Laptops All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies- P47: Okay, I’ll admit it: I’ve got a strange biography. I’ve been a writer all my life. My first semi-pro job was sports editor of my high school newspaper. (Go Commodores!) After college I was a political reporter for daily newspapers in Ohio and New York (I covered four national nominating conventions and two Presidential campaigns) and a correspondent for The Associated Press. And then, in 1983, I gave in to my inner geek and became the first Executive Editor of PC Magazine, back in the days when most people asked, “What is a PC?”. | 434 Knowing How Much Is Enough megadollars for my most recent bathing-suit modeling session you should reasonably understand that to mean 2 million. And I m worth every drachma. But as I explain in Book I Chapter 3 computers use an entirely different form of math. To begin with they don t have ten fingers. But more to the point a modern computer accomplishes its magic by applying brute force to just two numbers 0 or 1. It s called binary math. Yes I know 0 isn t a number it s the absence of a value. But that s human thinking not computer thought. The money in our wallets leather or virtual is mostly measured in parts of ten. Inside a computer it s all parts of two. To be more precise binary math is applied to computer words made up of 8 or 16 or 32 digits. An 8-digit word made up of either 0s or 1s can range in size from 0 00000000 to 255 11111111 to the computer that means 256 possible values. String together two of those words and you ve got 512 possible values a group of four offers 1 024 variations. When you referring to computer words also known as bytes you call that last value a kilobyte. Do you see the problem yet A kilobyte would seem to mean a thousand bytes but it s actually 1 024. When you talk about small numbers it s an error or at least a misunderstanding of only about 2 percent. But consider the difference between a decimal understanding of a gigabyte of 1 0003 1 000 000 000 bytes and a binary accounting of 1 0243 1 073 741 824 bytes . Up there amongst the gigabytes the difference is more like percent. So when you buy a gigabyte of RAM are you getting 1 000 000 000 bytes or 1 073 741 824 bytes Well when you re dealing with RAM the answer is neither. The raw capacity is actually 1 0243 although perhaps 10 percent of the RAM is taken up with overhead including indexing and error checking however when you buy 1GB of memory you re really getting that number of memory locations in true binary math million more than a mere billion. But things get
