A Technical History of Apple's Operating Systems

Segin segin2005 at gmail.com
Thu Jul 27 11:14:42 CDT 2006


Allison wrote:
> Dave Dunfield wrote:
> 
>>> Although according to the author the 6502 can address 65K, not 64K.
>>
>>
>> This is very common, and is based on an assumption of 'k' meaning
>> 1000 (decimal), not 1024 - 16 bit bus - 65535 bytes (65 thousand).
>> I've seen it in data sheets and other reasonably technically accurate
>> material - I guess it depends on your point of view (and how low-level
>> your experience is :-)
>>
>> Hard drive manufacturers have been doing the same thing with "meg"
>> for years - specing in decimal 1,000,000 makes the drive sound bigger
>> than specing in 2**20 sized blocks.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Dave
> 
> 
> For engineers and techs in electronics K=1000 as in 10k resistor 
> (nominally 10,000 ohms) and Meg=1,000,000  we also have the 10-n value 
> of milli, micro,
> nano and pico to name a few and they are all powers of 10.  In 
> programming/computer context only do K=1024 and M=1048576.  This leads to
> much confusion as a result for those that a marginally technical.  As a 
> result
> in documentation I tend to insist that some context help such as 
> K_bytes_ or
> Meg_ohms_ be there to keep some sense of If it's powers of 10 or 2.
> 
> Whats a millibyte? Saw that once!
> 
> 
> Allison
> 
> 
Most of the confugion is by idiot's that don't know what the fuck S.I. 
means.

-- 
The real problem with C++ for kernel modules is: the language just sucks.
	-- Linus Torvalds


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