ABSTRACT
There are 10 kinds of people in this world: those who understand binary math and those who do not. Many of us live in a binary world despite our base ten arithmetic system. Often we need to convert a 2N notation to its decimal equivalent. Quick, what is the maximum addressable file size given a 32-bit number system? Well, that is 232 and with a little calculator math we come up with 4,294,967,296 elements or approximately 4.3 billion. Is there a faster way to calculate the value? If we apply a few tricks we can quickly approximate the value to within 7.5% worst case. This is good enough for many practical uses.
