Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.00.1104160022440.24284@taxa.psych.umn.edu>
Date: 2011-04-16T05:36:45Z
From: Mike Miller
Subject: is "Gb" gigabyte or gigabit?
I sometimes get errors of this form:
Error: cannot allocate vector of size 13.8 Gb
I've also seen "Gb" used in R documents. Is "Gb" being used to refer to
gigabyte? We usually refer to bytes and gigabytes when discussing memory
usage, but the lowercase "b" more often refers to bits. According to
Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte
"The unit symbol for the gigabyte is GB or Gbyte, but not Gb (lower
case b) which is typically used for the gigabit."
If "Gb" means gigabyte in R, I can live with that, but I think it is
ambiguous and confusing. If it does mean gigabit, I think we should refer
to gigabytes instead when discussing memory usage.
Mike