SI prefix meaning 10 to the 9th power (109 or 10^9). Abbreviation is G.

A German computer and internet related TV-show. The show is 5 hours long and is aired by NBC Europe.

They have two spin-offs: GIGA Games (as the name says a show where they only talk about games) and GIGA Heartbeat (deals with romantic problems and such things, nothing you really want to watch).

GIGA tries to combine superficial computer information with nice to look at girls (and as far as I can say, they succeed).

Note that 'giga' now officially means 109 even in the context of data processing. The prefixes kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa, zetta, yotta always refer to powers of 10.

To refer to powers of 210 (powers of 1024), use the new binary prefixes kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi, pebi, and exbi. So

1 gigabyte = 1 GB = 109 bytes
1 gibibyte = 1 GiB = 10243 bytes

These new prefixes were created in December 1998 by the International Electrotechnical Commission: see the node prefixes for binary multiples for fuller explanation.

It is permissible to use terms such as 'gigabyte' to mean gibibyte on a temporary basis until industry standards have shifted to the new terms.

The prefix 'giga' was originally adopted by the eleventh CGPM of the SI in 1960. It comes from the Greek for 'giant'.

gig = G = GIGO

giga- /ji'ga/ or /gi'ga/ pref.

[SI] See quantifiers.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.

The prefix giga- was derived from Greek gigas "giant", to which our giant and gigantic are kin. The current American pronunciation of this form with a hard g masks that origin, but Merriam-Webster lists soft g as preferred - "jiggabyte", etc.

I suppose this is an example of unconscious synesthesia, or sound symbolism, because the hard g is felt to be more appropriate to something large and impressive.

Sample format for Nemesys' GigaSampler and TASCAM GigaStudio software samplers, with .GIG file extension. These samplers stream audio data directly from the hard disk, allowing for huge samples of very high quality.

Since conventional samplers are limited by RAM space, certain tricks are used to fit audio data into that space. For instance, note velocities are simulated by playing a sample louder or softer. Sometimes, not even every note is sampled, and notes in between available samples are interpolated to sound at the right frequency - usually by simply playing the sample faster or slower. Attack, decay, sustain and release are often emulated by using volume envelopes. Of course, these tricks all affect the resulting sound quality.

GigaSampler and GigaStudio do not have these limitations. 900 megabyte piano samples are available in GigaSampler format. In these samples, not only is each note sampled completely (including attack, decay, sustain and release) - each note is sampled multiple times with different velocities. Thus, the resulting sound is virtually impossible to tell from a real acoustic instrument.

In addition, GigaSampler and GigaStudio work with very low latency using consumer sound cards, though unfortunately only on Windows 98. For Windows 2000 and above, a professional card with GSIF interface is required.

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