Re: GB vs. MB

Albert Cahalan (albert@ccs.neu.edu)
Thu, 28 Nov 1996 03:00:23 -0500 (EST)


> If you want Linux to be "every other OS" then buy win95.
> LInux is Linux. It is for people who do not want an
> "ordinary" commercial OS. It is not for morons who want
> to be told "yOu have a big dick, er disk.", it is for
> people who want to use their disk foor something other
> than swapping out win95

That attitude is not good for Linux because it keeps away
the newbies. Some newbies become hackers, and even those
that don't can help by spreading the word and by buying
Linux on CD-ROM. When newbies support Caldera and Unifix,
those distributers return bug fixes for the kernel.

To really see the problem with traditional MB and GB,
you should convert all these nembers to GB in your head,
using 2^30 or 10^9 as you prefer:

20,000,000,000
402,000,000,000
123,000,000,000
1,000,000,000
9,000,000,000

Traditionalists will need to do 39-bit division in their head,
while modern people just do a decimal shift right.