Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Even if they are unmerited.
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
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.
Unless it's 7 bits aka ASCII 0 - 127. Some systems even used 6 bits and where case insensitive.
It doesn't change the unit of measure byte and its value when converting to the bit unit of measure.
Extended ascii uses the full 8 bits (unsigned) to value of 255 and values 0 through 31 are reserved for control codes.
From Wikipedia: The byte (/ˈbaɪt/) is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer[1][2] and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures. The size of the byte has historically been hardware dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size.
PS: 16 bit bytes are now common with UTF-16 with fits a large chunk of Unicode. On the other hand UCS-2 is not a fixed width encoding so different rules apply. However, we stuck with 8 bit bytes for long enough it's become a viable alternative definition, until we byte the bullet and go back to a fixed 32 bit format.
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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.