[conspire] output from gparted doesn't explain missing GiBs

[Darlene Wallach]

Rick,

On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 5:45 PM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> Also, I wrote:
>
>> Also, Seagate and the others were able to justify their nomenclature by
>> reference to official Systeme Internationale (SI) definitions of units
>> applied in an achingly precise and context-blind manner:  Within the
>> metric system proper, "tera" officially means 10^9, not 2^30.
>                                                ^^^^
>
> 10^12 -- but you knew what I meant, I suspect.
>
>> The official Seagate specs on your drive -- that's model
>> ST910004FAA2E1-RK, right? -- are annoyingly vague:  They say only that
>> it's a "1 TB" capacity drive, but if you _were_ able to get figures on
>> sectors per track, heads, tracks per head, and bytes per sector and do
>> the math, I'm guessing you'd find that it's just over 10^9 bytes, which
>> is what what Seagate calls a terabyte.                ^^^^
>
> Again, 10^12.
>
>
> A bit of bonus trivia, as long as I'm writing:
>
> Those of us who converse with English-speakers from elsewhere need to
> be careful about yet another USA-versus-everyone-else usage difference:
> "billion", "trillion", etc.
>
> In the UK and most other countries, a billion is a million million
> (10^12), a trillion is a million million million (10^18), etc.
>
> In the USA, a billion is a _thousand_ million (10^9).  A trillion is a
> _thousand thousand_ million (10^12).
>
>

Thanks Rick.

*argh*!!! Nothing like making things confusing! The UK and most other
countries seem to make more sense to me. The UK seems to pronounce
words in a more meaningful way too:
aluminium, schedule I'm sure this list could go on and on.

Darlene Wallach
-- 
equal justice under law