Re: Lua short reference part 1 - draft 1 (OT)

[Clemens Wacha <clemens.wacha@...>]

Am Die, den 09.03.2004 schrieb Jamie Webb um 12:05:
> On Tuesday 09 March 2004 00:15, RLake@oxfam.org.pe wrote:
> > Jamie Webb escribió:
> > >  Not entirely out of our field. Raw hard drive capacity for example is
> >
> > always
> >
> > > quoted in MiB.
> >
> > Not so. Raw hard drive capacity is always quoted in mega = 10^6 or giga =
> > 10^9 bytes.
> > RAM, on the other hand, is almost always quoted in mibi = 2^20 or gibi =
> > 2^30 bytes.

Actually its very simple.
Bits are only 0 and 1 so they are just counted. 1 Mega bit is therefore
10^6 bits

With bytes its different. Because one byte is 2^3 Bits they are usually
counted in powers of 2

In the majority of the cases if someone speaks of bits he thinks in
powers of 10 and if he speaks of bytes he thinks in power of 2

As always there are exceptions
1. The classical 1.44M Floppy 
2. as already mentioned: Hard Drives because they are "getting bigger"
if their size is given in powers of 10 :-) Bigger harddrives sell
better.

If I was you I would always write KB for 1024 bytes MB for 1024KB. In
other words: since lua has nothing to do with network you will never
need to write in (mega/kilo) bits so always write in power of 2 and
define that in a footnote.

Regards
Clemens
-- 
Clemens Wacha           wacha@gmx.ch           ICQ:12620942

proudly running Debian/GNU Linux. See http://www.debian.org