We use base 10 digits (aka decimal) because we have 10... digits. We use base 10 powers (aka metric) because logarithmic functions are extremely easy in powers of 10 for a base 10 numerical system.
MHz = 1,000,000 hertz, and refers to the clock rate. The clock rate is the number of cycles per second a processor executes. Each cycle is exactly one toggle - either a zero or a one.
Because this is used in the processing of the data, and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with data itself, there is absolutely no way to relate the clock rate to bits or bytes. You can't even compare hertz values between the different families of processors in a brand, let alone get any kind of external relation to bytes.
The only useful measure to relate to hertz is flops. More flops for a given hertz value is better, but even that has little to the byte, which is more related to how you organize the data than how the processor processes it. Bytes are related to memory registers, and don't come into play once the data is sent to the processor in the appropriately sized chunk.
In any case, the 1024 based kilobyte is far more practical for anybody who has to actually deal with the internals of software and computers than the 1000 based kilobyte. It's far less pertinent to everybody else, and if HD manufacturers had stuck to the established kilobyte convention in the first place we would not be having this discussion, because nobody would have been confused. They simple would not have noticed the difference. Seriously, who uses 10^9 bytes to describe anything? Use exabyte, it's close enough for that purpose, and far more useful for every other purpose besides that particular one.
It's only more correct in relation to hard drives.
With this 4gb of ram will not fit in 4gb of hard drive space. It's giving in to goddamn salesmen, and it pisses me off.
Everybody else in the industry uses the 1024 based metric because it makes decimal-binary conversions easier. A 1000 based metric will make decimal-binary conversions incredibly confusing because, I don't know if you know this, but computers are binary.
No, it wasn't. It meant, variously: 1000 bytes, 1024 bytes, 1000 bits, 1024 bits, or "approximately 1000 bits/bytes".
Until hard drive manufactures began referring to 1000 bytes as a "kilobyte", kilobyte meant 2^10 bytes. The 2^10 relates directly to the metric scale. 2^10, or 1024, is the base, and it scales by powers of ten:
Kilobyte is 1024, or 2^10 Megabyte is 1024^2, or 2^20 Gigabyte is 1024^3, or 2^30
Do you see how easy that is to convert between units? Whether I"m talking about decimal or binary, I know exactly what the conversion is. It's easy, just like the rest of the metric system.
Now, lets try it with kilobyte = 1000 shall we?
Kilobyte is now 1000, or 11 1110 1000 Megabyte is now 1000^2, or 1111 0100 0010 0100 0000 Gigabyte is 1000^3, or 11 1011 1001 1010 1100 1010 0000 0000
In other words, it's absolutely fucking useless for unit conversion, which is what the metric system is supposed to make easy.
HD manufacturers have managed to confuse the hell out of the laymen, and now we all have to suffer for it. No thanks.
There was also the goofiness that if you transferred at 64 kbps for 10 seconds, you ended up with 62.5 kb
There are a couple of gotchas on this one, one of which really is a confusing usage which I think originally related to baud rate but was converted when the baud rates and bit rates for modems diverged. 64kbps actually refers to 64,000 bits per second. It would be more appropriately expressed as 64kbit/s. 64kbit/s for 10 seconds is 64,000 kilobits, which is 640,000 bits, 80,000 bytes, or about 78 kilobytes. With TCP/IP overhead and settings it varies but 62.5 kilobytes is well within the normal range for the transfer.
In that case, it's confusing because you didn't know what units you were working with or how the data gets transferred. It's like putting 4 liters of gas in your gas tank and only seeing your gas gauge go up by one gallon, and not realizing that gallons and liters are different sized units.
This stuff is only confusing in decimal. Computers are binary, decimal will always be a little confusing when it's based on binary. The traditional kilobyte standard makes this as easy as possible. Changing it makes things more confusing, not less.
Someone somwhere just ignored the proper definition of kilo and redefined it as 1024
No they didn't, they based it on *drumroll* the metric system! You know what the metric system is, right?
The whole point of the metric system was to make converting among units easy. It's based on powers of 10, so you either shift the decimal point or add powers of ten. Simple right?
Well, how do you do that in a binary system? Why, exactly the same way! The only difference is, being a binary system it must be based on binary to be simple to use. The solution? Tenth powers of 2. It's just as easy to deal with as standard metric systems, but it is actually usable in a binary system.
So, the way you should be looking at it from its actual defined figure in decimal: kilobyte = 2^10, megabyte = 2^20, gigabyte = 2^30.
Seriously, you can convert 2^30 into binary in your head. Put a one down and 29 zeros after it. Done. You now have the gigabyte in binary. Good luck doing that with 1,000,000,000 bytes, I don't know binary nearly well enough to give you that, it's definitely an oddball number.
and then most of us have continued that mistake.
The only mistake we made was in letting hard drive manufacturers redefine the accepted definition of kilobyte so they could sell more hard drives. They got away with it because up into the megabyte range it's only a 3% or smaller difference. However, the percentage grows with each exponent and becomes a bigger and bigger issue.
This is especially visible in Terabyte drives, because they are lying to you about 9% of your drive space. It's really bad when you get up to the yottabyte (1 trillion terabytes), then you're missing out on 20% of what you should be - they're selling you about 200 billion terabytes less than you think they are.
They are the only ones benefiting from all this, and I can't believe the friggin Linux community is going to finally bend over and take it from them.
For those wanting another prefix, well yeah it would have been just as good if they had come up with something unique from the outset, but it probably wouldn't have stuck. Besides, everybody knows that kilobyte at least refers to computers, and everybody who would ever need more detail than that knows that the kilobyte is roughly 1024 bytes in decimal, and everybody who has to use it with any frequency knows it is based on tenth powers of two. The last group of people need it most, and it is very useful to them as tenth powers of two.
Trying to change its usage now to accommodate salesmen instead of scientists is just stupid.
Also, why be so small-minded to think that this only affects people in IT?
Maybe because only people in IT actually have to do anything with the 1024 bit byte? Hell, most people in IT don't even have to deal with.
And for the record, the confusion started with the hard drive manufacturers. There was a standard nomenclature for computer systems, but the fucking salesmen broke from convention to make their hard drives look bigger because they knew dumbasses like you would defend them for it.
Seriously, nobody would be confused at all if drive manufacturers had used the 2^10 convention from the beginning.
The 1,000 byte kilobyte is absolutely useless to anybody who actually has to use it. Seriously, go convert 1024 into binary (you know, that system that all computer components, even hard drives, are based on?) and compare that to 1,000 converted to binary and tell me which is easier and more useful. Then do it again for megabyte and again for gigabytes and tell me which is more useful. I can give you a hint for the traditional CS convention there, you can use 2^10, 2^20, and 2^30 to work it out. You're on your own for the SI convention, there's no easy metric for that.
No, they shouldn't be allowed to make hard drives.
The only reason there has ever been any confusion is because hard drive manufacturers are a bunch of lying salesmen. "10 megabyte hard drive, oh yeah!" *turn on computer, look at drive space* "WTF?! Only 9.765625 megabytes? Where did those bytes go?"
Nowhere Johnny, you got scammed. Feels good don't it?
Careful, some people might want to jump on board that bandwagon.;)
SI isn't the be-all-end-all, I say fuck em. If they really cared about it they would have given us something better 30 years ago, instead of waiting to come up with some half-retarded non-greek based system.
Just deal with it, for heaven's sake. The only reason anybody gets confused by kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, etc. is because hard drive manufacturer's lie. That's it. Everybody who needs to know what it means, knows what it means, and finds it far more useful that it is ten powers of two instead of powers of ten. Seriously.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the N word didn't ever mean anything other than a racial slur.
You are wrong sir, prepare to be corrected.
"Nigger" comes from the Spanish negro, which came from the Latin niger. All three of these words mean, quite literally "black".
It was originally used to describe people with black skin (more formally Negro was used), and it was only after the mass importation of black slaves from Africa (people largely enslaved by other Africans) that the term began to take on a negative connotation, and peaked after slavery was completely abolished when black/white racial tensions were highest.
For a word that began as an epithet but became common non-offensive usage, try Yankee. It was originally "John Cheese", an insult hurled at Dutch-Americans because of the amount of cheese they made. "John Cheese" in Dutch is pronounced "Yahn Kees", which quickly became Yankee.
Obviously Yankee is no longer a racial slur, and neither is Nigger as long as you are black (racist bastards).;)
And just to throw it out there, "kilo" meant 1000 way before nerds started using it to mean 1024.
It's not like they pulled it out of their ass, 1024 is 2^10, megabytes are 2^100, and gigabytes are 2^1000. It was created back when programmers actually did have to deal with individual bits. They used it because "kilobyte" could be pretty simply converted into decimal (2^10 bytes) and binary (100 0000 0000 bytes, 10 0000 0000 0000 bits).
It is an intersection of the metric system between binary and decimal. No, it's never 1,000 no matter how you look at it, but for people who need to use the numbers they are round and easy, which is the whole point of the metric system.
Applying the traditional definition of "kilo" to byte screws over the people who have to actually use the numbers for the convenience of charlatans selling hard drives. 1,000 bytes is 11 1110 1000 in binary, who the hell is that useful for except salesmen?
No matter how you look at kilobyte - either as 1,000 bytes or or 1,024 bytes, it's still just an approximation of the number of bits. It's just that 1,000 bytes is utterly useless when you convert to binary, 1,024 bytes is not.
Incidentally, the reason the 8 bit byte won over the 6 bit and 10 bit bytes is because 8 bits fits cleanly into this setup - a byte is 2^3 bits, kilobyte is 2^13, a megabyte is 2^103, a gigabyte is 2^1003, etc.
Metric bytes as tenth powers of two is the only way to do it that makes any practical sense.
The kilo et. all used in Computer Science are actually based on 10th powers, instead of powers of 10. Once you recognize that, they are practically identical - 2^10, 2^100, 2^1000, etc. Very simple. It also tells you -exactly- what you need to know, because it is a two digit system you are operating on instead of a 10 digit.
Kilobyte = 1000 bytes is just hard drive manufacturers screwing you out of 24 bytes.
The metric system is based on powers of 10. Oddly enough, kilobyte is based on 10 powers of two. Now, you say that isn't the same thing, and you're right. That's because decimal doesn't mesh well with binary, but we understand decimal much better than we do binary.
Kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes are metric representations of binary. 2^10, 2^100, 2^1000, it's the exact same concept. That's why the chose to use kilo, mega, and giga in the first place - because it is conceptually the same thing, and just as easy to understand if you know what it actually means.
disk makers have been using kilo to mean 1000 for years, and it'll probably never be really sorted out.
That's because disk makers have been trying to make their disks look bigger than the actually are for years. Coming up with a new unit that nobody understands, which fucks with the entire nomenclature used throughout the computer, all to accommodate hard drive manufacturers as they try to convince you that they are selling you more than they actually are, is fucking retarded.
Whoever came up with the kibibyte probably works (or worked) for a hard drive manufacturer.
Well, it depends on what you are talking about. The situation is not as clear cut as you depict it. 1 kb on your disk is usually defined as 1024 bits... but 1 kb/s is usually defined as 1000 bits/second. As an example, a 1.5 Gb/s SATA interface is running with a 1.5 GHz clock, so it will transfer 1500000 bits per second (actually, the number of effective bits will be lower as it uses 8b/10b balancing).
That's false.
1 kb/s is defined as 1024 bytes per second. 1 kbps is 1000 bits per second, as is 1 kbit/s. If someone has sold you a 1.5 gb/s SATA interface, they have robbed you blind, as the fastest SATA interfaces in development only run at 6 gbit/s, which is about 40% the speed of your 1.5gb/s interface.
Unfortunately as everytime we leap another 10^3 we're off by another 2.4%, and by the time we get to 10^12 we're off by 10%.
It only looks that way because we aren't leaping by 10^3, we are leaping by 2^10. The byte itself is 2^3.
Notice any similarities? Base your kilos on binary units instead of decimals and kilobytes = 1024 is what you get.
The problem is we are representing binary units in decimal, to make things easier on ourselves, and then trying to treat those units exactly the same as ordinary decimal units. They aren't exactly the same.
If manufacturer's didn't try to fudge their numbers by breaking convention, a "300gb" drive would actually show up as 300gb exactly in your computer. But manufacturers have fooled us. They use the 2^3 byte, just like everybody else, but they don't want to use 2^10 for figuring kilo, mega, and giga like everybody else.
Basically the hard drive manufacturers have been screwing you for years, and you're defending them for it. You don't "lose" 2.4% per 10^3, the HD manufacturers have been lying to you by 2.4% each iteration by breaking the 2^10 convention.
I'm kinda surprised to see that it is the Linux community that has fallen so hard for this deception.
One kilobyte (1024 bytes) is 2^10. One megabyte is 2^100. One gigabyte is 2^1000.
Kilo is 10x10, mega is 10x100, giga is 10x1000. It is simply shifted from a multiplier to a power accommodate the base-2 nature of computers. In fact, the byte itself is 2^3 bits. This structure keeps everything very smooth in binary.
Does that clear things up at all for you? Go ahead and plug 8x1024 into your calculator, then switch over to binary and look at the nice smooth number you get - it looks a lot like the pretty base-10 SI system doesn't it?
Kilobyte = 1024 bytes follows the definition correctly, people just misunderstand that "bytes" are a type of decimal representation of binary units. If you look at it in the correct set of units, you see that it is absolutely right. It has also been around for 30 years, why change it? While it makes no real difference for hard drive manufacturers (magnetic disk, anyway, it does make a difference for SSDs), why change 30 years of convention? A convention which does, actually, follow the definition?
While everything you say is true, there is some measure of security in the fact that at the device level, you are working with the equivalent of multiple operating systems.
A virus writer infecting both your primary OS and a device on your system must have intimate knowledge of both the primary OS and the device's firmware. The first is not hard, 95% of people use the same brand with only a handful of widely used platforms. The second though, varies wildly, and it would be extremely unlikely that a virus for one brand/model device would work on another brand, and even differing models within the same brand.
That doesn't make it impossible, just extremely unlikely. If a particular brand of a common device were ever to absolutely dominate the market I could see it becoming a major concern. Another possibility is if multiple devices become standardized under a unified "device OS" upon which the firmware runs, instead of running directly on top of the hardware. Until then, it's extremely unlikely that you would ever come in contact with such a virus.
That or give them a guaranteed end date with penalties for going over. Either one works great.
The biggest thing though, is knowing what you want/need ahead of time. More than likely the reason the project is still going on today is not because the contractors have been milking it (even though I'm sure they have been).
This project has scope creep written all over it, and the best written contracts with the most honest and efficient company in the world will not be able to finish a project where the scope is perpetually changing. It is impossible by definition.
It sounds like they contracted out all the project management, which means they probably did not empower those PM's with the ability to cancel all or part of the project. They then likely allowed multiple departments to make "suggestions" which the PMs were forced to accommodate. The cycle is vicious, and it takes a strong, honest, and empowered project manager to prevent it.
When the NYC government requests a change, and the consultant says "We can do that, but it will cost another $100 million", and the government signs the contract adjustment, you cannot blame the consultant. Period.
To put it another way, there is no way the government can pay out $700 million on a contract without the government approving the cost.
This has nothing to do with "smaller" government and everything to do with exactly what you expect to be doing when you enter the working world as one of the "masses".
You're both wrong, but the GP is closer to right than you are, I'm sorry to say.
This situation is caused by large bureaucracies. In many cases (most, more like it), project managers are not permitted to be competent by the bureaucracy they operate under. This situation can be seen over and over in both large government bureaucracies and smaller private sector bureaucracy.
The only way to solve it is with more direct management - i.e. less bureaucracy. In this sense, smaller government would definitely help the situation, because you would have fewer barriers to success. What this project needs is for someone to own up and say "This may have been a good idea, but it has gone wrong, and it is better to cancel the project with nothing than to continue it and waste more money on nothing." That takes power - in a bureaucracy the power is too spread out to make that kind of call, nobody would risk it. The person who does will probably find himself no longer moving up the ladder. With one person in charge, the guy who makes such a call may even get a raise for having made such a tough decision. In a bureaucracy it's all about hiding failures and avoiding blame - that's how you move up.
It's a culture that very naturally develops in all bureaucracies, and the only way to fix it is to trim them down. That is simply not possible beyond a certain point in any large organization. The only way to trim further is to split into smaller organizations.
How hard can it be to program a computerized timekeeping and payroll system.
Answer: difficult, but definitely doable in a reasonable time frame.
However, you've obviously never worked on a big bureaucracy-driven project before, because you've asked the wrong question.
Here's the correct question:
How hard is it to program a computerized timekeeping and payroll system when the fundamental requirements change on a monthly basis, individual design changes are made weekly, all because there are fifteen project managers who believe they own the project, since the primary project manager who actually does own the project spends all of his time in asinine meetings with his bosses and doesn't know what the hell is going on?
Answer: virtually impossible.
All that situation needs are a bunch of blind fools in upper management to keep approving the extensions and cost overruns and you have the NYC CityTime project.
It happens all the time in any sufficiently large bureaucracy, and the NYC government is definitely a sufficiently large bureaucracy. Note that this is not a private/public problem, it's a bureaucracy problem. The exact same thing happens to projects in large corporations (I work in a top 100 corporation and see this kind of thing happen all the time, though they are usually much quicker to pull the plug on a project than NYC is in this case).
Well, sure you would make sure this project never finishes, IF you wanted to be known in the industry as one of the 230 most evil and corrupt consultants on the entire planet.
Why would that matter when the government is going to keep paying your salary at 5 times market value? In 10 years you'd make as much money with a bad reputation as you would in 50 years with a good reputation.
I really don't see a poor reputation being the major factor here.
You are trolling but you are not aware of it because you got a blind spot. Remember those banks that collapsed and took the whole economy with them? Private industry and filled with excessive salaries and people who get golden parachutes when they are "let go".
Had the free market been allowed to work as it should, none of those golden parachutes would have been paid out.
Instead we propped them up and allowed them - no encouraged them to rob us blind. Dumbasses.
Yeah, the economy would have collapsed, and it would have sucked. But you know what? The fundamentals of economics don't change because someone fucked up. Where one company fails by making foolish decisions, another succeeds by making great decisions. What you end up with when the economy collapses is a country full of companies that made the correct decisions, because those are the only ones that would survive. Even in the midst of the banking crisis there were a number of banks who stood out as being rock solid for not making the foolish decisions other banks made. How did we reward them for doing the right thing? Why, we gave their failing competition free money to make sure they could still compete in spite of their foolish decisions! What fools are we?
Things would have sucked for a year or two, and things would definitely be very different today, but it wouldn't have taken very long for us to be better off than we were before. So instead of things sucking a lot for a short while, things are going to suck a little bit less for a very long time. Great choice.
It isn't fraud on the part of the consultants if the project is poorly managed. They charge what they charge, and if there is nobody saying "This is what the project covers, anything else needs to be a separate project with its own approvals and a separate budget." then it is 100% the fault of the program manager, who works for the government.
It's called scope creep, and it can raise costs astronomically. For example, I know of a project right now that is in the $10 million range that started out as a simple $300,000 parts change. It start as "Such and such needs to be upgraded, so we'll do X and it will be done." Then someone comes along with the bright idea "Well, if you're going to do X, you might as well just do Y instead." Y doubles the cost of the project, but we want it, right? Ok, fine. Then someone comes along and says "Well, if you are going to go ahead and do Y, it only makes sense to do M at the same time." M, of course, doubles the cost of the project. Well, the project is becoming complicated, so we need to hire an engineering firm (which is actually just one guy, but he's really good) to design the system. He charges $150 an hour for his time. He has spent a month designing the system, is essentially finished, when someone in another division gets wind of the project and goes to management with "Well, if they are doing M now, it's a perfect opportunity to do J at the same time and kill two birds with one stone!" This is apparently only a minor cost, but it does mean the engineer has to re-design the system.
We are now into the several million dollar range, and guess what? We just discovered that by starting work on J we have compliance issues, which means we need a team of third-party analysts to come in and determine if the final system will be in compliance with state and local regulations. Now things are getting complicated, you have to bring in a work planner (who charges $50 an hour) on top of everyone else just to keep things running smoothly. And guess what? If that $150 engineer is held up because of someone else's problem he's still charging his time.
Before long you've spent $10 million on a $300,000 project and have absolutely nothing to show for it. Oh yeah and that engineer has made over $300,000 in the year this project has gone on (remember he originally finished it in a month, but it changed).
I guarantee this is almost the exact same scenario for this time system debacle. Don't blame the consultants, it's rarely truly their fault beyond the final delivery of a shoddy product. They'll only be doing exactly what you tell them to. If what you tell them changes from week to week, expect the project to never end and expect a huge bill. They were just smart enough to charge a high enough rate that they could ride the chaos generated by poor project management and pad their bank accounts with other people's incompetence.
They aren't necessarily doing anything wrong, or even unethical. The whole thing is almost certainly not entirely their fault, if at all.
Remember this with regards to project management: Quality assurance is the responsibility of the vendor (the consultants), quality control is the responsibility of the customer (NYC). If the consultants really were scamming the government, the PM should have been refusing payment years ago. More likely, the PM is incompetent and kept changing the scope or allowing others to change the scope, preventing the consultants from actually finishing the job. It's much more common than it should be, and no matter the situation the buck stops with the project manager, not the consultant.
What's truly amazing is that the upper management kept approving the massive budget for this obviously failing project.
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We use base 10 because we have ten fingers.
We use base 10 digits (aka decimal) because we have 10... digits. We use base 10 powers (aka metric) because logarithmic functions are extremely easy in powers of 10 for a base 10 numerical system.
That's what the GP meant.
Wrong again. Never heard of MHz and GHz?
I thought you were doing great until this point.
MHz = 1,000,000 hertz, and refers to the clock rate. The clock rate is the number of cycles per second a processor executes. Each cycle is exactly one toggle - either a zero or a one.
Because this is used in the processing of the data, and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with data itself, there is absolutely no way to relate the clock rate to bits or bytes. You can't even compare hertz values between the different families of processors in a brand, let alone get any kind of external relation to bytes.
The only useful measure to relate to hertz is flops. More flops for a given hertz value is better, but even that has little to the byte, which is more related to how you organize the data than how the processor processes it. Bytes are related to memory registers, and don't come into play once the data is sent to the processor in the appropriately sized chunk.
In any case, the 1024 based kilobyte is far more practical for anybody who has to actually deal with the internals of software and computers than the 1000 based kilobyte. It's far less pertinent to everybody else, and if HD manufacturers had stuck to the established kilobyte convention in the first place we would not be having this discussion, because nobody would have been confused. They simple would not have noticed the difference. Seriously, who uses 10^9 bytes to describe anything? Use exabyte, it's close enough for that purpose, and far more useful for every other purpose besides that particular one.
It's only more correct in relation to hard drives.
With this 4gb of ram will not fit in 4gb of hard drive space. It's giving in to goddamn salesmen, and it pisses me off.
Everybody else in the industry uses the 1024 based metric because it makes decimal-binary conversions easier. A 1000 based metric will make decimal-binary conversions incredibly confusing because, I don't know if you know this, but computers are binary.
The metric should therefore be based on binary.
No, it wasn't. It meant, variously: 1000 bytes, 1024 bytes, 1000 bits, 1024 bits, or "approximately 1000 bits/bytes".
Until hard drive manufactures began referring to 1000 bytes as a "kilobyte", kilobyte meant 2^10 bytes. The 2^10 relates directly to the metric scale. 2^10, or 1024, is the base, and it scales by powers of ten:
Kilobyte is 1024, or 2^10
Megabyte is 1024^2, or 2^20
Gigabyte is 1024^3, or 2^30
Do you see how easy that is to convert between units? Whether I"m talking about decimal or binary, I know exactly what the conversion is. It's easy, just like the rest of the metric system.
Now, lets try it with kilobyte = 1000 shall we?
Kilobyte is now 1000, or 11 1110 1000
Megabyte is now 1000^2, or 1111 0100 0010 0100 0000
Gigabyte is 1000^3, or 11 1011 1001 1010 1100 1010 0000 0000
In other words, it's absolutely fucking useless for unit conversion, which is what the metric system is supposed to make easy.
HD manufacturers have managed to confuse the hell out of the laymen, and now we all have to suffer for it. No thanks.
There was also the goofiness that if you transferred at 64 kbps for 10 seconds, you ended up with 62.5 kb
There are a couple of gotchas on this one, one of which really is a confusing usage which I think originally related to baud rate but was converted when the baud rates and bit rates for modems diverged. 64kbps actually refers to 64,000 bits per second. It would be more appropriately expressed as 64kbit/s. 64kbit/s for 10 seconds is 64,000 kilobits, which is 640,000 bits, 80,000 bytes, or about 78 kilobytes. With TCP/IP overhead and settings it varies but 62.5 kilobytes is well within the normal range for the transfer.
In that case, it's confusing because you didn't know what units you were working with or how the data gets transferred. It's like putting 4 liters of gas in your gas tank and only seeing your gas gauge go up by one gallon, and not realizing that gallons and liters are different sized units.
This stuff is only confusing in decimal. Computers are binary, decimal will always be a little confusing when it's based on binary. The traditional kilobyte standard makes this as easy as possible. Changing it makes things more confusing, not less.
What are you smoking? 1kb has always been 1 kilobyte. When we want to refer to bits, we say 1kbit.
Someone somwhere just ignored the proper definition of kilo and redefined it as 1024
No they didn't, they based it on *drumroll* the metric system! You know what the metric system is, right?
The whole point of the metric system was to make converting among units easy. It's based on powers of 10, so you either shift the decimal point or add powers of ten. Simple right?
Well, how do you do that in a binary system? Why, exactly the same way! The only difference is, being a binary system it must be based on binary to be simple to use. The solution? Tenth powers of 2. It's just as easy to deal with as standard metric systems, but it is actually usable in a binary system.
So, the way you should be looking at it from its actual defined figure in decimal: kilobyte = 2^10, megabyte = 2^20, gigabyte = 2^30.
Seriously, you can convert 2^30 into binary in your head. Put a one down and 29 zeros after it. Done. You now have the gigabyte in binary. Good luck doing that with 1,000,000,000 bytes, I don't know binary nearly well enough to give you that, it's definitely an oddball number.
and then most of us have continued that mistake.
The only mistake we made was in letting hard drive manufacturers redefine the accepted definition of kilobyte so they could sell more hard drives. They got away with it because up into the megabyte range it's only a 3% or smaller difference. However, the percentage grows with each exponent and becomes a bigger and bigger issue.
This is especially visible in Terabyte drives, because they are lying to you about 9% of your drive space. It's really bad when you get up to the yottabyte (1 trillion terabytes), then you're missing out on 20% of what you should be - they're selling you about 200 billion terabytes less than you think they are.
They are the only ones benefiting from all this, and I can't believe the friggin Linux community is going to finally bend over and take it from them.
For those wanting another prefix, well yeah it would have been just as good if they had come up with something unique from the outset, but it probably wouldn't have stuck. Besides, everybody knows that kilobyte at least refers to computers, and everybody who would ever need more detail than that knows that the kilobyte is roughly 1024 bytes in decimal, and everybody who has to use it with any frequency knows it is based on tenth powers of two. The last group of people need it most, and it is very useful to them as tenth powers of two.
Trying to change its usage now to accommodate salesmen instead of scientists is just stupid.
Also, why be so small-minded to think that this only affects people in IT?
Maybe because only people in IT actually have to do anything with the 1024 bit byte? Hell, most people in IT don't even have to deal with.
And for the record, the confusion started with the hard drive manufacturers. There was a standard nomenclature for computer systems, but the fucking salesmen broke from convention to make their hard drives look bigger because they knew dumbasses like you would defend them for it.
Seriously, nobody would be confused at all if drive manufacturers had used the 2^10 convention from the beginning.
The 1,000 byte kilobyte is absolutely useless to anybody who actually has to use it. Seriously, go convert 1024 into binary (you know, that system that all computer components, even hard drives, are based on?) and compare that to 1,000 converted to binary and tell me which is easier and more useful. Then do it again for megabyte and again for gigabytes and tell me which is more useful. I can give you a hint for the traditional CS convention there, you can use 2^10, 2^20, and 2^30 to work it out. You're on your own for the SI convention, there's no easy metric for that.
No, they shouldn't be allowed to make hard drives.
The only reason there has ever been any confusion is because hard drive manufacturers are a bunch of lying salesmen. "10 megabyte hard drive, oh yeah!" *turn on computer, look at drive space* "WTF?! Only 9.765625 megabytes? Where did those bytes go?"
Nowhere Johnny, you got scammed. Feels good don't it?
Careful, some people might want to jump on board that bandwagon. ;)
SI isn't the be-all-end-all, I say fuck em. If they really cared about it they would have given us something better 30 years ago, instead of waiting to come up with some half-retarded non-greek based system.
Just deal with it, for heaven's sake. The only reason anybody gets confused by kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, etc. is because hard drive manufacturer's lie. That's it. Everybody who needs to know what it means, knows what it means, and finds it far more useful that it is ten powers of two instead of powers of ten. Seriously.
This kibi bullshit is retarded.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the N word didn't ever mean anything other than a racial slur.
You are wrong sir, prepare to be corrected.
"Nigger" comes from the Spanish negro, which came from the Latin niger. All three of these words mean, quite literally "black".
It was originally used to describe people with black skin (more formally Negro was used), and it was only after the mass importation of black slaves from Africa (people largely enslaved by other Africans) that the term began to take on a negative connotation, and peaked after slavery was completely abolished when black/white racial tensions were highest.
For a word that began as an epithet but became common non-offensive usage, try Yankee. It was originally "John Cheese", an insult hurled at Dutch-Americans because of the amount of cheese they made. "John Cheese" in Dutch is pronounced "Yahn Kees", which quickly became Yankee.
Obviously Yankee is no longer a racial slur, and neither is Nigger as long as you are black (racist bastards). ;)
And just to throw it out there, "kilo" meant 1000 way before nerds started using it to mean 1024.
It's not like they pulled it out of their ass, 1024 is 2^10, megabytes are 2^100, and gigabytes are 2^1000. It was created back when programmers actually did have to deal with individual bits. They used it because "kilobyte" could be pretty simply converted into decimal (2^10 bytes) and binary (100 0000 0000 bytes, 10 0000 0000 0000 bits).
It is an intersection of the metric system between binary and decimal. No, it's never 1,000 no matter how you look at it, but for people who need to use the numbers they are round and easy, which is the whole point of the metric system.
Applying the traditional definition of "kilo" to byte screws over the people who have to actually use the numbers for the convenience of charlatans selling hard drives. 1,000 bytes is 11 1110 1000 in binary, who the hell is that useful for except salesmen?
No matter how you look at kilobyte - either as 1,000 bytes or or 1,024 bytes, it's still just an approximation of the number of bits. It's just that 1,000 bytes is utterly useless when you convert to binary, 1,024 bytes is not.
Incidentally, the reason the 8 bit byte won over the 6 bit and 10 bit bytes is because 8 bits fits cleanly into this setup - a byte is 2^3 bits, kilobyte is 2^13, a megabyte is 2^103, a gigabyte is 2^1003, etc.
Metric bytes as tenth powers of two is the only way to do it that makes any practical sense.
The kilo et. all used in Computer Science are actually based on 10th powers, instead of powers of 10. Once you recognize that, they are practically identical - 2^10, 2^100, 2^1000, etc. Very simple. It also tells you -exactly- what you need to know, because it is a two digit system you are operating on instead of a 10 digit.
Kilobyte = 1000 bytes is just hard drive manufacturers screwing you out of 24 bytes.
SI doesn't own kilo, Greek does.
The metric system is based on powers of 10. Oddly enough, kilobyte is based on 10 powers of two. Now, you say that isn't the same thing, and you're right. That's because decimal doesn't mesh well with binary, but we understand decimal much better than we do binary.
Kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes are metric representations of binary. 2^10, 2^100, 2^1000, it's the exact same concept. That's why the chose to use kilo, mega, and giga in the first place - because it is conceptually the same thing, and just as easy to understand if you know what it actually means.
disk makers have been using kilo to mean 1000 for years, and it'll probably never be really sorted out.
That's because disk makers have been trying to make their disks look bigger than the actually are for years. Coming up with a new unit that nobody understands, which fucks with the entire nomenclature used throughout the computer, all to accommodate hard drive manufacturers as they try to convince you that they are selling you more than they actually are, is fucking retarded.
Whoever came up with the kibibyte probably works (or worked) for a hard drive manufacturer.
Well, it depends on what you are talking about. The situation is not as clear cut as you depict it.
1 kb on your disk is usually defined as 1024 bits... but 1 kb/s is usually defined as 1000 bits/second. As an example, a 1.5 Gb/s SATA interface is running with a 1.5 GHz clock, so it will transfer 1500000 bits per second (actually, the number of effective bits will be lower as it uses 8b/10b balancing).
That's false.
1 kb/s is defined as 1024 bytes per second. 1 kbps is 1000 bits per second, as is 1 kbit/s. If someone has sold you a 1.5 gb/s SATA interface, they have robbed you blind, as the fastest SATA interfaces in development only run at 6 gbit/s, which is about 40% the speed of your 1.5gb/s interface.
This might help you out a little bit.
Unfortunately as everytime we leap another 10^3 we're off by another 2.4%, and by the time we get to 10^12 we're off by 10%.
It only looks that way because we aren't leaping by 10^3, we are leaping by 2^10. The byte itself is 2^3.
Notice any similarities? Base your kilos on binary units instead of decimals and kilobytes = 1024 is what you get.
The problem is we are representing binary units in decimal, to make things easier on ourselves, and then trying to treat those units exactly the same as ordinary decimal units. They aren't exactly the same.
If manufacturer's didn't try to fudge their numbers by breaking convention, a "300gb" drive would actually show up as 300gb exactly in your computer. But manufacturers have fooled us. They use the 2^3 byte, just like everybody else, but they don't want to use 2^10 for figuring kilo, mega, and giga like everybody else.
Basically the hard drive manufacturers have been screwing you for years, and you're defending them for it. You don't "lose" 2.4% per 10^3, the HD manufacturers have been lying to you by 2.4% each iteration by breaking the 2^10 convention.
I'm kinda surprised to see that it is the Linux community that has fallen so hard for this deception.
One kilobyte (1024 bytes) is 2^10. One megabyte is 2^100. One gigabyte is 2^1000.
Kilo is 10x10, mega is 10x100, giga is 10x1000. It is simply shifted from a multiplier to a power accommodate the base-2 nature of computers. In fact, the byte itself is 2^3 bits. This structure keeps everything very smooth in binary.
Does that clear things up at all for you? Go ahead and plug 8x1024 into your calculator, then switch over to binary and look at the nice smooth number you get - it looks a lot like the pretty base-10 SI system doesn't it?
Kilobyte = 1024 bytes follows the definition correctly, people just misunderstand that "bytes" are a type of decimal representation of binary units. If you look at it in the correct set of units, you see that it is absolutely right. It has also been around for 30 years, why change it? While it makes no real difference for hard drive manufacturers (magnetic disk, anyway, it does make a difference for SSDs), why change 30 years of convention? A convention which does, actually, follow the definition?
While everything you say is true, there is some measure of security in the fact that at the device level, you are working with the equivalent of multiple operating systems.
A virus writer infecting both your primary OS and a device on your system must have intimate knowledge of both the primary OS and the device's firmware. The first is not hard, 95% of people use the same brand with only a handful of widely used platforms. The second though, varies wildly, and it would be extremely unlikely that a virus for one brand/model device would work on another brand, and even differing models within the same brand.
That doesn't make it impossible, just extremely unlikely. If a particular brand of a common device were ever to absolutely dominate the market I could see it becoming a major concern. Another possibility is if multiple devices become standardized under a unified "device OS" upon which the firmware runs, instead of running directly on top of the hardware. Until then, it's extremely unlikely that you would ever come in contact with such a virus.
That or give them a guaranteed end date with penalties for going over. Either one works great.
The biggest thing though, is knowing what you want/need ahead of time. More than likely the reason the project is still going on today is not because the contractors have been milking it (even though I'm sure they have been).
This project has scope creep written all over it, and the best written contracts with the most honest and efficient company in the world will not be able to finish a project where the scope is perpetually changing. It is impossible by definition.
It sounds like they contracted out all the project management, which means they probably did not empower those PM's with the ability to cancel all or part of the project. They then likely allowed multiple departments to make "suggestions" which the PMs were forced to accommodate. The cycle is vicious, and it takes a strong, honest, and empowered project manager to prevent it.
When the NYC government requests a change, and the consultant says "We can do that, but it will cost another $100 million", and the government signs the contract adjustment, you cannot blame the consultant. Period.
To put it another way, there is no way the government can pay out $700 million on a contract without the government approving the cost.
This has nothing to do with "smaller" government and everything to do with exactly what you expect to be doing when you enter the working world as one of the "masses".
You're both wrong, but the GP is closer to right than you are, I'm sorry to say.
This situation is caused by large bureaucracies. In many cases (most, more like it), project managers are not permitted to be competent by the bureaucracy they operate under. This situation can be seen over and over in both large government bureaucracies and smaller private sector bureaucracy.
The only way to solve it is with more direct management - i.e. less bureaucracy. In this sense, smaller government would definitely help the situation, because you would have fewer barriers to success. What this project needs is for someone to own up and say "This may have been a good idea, but it has gone wrong, and it is better to cancel the project with nothing than to continue it and waste more money on nothing." That takes power - in a bureaucracy the power is too spread out to make that kind of call, nobody would risk it. The person who does will probably find himself no longer moving up the ladder. With one person in charge, the guy who makes such a call may even get a raise for having made such a tough decision. In a bureaucracy it's all about hiding failures and avoiding blame - that's how you move up.
It's a culture that very naturally develops in all bureaucracies, and the only way to fix it is to trim them down. That is simply not possible beyond a certain point in any large organization. The only way to trim further is to split into smaller organizations.
How hard can it be to program a computerized timekeeping and payroll system.
Answer: difficult, but definitely doable in a reasonable time frame.
However, you've obviously never worked on a big bureaucracy-driven project before, because you've asked the wrong question.
Here's the correct question:
How hard is it to program a computerized timekeeping and payroll system when the fundamental requirements change on a monthly basis, individual design changes are made weekly, all because there are fifteen project managers who believe they own the project, since the primary project manager who actually does own the project spends all of his time in asinine meetings with his bosses and doesn't know what the hell is going on?
Answer: virtually impossible.
All that situation needs are a bunch of blind fools in upper management to keep approving the extensions and cost overruns and you have the NYC CityTime project.
It happens all the time in any sufficiently large bureaucracy, and the NYC government is definitely a sufficiently large bureaucracy. Note that this is not a private/public problem, it's a bureaucracy problem. The exact same thing happens to projects in large corporations (I work in a top 100 corporation and see this kind of thing happen all the time, though they are usually much quicker to pull the plug on a project than NYC is in this case).
Well, sure you would make sure this project never finishes, IF you wanted to be known in the industry as one of the 230 most evil and corrupt consultants on the entire planet.
Why would that matter when the government is going to keep paying your salary at 5 times market value? In 10 years you'd make as much money with a bad reputation as you would in 50 years with a good reputation.
I really don't see a poor reputation being the major factor here.
public sector is incompetent but at least its well meaning incompetence
private sector is incompetence combined with greed
ill take the first one
I don't see the difference, and I would fire both if I could.
At least I have the option to fire the second.
You are trolling but you are not aware of it because you got a blind spot. Remember those banks that collapsed and took the whole economy with them? Private industry and filled with excessive salaries and people who get golden parachutes when they are "let go".
Had the free market been allowed to work as it should, none of those golden parachutes would have been paid out.
Instead we propped them up and allowed them - no encouraged them to rob us blind. Dumbasses.
Yeah, the economy would have collapsed, and it would have sucked. But you know what? The fundamentals of economics don't change because someone fucked up. Where one company fails by making foolish decisions, another succeeds by making great decisions. What you end up with when the economy collapses is a country full of companies that made the correct decisions, because those are the only ones that would survive. Even in the midst of the banking crisis there were a number of banks who stood out as being rock solid for not making the foolish decisions other banks made. How did we reward them for doing the right thing? Why, we gave their failing competition free money to make sure they could still compete in spite of their foolish decisions! What fools are we?
Things would have sucked for a year or two, and things would definitely be very different today, but it wouldn't have taken very long for us to be better off than we were before. So instead of things sucking a lot for a short while, things are going to suck a little bit less for a very long time. Great choice.
It isn't fraud on the part of the consultants if the project is poorly managed. They charge what they charge, and if there is nobody saying "This is what the project covers, anything else needs to be a separate project with its own approvals and a separate budget." then it is 100% the fault of the program manager, who works for the government.
It's called scope creep, and it can raise costs astronomically. For example, I know of a project right now that is in the $10 million range that started out as a simple $300,000 parts change. It start as "Such and such needs to be upgraded, so we'll do X and it will be done." Then someone comes along with the bright idea "Well, if you're going to do X, you might as well just do Y instead." Y doubles the cost of the project, but we want it, right? Ok, fine. Then someone comes along and says "Well, if you are going to go ahead and do Y, it only makes sense to do M at the same time." M, of course, doubles the cost of the project. Well, the project is becoming complicated, so we need to hire an engineering firm (which is actually just one guy, but he's really good) to design the system. He charges $150 an hour for his time. He has spent a month designing the system, is essentially finished, when someone in another division gets wind of the project and goes to management with "Well, if they are doing M now, it's a perfect opportunity to do J at the same time and kill two birds with one stone!" This is apparently only a minor cost, but it does mean the engineer has to re-design the system.
We are now into the several million dollar range, and guess what? We just discovered that by starting work on J we have compliance issues, which means we need a team of third-party analysts to come in and determine if the final system will be in compliance with state and local regulations. Now things are getting complicated, you have to bring in a work planner (who charges $50 an hour) on top of everyone else just to keep things running smoothly. And guess what? If that $150 engineer is held up because of someone else's problem he's still charging his time.
Before long you've spent $10 million on a $300,000 project and have absolutely nothing to show for it. Oh yeah and that engineer has made over $300,000 in the year this project has gone on (remember he originally finished it in a month, but it changed).
I guarantee this is almost the exact same scenario for this time system debacle. Don't blame the consultants, it's rarely truly their fault beyond the final delivery of a shoddy product. They'll only be doing exactly what you tell them to. If what you tell them changes from week to week, expect the project to never end and expect a huge bill. They were just smart enough to charge a high enough rate that they could ride the chaos generated by poor project management and pad their bank accounts with other people's incompetence.
They aren't necessarily doing anything wrong, or even unethical. The whole thing is almost certainly not entirely their fault, if at all.
Remember this with regards to project management: Quality assurance is the responsibility of the vendor (the consultants), quality control is the responsibility of the customer (NYC). If the consultants really were scamming the government, the PM should have been refusing payment years ago. More likely, the PM is incompetent and kept changing the scope or allowing others to change the scope, preventing the consultants from actually finishing the job. It's much more common than it should be, and no matter the situation the buck stops with the project manager, not the consultant.
What's truly amazing is that the upper management kept approving the massive budget for this obviously failing project.
Correctly written these updaters would use essentially no resources at all while loaded, unfortunately that is not the case.
You could have 50 of them running and not doing anything, but no, can't do that can we?