That's only if you delay renewal until the last day of the lifetime of the certificate. If you renew at day 30 you'd only get in trouble if there's more than two weeks of downtime.
And a megabyte is depending on the context precisely 1000x1000=1,000,000 or 1024x1024=1,048,576 bytes*, except when you're talking about the classic 3.5 inch floppy disks, where "1.44 MB" stands for 1440x1024 bytes, or about 1.47 true MB or 1.41 MiB.
* Yeah, I read the article. Regardless of the IEC's noble attempt, in all my years of working with people and computers I've never heard anyone actually pronounce MiB (or write it out in full) as "mebibyte".
Well the 1.44 MB, was called that because it was 1440 KB, twice the capacity of the 720k floppy, and 4x the 360k floppy. It made perfect sense to me at that time.
It may "make sense" but that's actually a false equivalence. The raw disk space for a 3.5" high-density floppy disk for IBM PCs is 512 bytes per sector * 18 sectors per track * 80 tracks per side * 2 sides = 1,474,560 bytes. It is 1.47 MB or 1.40 MiB neither of which is 1440 KB or KiB. The 1440 number comes from Microsoft's FAT12 filesystem. That was the space that's left for files outside the allocation table.
Sectors per track or tracks per side is subject to change. Moreover a different filesystem may have non-linear growth of the MFT/superblock that'll have a different overhead.
It is worse of a downer when there is a complete failure to make further sense like that, but I'll try to do something.
Of course one chart does not an expert make, I don't understand half of it but at least I worked with 3.5 floppies since they first came out.
3.5 floppies are "soft sectored" media and usually the drives were capable of handling non-standard arrangements too. What made non-standard numbers of sectors uncommon was it would require software most people were not using. DOS and Windows simply prepared virgin magnetic media with 2880 sectors, or reformatted them that way and that was about it.
PC's were already popular when 3.5 size came out, and most of the time they were not virgin magnetic media, they were purchased pre-formatted with 2880 sectors (of 512 bytes per sector) already on the entire floppy, of which fewer sectors were available for user data because a number of sectors are used up by the FAT filesystem overhead.
On the chart you see the 1440kb designation since each sector is considered 1/2 "kilobyte".
512 bytes is pretty close to half a kilobyte ain't it?
(The oddball 1680kb and 1720kb were slightly higher-density sectors, with more of them squeezed into the same size media, most people couldn't easily copy them without using an alternative to DOS or Windows. Sometimes used for games or installation media.)
With Windows when partitioning your drive if you want a 64 GB volume you would likely choose 64000 MB in either the GUI or Diskpart. Each of these GB is exactly 2880000 sectors for some reason ;)
But that's the size of the whole physical partition whether it contains only zeros or a file system. Then when you format it the NTFS filesystem has its own overhead.
All words are made up. They weren’t handed down from a deity, they were made up by humans to communicate ideas to other humans.
“Kilo” can mean what we want in different contexts and it’s really no more or less correct as long as both parties understand and are consistent in their usage to each other.
I find it concerning that kilo can mean both 10^3 and 2^10 depending on context.
And that the context is not if you're speaking about computery stuff, but which program you use has almost certainly lead to avoidable bugs.
That latter part is only true since marketing people decided they knew better about computer related things than computer people.
It's also stupid because it's rare than anyone outside of programming even needs to care exactly how many bytes something else. At the scales that each of kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte etc are used, the smaller values are pretty much insignificant details.
If you ask for a kilogram of rice, then you probably care more about that 1kg of rice is the same as the last 1kg of rice you got, you probably wouldn't even care how many grams that is. Similarly, if you order 1 ton of rice, you do care exactly how many grams it is, or do you just care that this 1 ton is the same as that 1 ton?
This whole stupidity started because hard disk manufacturers wanted to make their drives sound bigger than they actually were. At the time, everybody buying hard disks knew about this deception and just put up with it. We'd buy their 2GB drive and think to ourselves, "OK so we have 1.86 real GB". And that was the end of it.
Can you just imagine if manufacturers started advertising computers as having 34.3GB of RAM? Everybody would know it was nonsense and call it 32GB anyway.
Not as far as I can tell. There's power of 10 bits and power of 2 bytes. I've never seen the inverse of those in an actual real world scenario outside of storage manufacturers gaming the numbers but even then the context is once again perfectly clear.
The "which program you use" confusion was instigated by the idiots insisting that we should have metric kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes (cheered on by crooked storage manufacturers).
Before all that nonsense, it was crystal clear: a megabyte in storage was unambiguously 1024 x 1024 bytes --- with the exception of crooked mass storage manufacturers.
There was some confusion, to be sure, but the partial success of attempt to redefine the prefixes to their power-of-ten meanings has caused more confusion.
> We agree to meaning to communicate and progress without endless debate and confusion.
We decidedly do not do that. There's a whole term for new terms that arbitrarily get injected or redefined by new people: "slang". I don't understand a lot of the terms teenagers say now, because there's lots of slang that I don't know because I don't use TikTok and I'm thirty-something without kids so I don't hang out with teenagers.
I'm sure it was the same when I was a teenager, and I suspect this has been going on since antiquity.
New terms are made up all the time, but there's plenty of times existing words get redefined. An easy one, I say "cool" all the time, but generally I'm not talking about temperature when I say it. If I said "cool" to refer to something that I like in 1920's America, they would say that's not the correct use of the word.
SI units are useful, but ultimately colloquialisms exist and will always exist. If I say kilobyte and mean 1024 bytes, and if the person on the other end knows that I mean 1024 bytes, that's fine and I don't think it's "nihilistic".
Translation: It's not inconsistent if we consider the deviation from the rule as a second rule. Any future deviation will get their own rule. Perfectly consistent
I don't think that's fair, I'm just saying considering kilo to mean 1000x in all bases is too narrow as a definition. Is 'car' a 'petrol-powered four-wheel transportation device with human-operated left-hand control'?
> Yes, and the made up words of kilo and kibi were given specific definitions by the people who made them up
Kilo was generally understood to mean one thousand long before it was adopted by a standards committee. I know the French love to try and prescribe the use of language, but in most of the world words just mean what people generally understand them to mean; and that meaning can change.
> Yes, and the made up words of kilo and kibi were given specific definitions by the people who made them up
Good for them. People make up their own definitions for words all the time. Some of those people even try to get others to adopt their definition. Very few are ever successful. Because language is about communicating shared meaning. And there is a great deal of cultural inertia behind the kilo = 2^10 definition in computer science and adjacent fields.
Inability to communicate isn't what we observe because as I already stated, meaning is shared. Dictionaries are one way shared meaning can be developed, as are textbooks, software source codes, circuits, documentation, and any other artifact which links the observable with language. All of that being collectively labeled culture. The mass of which I analogized with inertia so as to avoid oversimplifications like yours.
My point is that one person's definition does not a culture, make. And that adoption of new word definitions is inherently a group cultural activity which requires time, effort, and the willingness of the group to participate. People must be convinced the change is an improvement on some axis. Dictation of a definition from on high is as likely to result in the word meaning the exact opposite in popular usage as not. Your comment seems to miss any understanding or acknowledgement that a language is a living thing, owned by the people who speak it, and useful for speaking about the things which matter most to them. That credible dictionaries generally don't accept words or definitions until widespread use can be demonstrated.
It seems like some of us really want human language to work like rule-based computer languages. Or think they already do. But all human languages come free with a human in the loop, not a rules engine.
I don't think that the xkcd is relevant here, because I'm arguing that both parties know what the other is talking about. I haven't implicitly changed the definition because most people assume that kilobyte is 1024 bytes. Yeah, sure, it's "wrong" in some sense, but language is about communicating ideas between two people; if the communication is successful than the word is "correct".
If Bob says "kilobyte" to Alice, and Bob means 5432 bytes, and Alice perceives him to mean 5432 bytes, then in that context, "kilobyte" means 5432 bytes.
Such a myopic view when reality and marketing is messier than dramatic self-righteousness. This unnecessary bikeshedding nonsense has already been solved by using mebi, kibi, etc. to disambiguate sloppy abuse of SI units.
I worked with networked attached storage systems at pib scale several years ago and we referred to things in gib/tib because it was significant when referring to the size of systems and we needed to be precise.
That being said, I think the difference between mib and mb is niche for most people
Interestingly, HD floppies actually are 2 "MB" unformatted without the various overhead. This is how 1.68 "MB" DMF is possible. Extra-high Density (ED) 2.88 "MB" is similarly 4 "MB" unformatted.
It is right in claiming that "3.5-inch" floppies are actually 90 mm.
It is wrong in claiming that the earlier "5.25-inch" floppies weren't metric
"5.25-inch" floppies are actually 130 mm as standardised in ECMA-78 [0]
"8-inch" floppies are actually 200 mm as standardised in ECMA-69 [1]
Actually there's a few different ECMA standards for 130 and 200 mm floppies – the physical dimensions are the same, but using different recording mechanisms (FM vs MFM–those of a certain age may remember MFM as "double density", and those even older may remember FM as "single density"), and single-sided versus double-sided.
They should be more precise if they are talking about KiB in a context where the difference matters... luckily those contexts are usually written down.
I think I have some sort of intuition why all the probabilities are the same.
Imagine you're standing on a randomly chosen vertex on the ring which is not right next to the starting position. At some point, the ladybug will be guaranteed to appear either to the left of you or to the right of you for the first time, and this cannot happen as the second-to-last step, because then the ladybug would have had to have visited both of your neighbors. At this point, for your vertex to be the one last visited, the ladybug would have to turn around and loop all the way around the circle to your other neighbor. But this means the previous trajectory of the ladybug and which vertices were visited before is irrelevant, as the ladybug will have to pass by them anyway. By symmetry, this situation is completely equivalent to being at the very start of the process on one of the vertices neighboring the starting position. Hence any randomly chosen vertex not next to the starting position has to have the same probability of being visited last as those two vertices. Hence all vertices have to have to same probability of being visited last.
In that case following Alice's input is still the best strategy, but you'll be worse off: you'd only be right if both tell the truth, at 80%80%=64%, or both lie, at 20%20%=4%, for a total of 68%.
In the general case of n intermediate occasional liars, the odds of the final result being accurate goes to 50% as n grows large, which makes sense, as it will have no correlation anymore to the initial input.
Thanks. I came up with this Python simulation that matches your 68%:
import random
def lying_flippers(num_flips=1_000_000):
"""
- Bob flips a coin and tells Alice the result but lies 20% of the
time.
- Alice tells me Bob's result but also lies 20% of the time.
- If I trust Bob, I know I'll be correct 80% of the time.
- If I trust Alice, how often will I be correct (assuming I don't
know Bob's result)?
"""
# Invert flip 20% of the time.
def maybe_flip_flip(flip: bool):
if random.random() < 0.2:
return not flip
return flip
def sum_correct(actual, altered):
return sum(1 if a == b else 0 for (b, a) in zip(actual, altered))
half_num_flips = num_flips // 2
twenty_percent = int(num_flips * 0.2)
actual_flips = [random.choice((True, False)) for _ in range(num_flips)]
num_heads = sum(actual_flips)
num_tails = num_flips - num_heads
print(f"Heads = {num_heads} Tails = {num_tails}")
bob_flips = [maybe_flip_flip(flip) for flip in actual_flips]
alice_flips = [maybe_flip_flip(flip) for flip in bob_flips]
bob_num_correct = sum_correct(actual_flips, bob_flips)
bob_percent_correct = bob_num_correct / num_flips
alice_num_correct = sum_correct(actual_flips, alice_flips)
alice_percent_correct = alice_num_correct / num_flips
# Trusting Bob should lead to being correct ~80% of the time.
# This is just a verification of the model since we already know the answer.
print(f"Trust Bob -> {bob_percent_correct:.1%}")
# Trusting Alice should lead to being correct ?% of the time.
# This model produces 68%.
print(f"Trust Alice -> {alice_percent_correct:.1%}")
print()
That alignment is only necessary to do the Grand Tour, to visit all four outer planets in one mission. Voyager 1 actually didn't do the Grand Tour, it only visited Jupiter and Saturn, you're thinking of Voyager 2. This alignment is also not even necessary to attain the highest speed, Voyager 1 is even faster than Voyager 2.
A flyby of both Jupiter and Saturn can be done every two decades or so (the synodic period is 19.6 years)
There are many more kinds of masters than just owners of slaves. The word "master bedroom" only appeared in 1920, it has absolutely nothing to do with slavery.
No, that's just one of those made-up lies people repeat often enough online to become "true" because it's the top search result and because it makes them feel good about continuing to use that term.
> TO LET, Westmoeath Cottage and Garden, situated near to Cook's River, only
three miles from the city. the cottage contains
parlour and drawing room,and four large bed rooms ;
detached kitchen, bakehouse, landry, storeroom,
four stall stable and double coach-house, servants'
rooms neatly fitted up, together with hay-loft and
granary, school house and master's bed-room. A
cottage containing four separate rooms for overseer
and workmen ; two excellent wells of water on the
premises, about six acres of garden neatly laid out
and planted with the best vines and fruit trees,
'This property is fit for a family of the first
respectability.
You couldn't own slaves in London in 1845, and in any case the name derives from the "Master of the household", so if you want to be mad about it, you should call it sexist, not racist. Or you could just be chill, stretch the meaning a bit and say the couple together are the masters of the household.
But, now I'm curious: Where do you draw the line? You don't like git master branches and master bedrooms, but what about other uses?
You can have a master key, master record, master a skill, create a masterwork, be a master to an apprentice, join the toastmasters, be a master of ceremonies at a formal event, you can dress up for comic con as Master Yoda, Master Chief, or Dumbledore (the Headmaster of Hogwarts), you can be a Master Chief in the US Navy, be the dungeon master for a game of D&D, get a Masters' Degree and so on.
Which of these things are in your opinion bad and should be renamed?
This is very much like asking why are you focused on fixing one bug at a time in your software when you can fix every reported bug simultaneously?
I don't know man, maybe it's because fixing this one completely inconsequential bug faces so much backlash for no particular reason other than "change bad"?
And well done with using an example from a book series where the only Asian character is named Cho Chang and where there are elves with long noses in charge of the "central bank". That really works in your favour, you totally owned me [pun intended] with that one!
> A footman in his lordship's service stated he went into his master's bedroom [...]
isn't an example of the phrase "master bedroom".
I am also skeptical of "school house and master's bedroom". The main cottage has "four large bed rooms". Why would the "master bedroom", if it is meant to be read as it is today, be listed after the list of detached outbuildings?
Interesting to see you have a different experience. I'm not sure I would call it stellar. On the train route between Den Haag and Amsterdam, one of the busiest routes in the country presumably, reception is constantly dropping out. I'd love to be able to work on the train, but it's completely impossible if you need a network connection for anything.
Perhaps the route being so busy is the cause of the connectivity issues, but it's still baffling to me how bad it is, given that the amount of mobile devices trying to connect must be very predictable.
+1 on the train, mobile internet in the train is really bad. I kinda get it because you're in a faraday cage, moving between cells quickly, and frequently far outside of inhabited areas but still.
I'm pretty sure the in-train internet also relies on mobile networks, so that's unreliable too. Plus any bandwidth is taken up by people scrolling through tiktok.
In Newtonian gravity, the relation between the orbital period T and the semimajor axis a of the orbital ellipse is a^3 / T^2 = GM / 4π^2, where M is the reduced mass of the system (in this case, with 99% of the mass being in one of the two black holes, it's simply the mass of the heavier one).
Plugging 12 years and 18e9 solar masses gives about 2e12 kilometers, or roughly a fifth of a lightyear. This also means the smaller black hole is zipping around the bigger one at around 6% of the speed of light, which is low enough that the Newtonian approximation is probably reasonable accurate (at least to give a rough idea of how large the distances must be).
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