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RE[4]: Comment by abstraction
by Alfman on Wed 2nd Jan 2013 16:26
in reply to "RE[3]: Comment by abstraction"
"If going back to the 80:s and before that, Mb was only one thing, 2^20, but most of us only mattered about Kb at that time."
It's always depended on the context, unfortunately. Everyone probably knows that "16 megabytes" of ram means 2^24 because of the binary nature of ram, but with disks it's not obvious and with networking it's supposed to be normal SI units.
Ironically even your post has me second guessing because contextually you probably meant megabytes and kilobytes, but the lowercase 'b' indicates bits. The case is significant.




Member since:
2008-01-31
Alfman,
I know about all this.
What I am saying is just that it is a lot of different words we are using, that are redefined over time.
If going back to the 80:s and before that, Mb was only one thing, 2^20, but most of us only mattered about Kb at that time.
So the point is that it is a problem to know these days what somebody actually means, with everything that measures things such as speed and storage etc. But in recent years I would say that the same things starts to happening with definitions like operating system, programming language, applications etc. etc.
Nobody really differs between tools and apps any more.
Different packaging of Linux has become different operating systems.
Writing HTLM has became programming.
So my only point really is that from my point of view.
The heading of this article is wrong. It's not about a new operating system, it's a Linux preconfigured to perform a certain way, combined with applications like virtual machine etc.