4 ms·
As a student in physics, I always used to joke about how we should say "3 megadollars" and "5 gigadollars" instead of "3 million dollars" and "5 billion dollars
by fluxquanta 11y ago
As a student in physics, I always used to joke about how we should say "3 megadollars" and "5 gigadollars" instead of "3 million dollars" and "5 billion dollars".
- SamReidHughes 11y agoThere's a backup service that lists its pricing in picodollars per byte (or byte-month).
- mmastrac 11y agohttp://www.tarsnap.com/picoUSD-why.html http://www.tarsnap.com/picoUSD-why.html There are three major reasons why Tarsnap pricing is defined in terms of picodollars per byte rather than dollars per gigabyte: Tarsnap's author is a geek. Applying SI prefixes to non-SI units is a geeky thing to do. If prices were listed in dollars per GB instead of picodollars per byte, it would be harder to avoid the what-is-a-GB confusion (a GB is 10^9 bytes, but some people don't understand SI prefixes). Picodollars are perfectly clear — nobody is going to think that a picodollar is 2^(-40) dollars. Specifying prices in picodollars reinforces the point that if you have very small backups, you can pay very small amounts. Unlike some people, I don't believe in rounding up to $0.01 — the Tarsnap accounting code keeps track of everything in attodollars and when it internally converts storage prices from picodollars per month to attodollars per day it rounds the prices down.
- rootbear 11y agoI think it would help if news reports always used the same units. "This project would cost 0.1 Gigabux out of a total agency budget of 18 Gigabux." Switching between millions and billions and trillions can obscure how small, or large, something actually is in relation to the whole.