Gigabyte

The gigabyte (/ˈdʒɪɡəbaɪt/) is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix giga means 10⁹ in the International System of Units (SI), therefore one gigabyte is 1000000000bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte is GB.

This definition is used in all contexts of science, engineering, business, and many areas of computing, including hard drive, solid state drive, and tape capacities, as well as data transmission speeds. However, the term is also used in some fields of computer science and information technology to denote 1073741824 (1024³ or 2³⁰) bytes, particularly for sizes of RAM. The use of gigabyte is thus ambiguous. For semiconductor RAM, the gigabyte denotes 1073741824bytes. For hard drive capacities as described and marketed by the drive manufacturers, the gigabyte denotes 1000000000bytes, but when a 500-GB drive's capacity is displayed by, for example, Microsoft Windows, it is reported as 465 GB, where GB then means 1073741824bytes.

To address this ambiguity, the binary prefixes are standardized in the International System of Quantities, each binary prefix denoting an integer power of 1024. With these prefixes, a memory module that is labeled as having the size 1GB is designated as 1GiB (one gibibyte).

Jim Jones

James Warren "Jim" Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was an American cult leader. Jones was the founder and leader of the Peoples Temple, infamous due to the mass murder-suicide in November 1978 of 918 of its members in Jonestown, Guyana, the murder of Congressman Leo Ryan, and the ordering of four additional Temple member deaths in Georgetown, the Guyanese capital. Nearly three-hundred children were murdered at Jonestown, almost all of them by cyanide poisoning. Jones died from a gunshot wound to the head; it is suspected his death was a suicide.

Jones was born in Indiana and started the Temple there in the 1950s. He later moved the Temple to California in the mid-1960s, and gained notoriety with the move of the Temple's headquarters to San Francisco in the early 1970s.

Early life

Jones was born in a rural area of Crete, Indiana, to James Thurman Jones (1887–1951), a World War I veteran, and Lynetta Putnam (1902–1977). Lynetta reportedly believed she had given birth to a messiah. He was of Irish and Welsh descent. Jones later claimed partial Cherokee ancestry through his mother, though according to his maternal second cousin Barbara Shaffer, this is likely untrue. Economic difficulties during the Great Depression necessitated that Jones' family move to Lynn, Indiana, in 1934, where he grew up in a shack without plumbing.