On Thu, 12 Oct 2006, steve szmidt wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Here's an interesting mystery for those of you with too much time on your
> hands:
>
> We all know that capacity on computers is measured in bytes, where 1KB is
> 1024bytes. It arrives of course at 1024 since we deal with a binary system
> which grows like this.
>
> 2 4 6 8 16 32 64 128 256 512 1024
>
> Pretty straight forward.
>
> Now some of you have 1GB RAM. When you run a check on that the number that
> shows up is 1,048,048.
Actually Linux says:
eben@pc:~$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1036908 1018880 18028 0 142216 478264
-/+ buffers/cache: 398400 638508
Swap: 3212988 2740 3210248
but I forget how much RAM is in this box really.
XP says:
C:\>mem
655360 bytes total conventional memory
655360 bytes available to MS-DOS
598304 largest executable program size
1048576 bytes total contiguous extended memory
0 bytes available contiguous extended memory
941056 bytes available XMS memory
MS-DOS resident in High Memory Area
> How do they arrive at 1,048,048?
Arithmetic tells me that 2^20 - 1048048 = 512 + 16 = 2^9 + 2^4, so I'm going
to guess a half-K paging scheme plus 16 bytes bootstrap code for the CPU.
Close?
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