computer question

[Metacrock]

serious. i want to down load google earth. I have been dying to get it. I have a version that is 14 mb. is that a lot? Is that going to eat up memory?

[KR Wordgazer]

14 MB sounds really small to me. Most programs nowadays are measured in KB. But I don't know a lot about computers.

[tinythinker]

serious. i want to down load google earth. I have been dying to get it. I have a version that is 14 mb. is that a lot? Is that going to eat up memory?

For a computer made around 1999-2001, 14MB would be a average chunk of space - not huge on 400-800MB hard drive. And hard drives keep getting bigger. Computers in the last 2-3 years, for example, tend have hard drives with 40 to 200 GB hard drives. To break that down...

KB....Kilobyte......1,000 bytes (one thousand)
MB...Megabyte....1,000,000 bytes (one million)
GB...Gigabyte.....1,000,000,000 bytes (one billion)

So I guess it depends on how much (free) space you have left. There are other potential issues, such as what kind of graphics or RAM or processing speed a program needs, but I don't think that it should be a problem as far as having it on your hard drive.

[Antimatter]

KB....Kilobyte......1,000 bytes (one thousand)
MB...Megabyte....1,000,000 bytes (one million)
GB...Gigabyte.....1,000,000,000 bytes (one billion)

To confuse matters, the size of files and volumes of drives were originally measured by programmers using powers of two bytes. This resulted in a gross misapplication of the metric system.

KB....Kilobyte......1,024 bytes (2^10 bytes)
MB...Megabyte....1,048,576 bytes (2^20 bytes)
GB...Gigabyte.....1,073,741,824 bytes (2^30 bytes)

This has lead to all manner of confusion. Operating systems and hardware manufacturers inconsistently used 1,024 or 1,000 when reporting the sizes of files and drives. For example, hard drive manufactures would use powers of ten when advertising 100 GB drives, which an operating system might report as only 95.37 GB. "1.44 MB" floppies even mixed the two systems, with each MB representing 1000 times 1024 bytes.

As the size of drives have grown, the gap between the binary and decimal representations have grown larger. For a terabyte drive, the difference between a 10^12 byte and 2^40 byte drive is 10%. The IEC recently proposed new units of measurement, including kibibytes (KiB), mebibytes (MiB), and gibibytes (GiB) to represent the powers of two, returning the metric prefixes to their proper meaning. Unfortunately, adoption of these new units has been sporadic.

Oh, and Meta, 14 MB is tiny. Go for it!

[tinythinker]

KB....Kilobyte......1,000 bytes (one thousand)
MB...Megabyte....1,000,000 bytes (one million)
GB...Gigabyte.....1,000,000,000 bytes (one billion)

To confuse matters, the size of files and volumes of drives were originally measured by programmers using powers of two bytes. This resulted in a gross misapplication of the metric system.

KB....Kilobyte......1,024 bytes (2^10 bytes)
MB...Megabyte....1,048,576 bytes (2^20 bytes)
GB...Gigabyte.....1,073,741,824 bytes (2^30 bytes)

This has lead to all manner of confusion. Operating systems and hardware manufacturers inconsistently used 1,024 or 1,000 when reporting the sizes of files and drives. For example, hard drive manufactures would use powers of ten when advertising 100 GB drives, which an operating system might report as only 95.37 GB. "1.44 MB" floppies even mixed the two systems, with each MB representing 1000 times 1024 bytes.

Very true.

[Oh, and Meta, 14 MB is tiny. Go for it!

That's what counts. Very very true.