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Gb abbreviates gigabit or gigabyte? What does GB abbreviate? ===================== In update: PLEASE stop down voting me for my simple, nice, courteous remi
by graycat 10y ago
Gb abbreviates gigabit or gigabyte? What does GB abbreviate?
=====================
In update:
PLEASE stop down voting me for my simple, nice, courteous reminder to the person who wrote the post I replied to.
I was NOT, NOT, NOT, NOT ignorant of the meanings of Gb versus GB and was NOT, NOT, NOT, NOT asking for a tutorial on the difference. I am not an ignorant newby on HN knowing too little to be posting here. Just what I did wrong is beyond all
obvious criteria.
These attacks are personal, based on my user name and some earlier posts of mine?
I did NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING wrong.
Instead, I was suggesting that maybe the post I responded to was not using Gb versus GB correctly -- MAYBE. I was trying to be subtle and suggesting that the person just review the meanings of Gb versus GB. I DO know very, very well the correct, accepted meanings the two abbreviations.
So, for trying to be nice, I get attacked? What kind of hostility is that?
MOD, please get involved and correct this.
Right, I'm a newby? I've published several peer-revewed papers of original research in computer science and artificial intelligence and taught computer science in graduate school at Ohio State University. I DO know quite a lot of computing. Early in my career I designed and wrote the software that scheduled the fleet at FedEx and literally saved the company -- pleased the BoD and enabled crucial financing. My Ph.D. dissertation in engineering was in software.
For one of my contributions in artificial intelligence at the IBM Watson lab, I received an award from IBM. For some other research I did at IBM, I reinvented k-D trees -- a few years earlier, and k-D trees would have been mine.
MOD: I've done NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING wrong, but I've been severely attacked. The attacks look personal, by paid propagandists attacking me for some old post on some topic the propagandists are paid to fight about.
MOD: Please straighten out these attacks.
- yomly 10y agoSome people have connections with download limits. I.e. You can only download 4 gigabytes of data before having your connection throttled or being charged. Some people also tether to mobile internet, which very definitely has download limits. Case in point, I was working on the road a lot this Summer and was using my 4G hotspot. Automatic downloads can very rapidly eat your download limit up whereas browsing and email is unlikely to do so.
- Animats 10y agoI have a small laptop I seldom use, and when I powered it up in a meeting, it downloaded vast numbers of updates. Then I couldn't shut it down for 15 minutes while it installed updates. I was stuck in a conference room alone while the thing updated.
- y4mi 10y agoG stands for giga, exactly 1000 units. the general understanding is 1024, but this would technically be a Gibi- (abbreviated to GiB or Gib) the small b stands for bit, which is an eighth of a byte. a big B stands for byte. So a GB is exactly 1000 bytes, or 8000 bit
- graycat 10y ago> G stands for giga, exactly 1000 units. Actually that is the meaning of K, as in Kb or KB. Giga is not for "1000 units" but for 1 bilion "units" or, for the power of 2 approximation 2^30 = 1,073,741,824. I was just trying to be nice to the person who wrote the post I responded to. It seemed to me that their post needed to distinguish between Gb, gigabit, and GB, gigabyte. Not strictly, of course, because in principle the post could have been correct with either Gb or GB. But usually communications speeds are in terms of bits, and file sizes in terms of bytes. So, monthly download limits are commonly in terms of bits or bytes -- i can't say. But the file sizes downloaded for Windows 10 are likely usually in terms of bytes. So, if Windows 10 needs 10 billion bytes, then that is 10 GB. Then that would need communications of about 80 Gb (less in case of data compression; more for overhead for TCP/IP, etc.). Or 10 Gb would be only 1.25 GB which seems small for copy or full update of Windows 10. So, net, I was guessing that the Windows 10 size would be about 10 GB, not 10 Gb. Then for the communications limit, that could be in Gb or GB. That is, I was responding to > My 4Gb per month download limit doesn't like secret 10Gb downloads, that's what. So, for Windows 10, the 10Gb should likely be 10 GB? Right? For the 4Gb, that might be correct but then it is only about 0.5 GB. Yes, currently and at least back to IBM System/360, on systems from IBM, DEC VAX, Prime, Data General, Intel, and AMD, nearly always a byte has been 8 bits. Yes, the original ASCII character set needed only 7 bits; the DEC PDP 10 had 36 bit words, and DEC commonly stored 5 ASCII characters in each word. Communications speeds are commonly in terms of bits per second, and maybe communications data limits are also in terms of bits. File sizes are commonly in terms of bytes. So, maybe for communications, say Gb, and for file sizes, say GB. Giga abbreviates 1 billion or 2^30 = 1,073,741,824. Apparently some reader got totally torqued at me for trying to be nice. I was not asking for a tutorial on Gb versus GB but was trying nicely to suggest to the writer of the post I responded to that maybe they were not fully careful in using Gb versus GB. MOD: I'm being attacked for no good reason. Please intervene and clean up these attacks.
- EasyTiger_ 10y agoNice meltdown
- mitm2mitm 10y agoCopypasta
- SixSigma 10y agoI don't think for one minute that you confused space consumption with rate.
- golergka 10y agoCan somebody please explain why is this comment being downvoted so low? I understand that the edits don't look nice, but why was it downovoted in the first place?
- eachro 10y agoIt didn't add to the discussion and the clarification graycat was getting at was hardly necessary. The overreaction edit added afterwards also probably did not help their cause.
- dredmorbius 10y agoFrom HN guidelines: Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Even if they are unmerited.
- rdiddly 10y agoA downvote or even a hundred downvotes on HN is hardly worth getting upset over. Remember how there's this whole world out there with women in it and sunsets and grass and beer and stuff?
- Neeek 10y agoMmmm, beer.
- dang 10y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12306744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12306744 and marked it off-topic.