No, those are not metric, they just borrowed some prefixes, although it’s not like metric designers invented those anyways.
Imperial, obviously: F(reedom)T(ons) and fractions thereof. 1FT is the amount of data that it takes to store the entire King James edition of the New Testament and the Bill of Rights as a PDF.
Dec = 10 Cent = 100 Mil = 1000
Using historical, global linear language sounds good to me
Metric uses those for numbers less than 1, a situation that doesn’t arrise in computing. There is nothing less than a bit, whether its set to 1 or 0.
If you wanna be American, you gotta start thinking outside the box. A bit has two states, right? So a half-bit has only one state. Half-bits are truly American.
All hail Analog! ;P
Octal. Start expressing it in maga Octal with thoughts prayers and bullets for ones
Letter to Grandma, The Bible, Vacation photo album, and Video Collection
1 bible = 69 porn clips = 420 feet (unrelated to the other measurement)
TiB
One tebibyte equals 2^40 or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.
What makes that more intuitive than any of the others?
K/M/G/T/P = decimal prefixes. K is 1000. M is 1,000,000. etc.
Ki/Mi/Gi/Ti/Pi = binary prefixes. Ki is 2¹⁰ (1024), Mi is 2²⁰ (1,048,576), etc.
It’s a disambiguation of the previous system where we would use KB to interchangeably mean 1000 or 1024 depending on context.
I thought you wanted it to be more american
Yeah, American stuff makes sense unlike the metric system which is completely unintuitive /s
This whole post is meant to be a joke. The metric prefixes are perfectly understandable even if they’re technically off the decimal benchmarks by a handful of bytes
Metric is intuitive, but also shit. Just because you have 10 fingers doesn’t mean you should formulate a measurement system out of it. In fact if you actually give a shit about intuitiveness you’d go back to the American system which is roughly base 12 and therefore easier for division and manual estimations.
Bushels of data
What can you fit in a bushel?
That’s 1 day of Facebook, or 5 minutes of Netflix, or roughly 11.2milibits driven over 2 Chicago style city blocks.
I would suggest:
- 1KB = storage capacity of 1 kg of 1.44 floppy disks.
- 1MB = storage capacity of 0.0106 mile of CD drives.
- 1GB = storage capacity of 1 good computer in the 2000s.
- 1TB = storage capacity of 1 truck of GB (see above)
I know you’re joking, but that first Kb definition makes me grind my teeth!
1.44 floppy disks can store, well, 1.44 MEGAbytes. So how can 1 kg of floppy disks can just store 1 KB?
Thank you for your compliment. I love it. The floppy disk is 1.44 non-freedom MB, not 0.015264 miles of CD drives.
lol
1 kg
(͡•_ ͡• )
Don’t you mean one pound, abbreviated lb?
Naw, it’s actually one Kinda Gallon; a Kinda Gallon of course referring to the average of the masses of a gallon of water, a gallon of beer, and a gallon of whiskey.
The Indians use Crore and Lakh
They use those for everything
We can use bits instead of bytes. That way it can look 8x bigger than it really is and have no real bearing to modern computing.
How about feet of IBM punch cards?
A 1 foot tall stack holds 1,647,360 bits of data if all 80 columns are used. If only 72 columns are used for data then it’s 1,482,624 bits of data and the remaining columns can be used to number each card so they can be put back in order after the stack is dropped.
THIS is what I’m talking about!
I like this because the amount of bits in a stack can vary depending on whose foot you use to measure, or the thickness of the card stock.
IBM standard cards are one 48th of a barleycorn thick. I believe IBM measured from the 1932 Iowa Reference Barleycorn, now kept in the vault inside Mt Rushmore.
I’m surprised there aren’t more suggestions which use intentionally-similar abbreviations. The American customary system is rich with abbreviations which are deceptively similar, and I think the American computer memory units should match; confusion is the name of the game. Some examples from existing units:
- millimeter (mm) vs thou (mil)
- meter (m) vs mile (mi)
- kilo (k) vs grand (G)
- kilonewtons (kN) vs knots (kn)
- statute mile (m/sm) vs survey mile (mi) vs nautical mile (NM/nmi) vs nanometer (nm)
- foot (ft) vs fathom (ftm)
- chain (ch) vs Switzerland (ch)
- teaspoon (tsp) vs tablespoon (tbsp)
- ounce (oz) vs fluid ounce (fl oz) vs troy ounce (ozt) vs Australia (Ozzie)
- pint (pt) vs point (pt)
- grain (gr) vs gram (g)
- Kelvin (K) vs Rankine (R; aka “Kelvin for Americans”)
- short ton (t) vs long ton (???) vs metric tonne (t) vs refrigeration ton (TR)
The knot is non-SI but perfectly metric and actually makes sense as a nautical mile is exactly one degree meridian. kn also doesn’t clash with kN, Newtons are always written with capital N. Capitalisation generally matters. No standard abbreviation exists for nautical miles but definitely don’t use nm because newton metres.
That is, if you take all those colonial units out of there suddenly you’re left with SI units and things that work well with SI units.
Oh and a pint is 500ml, a pound is 500g, a hundredweight is 50kg (because 100 pound), and a teaspoon is rather approximate because everyone outside of North America will use an actual spoon you stir tea with. The important part is not the precise amount but distinguishing it from “a pinch” etc. I guess by extension ounces should be 25ml and 25g. While we’re at it: An inch is 25mm, and a foot an even 1/3rd of a metre while a yard is exactly one metre.
Did you know that a Newton metre is about exactly one chocolate bar metre? The work it takes to lift it in about standard gravity, that is. Very intuitive.
t for ton is a quirk in SI, you can use Mg if you want. There’s also other SI-adjacent strangeness such as the hectare, which is one hecto-are: While SI has meters for length and litres for volume somehow the are isn’t official for area.
The knot is non-SI but perfectly metric and actually makes sense as a nautical mile is exactly one degree meridian
I do admire the nautical mile for being based on something which has proven to be continually relevant (maritime navigation) as well as being brought forward to new, related fields (aeronautical navigation). And I am aware that it was redefined in SI units, so there’s no incompatibility. I’m mostly poking fun at the kn abbreviation; I agree that no one is confusing kilonewtons with knots, not unless there’s a hurricane putting a torque on a broadcasting tower…
No standard abbreviation exists for nautical miles
We can invent one: kn-h. It’s knot-hours, which is technically correct but horrific to look at. It’s like the time I came across hp-h (horsepower-hour) to measure gasoline energy. :(
if you take all those colonial unit
In defense of the American national pride, I have to point out that many of these came from the Brits. Though we’re guilty of perpetuating them, even after the British have given up on them haha
An inch is 25mm, and a foot an even 1/3rd of a metre while a yard is exactly one metre.
I’m a dual-capable American that can use either SI or US Customary – it’s the occupational hazard of being an engineer lol – but I went into a cold sweat thinking about all the awful things that would happen with a 25 mm inch, and even worse things with 3 ft to the meter. Like, that’s not even a multiple of 2, 5, or 10! At least let it be 40 inches to the meter. /s
There’s also other SI-adjacent strangeness such as the hectare
I like to explain to other Americans that metric is easy, using the hectare as an example. What’s a hectare? It’s about 2.47 acre. Or more relatable, it’s the average size of a Walmart supercenter, at about 107,000 sq ft.
1 hectare == 1 Walmart
No standard abbreviation exists for nautical miles but definitely don’t use nm because newton metres
Since as you mentioned Newtons are
Nnotn, Newton meters areNm.nmmeans nanometer.yep brainfart too many newtons in the sentence before that
We already have a confusing abbreviation:
Bvsb. One is bits, one is bytes.It’s a pretty drastic difference. One Gb per second is only 125 MB per second. Don’t mess up your capitalization!
It’s for this reason I sometimes spell out the Bytes or bits. Eg: 88 Gbits/s or 1.44 MBytes
It’s also especially useful for endianness and bit ordering: MSByte vs MSbit
Power of Two
1GB is 29.8975 pots
1MB is 19.9315 pots
why go for RAMs when the constitution says ARMs…
and no more bits or bytes too, double bytes small or quadbytes regular size all the way.
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kilo bytes is a grand
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mega bytes is a venti
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giga bytes is a grand venti
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terabytes is a doble venti
really large amounts of ARM is a ton
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