6 ms·
Pretty nice table here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix "(...) he had the idea for the update when he s
by illys 4y ago
Pretty nice table here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix
"(...) he had the idea for the update when he saw media reports using unsanctioned prefixes for data storage such as brontobytes and hellabytes. (...)" and "The only letters that were not used for other units or other symbols were R and Q"
So it seems the new prefixes are partly initiated by the exponential computer storage needs rather than scientific needs. So they might need to move again soon. However the SI has exhausted the available stock of letters. Maybe Greek letters next time like micro for 10^-6.
Anyway does it really matter for IT people? I have seen so many people mixing up bit and byte, milli- and mega- as well. There are countless usages of mb all over the Internet to express MB.
- labster 4y agoUppercase MB is megabytes, lowercase mb is millibars. Both can go through a series of tubes, but millibars are also useful in dump trucks, to make the wheels go round and round.
- gregmac 4y agoDo we need to have a single letter? Is it acceptable to combine prefixes? Eg: 1 QB (quettabyte) == 1,000,000 YB (yottabytes) == 1 MYB (mega-yottabyte) Without the new prefixes, we could have gone to 1 YYB (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 10^48 bytes)
- allanrbo 4y agoThat is almost like reinventing something like Roman numerals :-) Maybe better to stick with 1e48 notation after all.
- silisili 4y agoIt's kinda funny that you mention it. If we say to someone '99 hundred', they'd immediately understand it as 9,900. If we say 'hundred hundred', it's an immediate math problem trying to figure out how many zeros and what it's called. At least, that's how I'd react.
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago> If we say to someone '99 hundred', they'd immediately understand it as 9,900. That's definitely untrue. In my native language we never mix tens and hundreds, and it always takes me a moment to parse that "thirteen hundred" means one thousand and three hundred.
- silisili 4y agoAh, I should have specified in the US. It's more common to say numbers between 100 and 10k as hundreds, unless it's exactly on a thousand. I think most people would say nineteen hundred, or 21 hundred for 1900 and 2100, but nobody would say 20 hundred for 2000(except for military time).
- halper 4y agoSI prefixes could originally be combined like that: it was perfectly fine to say one hectokilometre. Such usage is now deprecated, though. You'd have to say 0.1 megametre instead.
- iquerno 4y agoThe only use cases I have seen for units larger than 'petabyte' are those representing the maximum allowed file sizes for ZFS, Btrfs and such. I also don't see a point in inventing more prefixes so that statisticians don't have to use scientific notation for large numbers. What use is that? How many people know how much a yottabyte is? If they need to Google the answer, that defeats the point. 1e12 terabytes seems easier to digest than 1 whatever-the-hell-,-I-don't-know-what-this-unit-is-meant-to-represent-byte. Not to mention, easier to read.
- Spivak 4y agoYes but translate this statement to the 80s and you might have said the same about giga.
- saltcured 4y agoHmm, why would you mix 1e12 terabytes instead of saying 1e24 bytes? Why do we talk about 200k USD salaries instead of 2e5 USD? Or why isn't a US postage stamp marked as 6e-1 USD? Also: in the past 25 years, "tera-scale" (TB and TFLOP) went from a prognostication about future high-performance computing into something you find in affordable consumer products. When campus computing centers are now deploying hundreds of petabytes, it seems myopic to think the PB threshold is anything but a signpost flying by the window...
- rjbwork 4y ago>200k USD salaries instead of 2e5 USD? You mean 2 lakh USD? :D
- titzer 4y ago$MEGACORP measures internal disk storage capacity in exabytes.
- Asraelite 4y agoDoes anyone know why they chose "ronna" instead of "renna"? It should be r + ennea (Greek for nine), so where does the "o" come from? Every prefix up until now has been consistent about the first vowel mirroring the Greek word: tetra -> tera penta -> peta hex -> exa hepta -> zetta okto -> yotta