This is from the Gmail front-page. What are the digits after the decimal signifying? Bytes? Bits? 0s and 1s? Every time I see it there seems to be another decimal place added. Is this logical?
Well, a Megabyte is approximately a million bytes (or, some people claim, exactly a million bytes, but Google knows that 2^20 bytes = 1 Megabyte), so the 6th place after the decimal corresponds (approximately) to a byte.
When referring to storage space (and not RAM), a megabyte is exactly one million bytes.
Mmm…kind of. That’s not really a hard rule, though. It depends entirely on who’s doing the reporting. The storage manufacturers certainly use the million bytes definition – at allows them report larger numbers for their hard drives. Google may or may not be using that definition.
AFAIK, gmail reports message and attachment sizes in “binary” megabytes, so I would guess that google’s mail storage figures use the same units. But that’s just a WAG on my part.
If you look at the source of the page, you’ll see some javascript that generates that variable (its called quota). Im guessing someone coded it to display 10 digits. You can probably ignore everything after the first decimal point. So its saying you have around 7 gigs free space.