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Bits and bytes

I was about to write of another milestone in my writing career. But then I realized I already passed it a couple of days ago. So I'm writing this now, two days late.

As if 1000 posts wasn't remarkable, for people like me working on the IT industry 1024 is more meaningful, round number. As binary is quite important system it's the standard measure of size. 1024 equals to the tenth power of 2. So putting everything in ones and zeroes it spells out 10 0000 0000 (note also the notion of grouping the numbers in fours instead of threes. Each number in binary is called a bit, group of four a nibble and 8 bits is a byte).

I could say that I have now written one kilopost. Kilo, in computer science often refers to 1024 instead of more common 1000 in other fields. 1024 posts of average length just a bit over 200 words, if the average world length is 4,7 characters also matches another round number: 1048576 (e.g. 2^20). That is one Megabyte, which would be roughly the size of storage needed for all the text I have written so far assuming base ASCII encoding where one character is equal to one byte.

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