Patch size difference

zulu9812 · July 19, 2002, 20:02

I noticed that the 1.29f patch hosted on Poly is 10.1MB. However, when I d/l it from the Firaxis site on Thursday it was 9.91MB. I know it's not much of a difference, but does it matter?

Palleon · July 19, 2002, 20:54

Multiply 9.91 by 1.024, and you'll get 10.1, 1024 being the amount of bytes in a bit. It's just a rounding thing, the sizes are identical.

nbarclay · July 19, 2002, 21:14

To give more background, the traditional computer uses of "kilo," "mega," etc. are different from their metric uses. In computers, kilo=1024, mega=1024*1024, and so on. This is because two to the tenth power, or 1024, happens to be a power of two that is very close to a value we're used to using in our decimal cystem. (However, makers of hard drives and other storage devices have long since figured out that their devices look bigger if they go with the metric definitions.)

Suppose a file is 9,910 kilobytes (with k=1024) long. A person posting its size might convert that to 9.91 megabytes.

Now suppose another person looks at the size of the file in bytes, which is 10,147,840 bytes. Using "meg=million" and doing a bit of rounding, the file size comes to 10.1 megabytes.

So voila, two seemingly reasonable ways of calculating the file size produce different numbers of megabytes. Actually, there are three possible sizes that could be reported: mega=1000x1000, mega=1000x1024 (or 1024x1000), and mega=1024x1024. So who knows, maybe someone will run into a copy of the patch with yet a third reported size.

Nathan

Switch · July 19, 2002, 23:58

So technically it's 83 168 384 bits, 10 396 048 Bytes, 10 153 kiloBytes, and 9.91 MegaBytes.

It all makes sense

BTW, nbarclay, your technical stuff is right, but you have your numbers off. I got my numbers from the file size as reported on my computer for accuracy (but not "size on disk," mind you), as much as it doesn't really matter.

nbarclay · July 20, 2002, 01:36

Quote:

Originally posted by SwitchMoO
So technically it's 83 168 384 bits, 10 396 048 Bytes, 10 153 kiloBytes, and 9.91 MegaBytes.

It all makes sense

BTW, nbarclay, your technical stuff is right, but you have your numbers off. I got my numbers from the file size as reported on my computer for accuracy (but not "size on disk," mind you), as much as it doesn't really matter.

I haven't downloaded the patch yet, so I was working it as a hypothetical to show how such illusions can occur.

Nathan

delsolsi · July 20, 2002, 04:19

Its because computers use the binary number system. Binary is base 2, our normal counting numbers are base 10.
Kilo = 2 to the 10th power = 1,024
Mega = 2 to the 20th power = 1,048,576
Giga = 2 to the 30th power = 1,073,741,824
tera = 2 to the 40th power = 1,099,511,627,776