@@@  Measures in Technology and The Metric System   @@@

Even though  The Metric System  exists throughout the United States, it is not well accepted and not well understood in the US.
The Metric System is very much pervasive in the Medical Profession, in the Automobile Commerce and in the Grocery Industry.
Since Technology impacts all types environments throughout the World especially the US, it especially uses The Metric System.
Therefore, it is especially important that Students, Teachers and Parents understand and appreciate The Metric System.

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This activity will attempt to present an overview of The Metric System in Technology
and concentrate on the aspects of storage within Technology usage.
The basic units to be explored in this activity will be:  Kilo,  Mega,  Giga,  and  Tera.

Kilo = 1x10³   Mega = 1x10⁶   Giga = 1x10⁹   Tera = 1x10¹²

In words, these terms mean:  Thousand, Million, Billion, Trillion.  They are used most often in the US Government!
These basic units are actually prefixes that provide a quantity to a specific Technology term.
The common Technology term of  Byte which is used to describe the storage of one piece of information is somewhat confusing.
A simple and pratical definition of a Byte is easy to understand if we use a keyboard. Thus  Letters, Numbers, Symbols are in facts Bytes.

Using the term Byte, there are common technology storage devices to store information.
Floppy Disk,    CD,   Flash Drive,   DVD,    Hard Drive
These five storage devices are  probably  the  most common in use today 's technology.
These common storage devices can be Read/Write which means data can be put on and taken off by a PC user.
Also, some of these storage devices are Read Only which means that data can be taken off but not put on by PC user.

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Now, activities with Measures of Technology and The Metric System.

A most common, but becoming less used in today's technology, is the Floppy A Diskette.
The Floppy A Diskette stores approximately 1.4 MegaBytes (MB) of data (Letters, Numbers, Symbols)
Therefore, a Floppy A Diskette would hold approximately 1,400,000 Letters, Numbers, Symbols.  Whoa!!!
A simple web page created with Mozilla Composer,  like the one you are viewing, would be about 5 to 10 Kilobytes (KB).
Ok, now how many smallest and simplest web pages could a Floppy A Diskette contain approximately:?  __________

Use your  Basic Online Calculator to determine (check) the answer to this question!   (1,400,000 / 5,000= 280 web pages ).

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Now, activities with Measures of Technology and The Metric System.

A most recent, but becoming more used in today's technology, is the Flash Drive.
The Flash Drive stores from approximately 128 KB to 2 GB of data (Letters, Numbers, Symbols)
Therefore, a Flash Drive would hold approximately 128,000 to 2x10⁹ Letters, Numbers, Symbols.  Whoa!!!
A simple web page created with Mozilla Composer,  like the one you are viewing, would be about 5 to 10 Kilobytes (KB).
Ok, now how many smallest and simplest web pages could the largest Flash Drive contain approximately:?  __________

Use your  Basic Online Calculator to determine (check) the answer to this question!   (2,000,000,000 / 5,000 = 400,000 web pages ).

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Now, activities with Measures of Technology and The Metric System.

A most common and most often used in today's technology, is the Hard Drive.
The Hard Drive stores from approximately 20 GB to 80 GB of data (Letters, Numbers, Symbols)
Therefore, a Hard Drive would hold approximately 20x x10⁹ to 80x10⁹ Letters, Numbers, Symbols.  Whoa!!!
A simple web page created with Mozilla Composer,  like the one you are viewing, would be about 5 to 10 Kilobytes (KB).
Ok, now how many smallest and simplest web pages could the smallest Hard Drive contain approximately:?  __________

Use your  Basic Online Calculator to determine (check) the answer to this question!   (20,000,000,000 / 5,000 = 4,000,000 ).

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Free JavaScripts provided by The JavaScript Source

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Try finding out how much does a CD and a DVD hold and how many simple web pages it would hold?

By the way, what are the words for the letters CD and DVD? What are words called when made from letters?

Humm… A good way would be to click on the CD and DVD links above in this article!!! J

Maybe another way to investigate CDs and DVDs would be to use Wikipedia or How Stuff Works!

@@@ The National Institute of Standards and Technology @@@

Tom Love Malone College Spring 2006