Oops. Yeah, what he said. --- Bob Bridges, [email protected], cell 336 382-7313
/* Few people can keep up with written law. They shouldn't have to. If the written law is basically the Ten Commandments writ large, and in keeping with customary morality, you can be a good citizen by leading a decent life, without undue study or reflection. That ought to be enough. But when laws become so numerous, detailed, and technical that decent people find themselves running afoul of them just by behaving in customary ways, something is seriously wrong. -Joseph Sobran, 1999-09-09 */ -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, December 22, 2021 17:51 um, 10e15 is 10 x 10**15, or 1e16, --- On 2021-12-23 01:59, Bob Bridges wrote: > I'm enjoying the article so far, and I'm sure contributors will chime > in who are far more knowledgeable than I. But the first thing I > notice is that he spends some time estimating how inferior the early > 7090 was to a modern laptop in terms of clock speed, RAM, and > tape-driven I/O, and concludes "So now the 7090 looks to have run at > about a quadrillionth (10-15) the speed of your 2021 laptop." The > first thing that leaps out at me is that he appears to be multiplying > the three comparative numbers to come up with a quadrillion. But that > isn't the proper way to compare speeds, is it? Surely the proper > comparison is only the slowest of the three. > > Not to mention the silly typographical error of writing 10 to the 15th > as "10-15". I use "10e15", myself, though I suppose in a magazine > with decent capabilities a superscript might look more professional. > > This article, though, isn't comparing modern PCs to modern mainframes, > so no need to wax indignant. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
