Re: [gentoo-sparc] OT: From gentoo to Solaris

[Paul Heinlein]

On Fri, 13 Oct 2006, gentuxx wrote:

> > What size is the drive? If it's over about 130GB, you could be
> > running into a problem with the archaic IDE controller on that
> > Ultra 5.
>
> It's 120GB.  Solaris "sees" 114GB.

It's the old question: is a "megabyte" 2^20 bytes or 10^6 bytes? 
Marketers like base 10 because they can report bigger megabyte counts 
on their hard drives, but many engineers still see everything in base 
2. 

Hard drives, even in sizes greater than 100G, are still measured in 
megabytes. So a drive with 1200 base-10 megabytes (120G) only counts 
as 1144 base-2 megabytes (114G).

  (1200*(10^6))/(2^20) = 1144

The disparity is even wider if you do battle at the next level up: is 
a gigabyte 2^30 or 10^9? In that case, the 120G HD is only 111G:

  (120*(10^9))/(2^30) = 111

Reminds me of Tom Lehrer's semi-classic "New Math":

  Now, that actually is not the answer that I had in mind, because
  the book that I got this problem out of wants you to do it in
  base eight. But don't panic! Base eight is just like base ten
  really - if you're missing two fingers! Shall we have a go at
  it? Hang on...

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein@××××××.com <> www.madboa.com
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