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The definition of an operating system has not changed I believe.
But since more and more people that are not professionals are using the same vocabulary, it tends to redefine it self over time.
Today OS it's often used to describe distributions of Linux, or some times a predefined system configuration (like this is).
We have the same problem with the prefixes mega and giga.
You seldom know today if people actually mean the real base 2 mega and giga or the base 10.
Maybe we should invent a prefix to use when we actually mean what we write, like BD-Mb, or BD-OS where BD stands for By Definition 
iLikeOS,
"Maybe we should invent a prefix to use when we actually mean what we write, like BD-Mb, or BD-OS where BD stands for By Definition
"
You know we do have separate binary and decimal notations?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte
1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes
1 MiB = 2^20 (1,048,576) bytes
Alas, not many people seem to know about this, and therefore the binary variants don't get much use.
Edit: The two are sufficiently close that it doesn't matter that much in most contexts, but I get really peeved when MB/s mBps and mbps get interchanged because that mistake forces us to second guess between values which differ by a factor of 8 for bits and bytes. When talking about network transfer speeds, they're both plausible and they're both in common usage.
Edited 2013-01-01 19:42 UTC





Member since:
2008-11-27
If that is an operating system, what do we these days call the thing that was previously known as an operating system?