5 ms·
> 1/10th of a thou What is this unit?
by delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
> 1/10th of a thou
What is this unit?
- Kirby64 3y agoThe standard industry term for a thousandth of an inch. Also called a mil. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousandth_of_an_inch https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousandth_of_an_inch A 1/10th of a thou is 1/10000th of an inch, or 2.54 micrometers. It's insanely small.
- delta_p_delta_x 3y ago> a thousandth of an inch. Also called a mil Why, America... At that point, if it's inventing new units to decimalise USC units, why not just use micrometres?
- hanche 3y agoOr they could stick with binary and introduce a name for 1/1024th of an inch. Borrow a meme from the “almost SI” prefixes kibi, mebi, gibi etc., and call it a mibi, perhaps? ;-)
- flangola7 3y agoWhat the hell are kibi and gibi?
- hanche 3y agoKibibyte: 1024 bytes. Gibibyte: 2^30 or 1,073,741,824 bytes. The -bi suffix is intended to signify “binary”.
- delta_p_delta_x 3y agoThey are IEC prefixes, complementary to the SI prefixes, and they only are defined for positive exponents. kibi : ki : 2^10 mebi : Mi : 2^20 gibi : Gi : 2^30 tebi : Ti : 2^40 ... Conveniently, these numbers are fairly close to 10^3, 10^6, 10^9, and 10^12 respectively (but with increasing error: 2^40 is almost 10% larger than 10^12, whereas 2^10 is only 2.4% larger than 10^3). This leads to a lot of conflation, mess, and misreporting by vendors and OS authors. Windows is an egregious example. A 1 TB (terabyte, 10^12) disk is reported in Windows as 931.7 GB. It ought to be 931.7 GiB, which is what Linux does. macOS uses the correct number but SI prefixes, so 1 TB is reported as 1 TB.
- edgineer 3y agoWait, does MacOS report file sizes in base 10 as well, or just disks?
- delta_p_delta_x 3y agoFile sizes too.
- boolemancer 3y agoI think it's hard to call it misreporting when they've been reporting it the same way since before the standard you'd rather they use existed.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- colanderman 3y agoElectronics manufacturing uses both with about equal frequency, often without unit names attached, and it's confusing as all hell, at least as a hobbyist. E.g. a 0603 footprint can mean 0.6×0.3 mm or 60×30 mils. https://eepower.com/resistor-guide/resistor-standards-and-codes/resistor-sizes-and-packages/ https://eepower.com/resistor-guide/resistor-standards-and-co...
- compiler-guy 3y agoBecause at the time of the invention and adoption of this term of this term in the late 1850s, the metric system didn’t have widespread adoption at all. The treaty of the meter wasn’t until 1875. So the metric system and decimalization of the inch are roughly contemporaneous and “just use this othe, also brand new system” isn’t an obvious choice at that point.
- delta_p_delta_x 3y agoFair enough. I think the real question is... Why is such a unit still being used? I was under the impression that any serious ultra-precise CAD and machining was done in milli, micro, and nanometres. I thought pretty much any serious science or engineering had been metricated... But then again I shouldn't be surprised; Americans measure the volume of lakes in 'acre-feet'...
- firebat45 3y agoI mean, a "thousandth" of an inch is also a decimalised USC unit. Don't try to logic how Americans measure things.