[Techtalk] metric system/transfer rates

Andrew Wendt awendt at putergeek.com
Sun Sep 9 16:00:41 EST 2001


On September 9, 2001 18:21, Jennifer Davis wrote:

> 1 mi. = 1.6km
> 1km = .625 mi.
> 1m = 39' or 3'3"
> 1" = 2.54cm
> 1' = 30.48cm = 0.3048m

If you are converting a lot of stuff between metric and imperial like this, 
the GNU "units" program can be very helpful. My Linux distro came with it, 
but you can download the source from: ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/units/

The interface looks like this:

--- snip ---
You have: 1 mile
You want: km
        * 1.609344
        / 0.62137119
--- snip ---

This tells you there's 1.609344 km in a mile and 0.62137119 miles in a km.

I don't know how useful it will be for the original poster, since it seems to 
think a kilobyte is 1000 bytes. Perhaps the new versions accept "kibibyte". 
:-)

The computerish units aren't that hard to convert, though...

Remember the prefixes:
G M k <nothing>

Whenever you go left (such as Mbytes to Gbytes), divide by 1024. Whenever you 
move right (such as kbytes to bytes), multiply by 1024.

Whenever you go from bits to bytes, divide by 8. Whenever you go from bytes 
to bits, multiply by 8.

So, for example, if you have 2000000 bytes and you want gigabits:
2000000 bytes / 1024 = 1953.125 kilobytes
1953.125 kilobytes / 1024 = 1.907 megabytes
1.907 megabytes / 1024 = 0.001862 gigabytes
0.001862 gigabytes * 8 = 0.0149 gigabits

TTFN
Andy




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