000 aren't confused now. People who don't understand the difference won't understand the new terms.

This very much coincides with my thoughts on the discussion.

2013-04-29 Reply Admin

Many are saying that this is fine in Linux, but static array declarations are initialized to 0 in C. Won't this declaration require the OS to actually write zeros into all 64 MB?

CarnivorousHippie · 2013-04-30 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
FAIL. "no less than" is a fossilised set phrase, and therefore not subject to the normal rules of 21st Century (or even 20th Century) grammar.

A fixed point in time?

2013-04-30 Reply Admin

herby:
Yes, bytes have had different sizes. On one machine I worked on the size of a byte was two digits (name that machine!).

And hard drives had 20000 sectors of 100 digits each.

And the interrupts were latched in relays, but I don't know if it came that way from IBM or if that was one Waterloo's mods.

2013-04-30 Reply Admin

VinDuv:
modifiable lvalue:
There are no variables in C that have "global" scope. Variables declared at file scope (that is, outside of any functions) have static storage duration. Their scope is valid from the end of the declaration to the end of the translation unit.
No, variables declared outside of functions have external linkage by default, not static storage. If you define "int foo;" into two C files, it will compile fine, but the variable will be shared between the two files. I believe it works differently with a C++ compiler, though.

Variables declared at file scope have both static STORAGE DURATION and external LINKAGE by default (except when declared static). Functions also default to external linkage except when declared static, but they don't have storage durations. In C++ the meaning of static is more dynamic, varying between usage inside a class and outside a class.

In one of last week's discussions, someone clicked and copied an extern on one computer and pasted on another computer. Both computers were on the same planet but globalization FAILED. I hope he got his money back.

2013-04-30 Reply Admin

Boomslang:
And I've never heard anyone say "mebibyte". It sounds stupid,

Of course it sounds stupid. "Call me mebi."

2013-04-30 Reply Admin

One big flee:
The largest flee is about four millimeters.

Are you sure? If I were fleeing, I'm convinced I'd cover more ground than 4mm.

Steve The Cynic · 2013-04-30 Reply Admin

gnasher729:
Steve The Cynic:
Um, no, a 2 megabit ADSL line was always 2048000 bits per second, because the telecoms industry uses decimal thousands -
God, the stupidity. Bandwidth was _always_ measured with Kilo = thousand, Mega = million, and never, ever, any different way. Never.

Yes indeed, except that the thing we consumers call a 2 megabit connection is, indeed, neither 2 mebibit/sec nor 2 megabit/sec (SI style). It is normally 2.048megabits/sec (SI style), or alternatively two kibikilobits/sec.

2013-04-30 Reply Admin

Hi,

Geoff:
Oh just stop it all ready. You MiB people are the problem. MB has been expressed as a power of two in our field since um forever.

I agree - the idea that we could actually improve anything is just plain silly. Instead of merely being inaccurate and/or ambiguous morons, we should strive towards complete meaningless by reviving the traditions of our Neanderthal forefathers and express all measurements by the duration of grunts!

I mean honestly, the idea of using a system of numbers is just too new and too hard. The human race used grunts without any problem for gruuuuuurrrrm years and numbers have only existed for exactly uurgh years, ug months and ook minutes.

Brendan

Hmmmm · 2013-04-30 Reply Admin

Dave:
You even quote the correct spelling, yet still manage to spell it wrong yourself one less than five times.

FTFY

2013-04-30 Reply Admin

Meh. Come over to the Arduino forums. We see this all the time.

Nagesh · 2013-04-30 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
Ironside:
Boomslang:
Nagesh:
Obvious WTF is programming in low level languages. Best stick to language like Java and you see less and less WTF every day.

Quite the opposite. If a programmer never uses a low-level language to, for example, poke hardware or manage memory, he is more likely to make less efficient software, just because he doesn't understand what's going on beneath the hood.

No Nagesh is right (or rather, if you believe such matters are subjective, I agree with Nagesh), programming in low level languages opens the door to a whole slew of novel WTFs that can be avoided by programming in eg Java or C# or even VB.Net, mainly to do with memory management.

In return for avoiding the low-level programming memory management WTFs, the higher-level languages like Java and friends provide a whole slew of memory-management WTFs of their own.
And anyway, TRWTF is that someone agreed with Nagesh.

If you think like parrot, you will not agree with me, but think with logic and use your brain and you will agree with me also.

2013-04-30 Reply Admin

A 2 megabit-per-second connection: is that mebibits or megabits?
Answer: neither. It's two kibikilobits, 2KiKb for short.

Meanwhile, a "56k" connection is 57600 = 56*1028.5714 bits.

2013-04-30 Reply Admin

anon:
Anonymouse:
I think I would be safe in saying that the vast majority of architecture is either Intel, or Intel clones.
I don't think that's actually true. There is a lot of ARM and PowerPC out there that you don't see, because it's controlling your transmission, your wi-fi router, your phone, your cable box, your game console or your coffee pot.
In terms of desktop PCs, Intel rules, but there are a lot more random devices with chips in them than desktop PCs.

True enough. Good point.

2013-04-30 Reply Admin

You are wrong. The binary prefix are an international standard. Look here: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

It's not the size that matters

i.e. 6.962e17 mm^2

medium sized molecule is around 1nm in length, per http://h2g2.com/approved_entry/A791246

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