Gazillions of miniature violins

[venta]

So, recently I was perusing the packaging for a USB memory stick (no, I don't get out much). I was vaguely confused by it. It turns out that numbers are even less clear-cut than I thought they were.

The USB stick was advertised as 2GB. As I'm sure many of you know, that's not actually a very precise measurement. (If you know all about that you can skip the next paragraph).

A kilobyte, for example, is approximately a thousand bytes. Owing to computers' pesky habit of doing everything in powers of two it's not actually a 1000 bytes, it's 1024 bytes. 24 bytes out of a thousand - big deal, let's call it a thousand bytes. A megabyte is a thousand kilobytes, and by that stage it's become more of an issue whether you mean 1,000,000 bytes, or whether you mean 1,048,576 (= 1024 x 1024) bytes. And the trouble with the term 'megabyte' is that people use it to mean both values. I relatively recently learned that the abbreviation MB is ambiguous, while the less-common abbreviation MiB specifically means the larger, non-decimal-friendly number. The same is true for gigabyte (GB/GiB), only more so.

Fortunately, the manufacturers of the USB stick were clued up to this problem, and wrote on the packaging that 1GB = 1 billion bytes. OK, I thought; modulo the warnings about not all space being available for storage, we know where we are.

Then I thought hang on, a gigabyte isn't a billion bytes. It's 1,000,000,000 bytes. A billion would be 1,000,000,000,000. Since this is for sale in the UK, they should use UK billions (the larger number) not US billions. Humph, I thought.

However, ChrisC pointed me at the Wikipedia page about the word billion. This distinguishes between a "short scale" billion (1,000,000,000) and a "long scale" billion (1,000,000,000,000). It then goes on to say:

In 1974 the government of the UK abandoned the long scale, so that the UK now applies the short scale interpretation exclusively in mass media and official usage.

You what ? Twenty years after that decision was made, my school was still teaching me that a UK billion was a million million ? Despite that usage having been dropped before I was even born ?

I'm genuinely disgruntled about this. I've been misreading news reports and financial projections and population estimates for my entire life ?

Did you all know this ?

Comments

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

and wrote on the packaging that 1GB = 1 billion bytes
Usually in very very small writing.
Common, oh so very common on the size if a GB on sticks and drives.
Every so often trading standards contemplates the whole thing and then gives up again.

The whole billion thing is one of those that I kind of subconcisouly absorbed some time ago. Brain sponge, damn American football and cricket rules.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Actually, no, in fairness to SanDisk it was in moderately large writing.

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

*whispers quietly* I can't speak for all of us, and it would be terribly rude of me to speak ill of your estimable education, but...

I know only one person who habitually uses the term "milliard" for the number 10⁹ - and, dear, sweet, highly respected man that he is, he is doing it to make a point.

What got me is when Gordon Brown habitually announced in the budgets, and the like, that he would spend "two hundred millions of pounds" or "two billions of pounds". To me, I would skip the "s of" part, but I have this nasty feeling - like you - that I may have technically been wrong all my life.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

*cough* I do it too. Not that you'd know that.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I've never noticed Brown saying that, so I suppose it doesn't grate on me. Or I just don't listen to him, of course.

I hadn't ever heard the term milliard up until my googling earlier this evening. It seems somewhat sensible to have a non-ambiguous word for 10⁹, though.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh blimey - you're into religious war territory.

The same is true for gigabyte (GB/GiB), only more so.

You don't pronounce them the same. In the new order, only the smaller, base 10, values KB, MB and GB, are pronounced kilobyte, megabyte and gigabyte respectively.

The larger, base 2 values, are KiB, MiB and GiB and are supposedly pronounced kibi-, mebi- and gebi-, respectively.

Did you all know this ?

Yes. Do I like it? No.

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

That was me!

[glamwhorebunni.livejournal.com]

I've always be used to billion = thousand million...

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

Financially, I'd alway assume i billion = 1000 Million.

While at some point I'm sure I learnt the 1 million-million 'British' version, I've had enough years of international stream accountancy courses (and working for US company), that I must confess I'd dropped it as a bit of an archaic oddity.

(Yes, I still consider my height in inches, weight in stones & pounds, cook & brew in pounds & ounces; whilst doing DIY in millimetres, measure temperature in celsius...and yes, give me a metric measuring jug and I can comfortably use 454g=1 lb, a pint of water weighs a pound & a quarter, & 1 litre=1kg to work out what a pint in millilitres is in my head. Nobody said I had to be consistent :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Interestingly (or not) I always know that a pint = 568ml, but I have to go through similar complicated processes to work out what a pound is in grammes :)

And yes, SI units all the way for anything where serious calculation is to be done, but imperial for everyday run-of-the-mill use.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Yes, I still consider my height in inches, weight in stones & pounds

I do that too, but it's mostly because I'd otherwise have to recalibrate all my intuitive measuring. I can look at someone and think "about 5'3", 11st", not because imperial's easier but because as a small child our bathroom scales used imperial and it's been the units I've worked in ever since.

[stegzy.livejournal.com]

I didn't but then, as most of the geography books I had at primary school discussed the British Empire, this doesn't surprise me.

[secondhand-rick.livejournal.com]

Did you all know this ?

Yup.

Probably just as well there's a standard, even if it's a filthy Yank standard.

International finance would be even more f*cked if 1 billion != 1 billion.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well yes, I quite agree. I just think it'd be nice if someone had told me. Sooner.

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

*dons Australian hat*

My impression 25 years ago was UK billion was 10¹², US billion was 10⁹, and Australia was meant to use the UK billion but the evil media/common usage was tending towards using US, about which I was Not Happy. Sometime in my teens I transitioned from evangelism to gloomily telling people the 'million million' billion was dead, long live the 'million million' billion.

By the time I moved to the UK (11 years ago) I assumed the UK had already succumbed, though I didn't realise how long ago it became official.

(aside - I tried moving Reflections' internal documentation over to using the IEC Prefixes for binary multiples. No idea whether it stuck..)

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

Yes, I knew all of that, in fact. But I do have an excuse, in that I wrote large chunks of a book on measurement a few years ago. Personally, I think the distinction between MB/GB and MiB/GiB is a useful one, although I accept that it might be useful to put both numbers on HDDs and the like.

Mind you, if you had to guess, would you expect a 1.44M floppy to be MB or MiB? And what about a 56K modem?

[mrlloyd.livejournal.com]

Argh. I'd expect it to have been MB, but the folks assigning the value to have *meant* MiB, and the same for the 56k modem.

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

The UK billion, (10¹²) went the way of all flesh because it is too big to be useful. The US billion (10⁹) is much more useful. Nobody in Britain (to a close approximation) knows what a milliard is. Here is an example.

(US) The English Government proposes to bail out RBS by taking a $40bn stake. This will be in the form of $10bn of preference shares and $30bn of ordinary shares. This represents about $133 for each of the 300m US inhabitants.

(UK) The British Government proposes to bail out RBS by taking a £20,000m stake. This will be in the form of £5,000m of preference shares and £15,000m of ordinary shares. This represents about £3.33 for each of earth's 6,000m inhabitants.

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

I didn't know, and I don't accept it. Though I do accept that on packaging billion is likely to refer to the American version.

[venta.livejournal.com]

What don't you accept ? That the government made that announcement, or that press usage is now 1 billion = 1,000,000,000, or something else ?

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I'm amazed you worked for as long as you did in the company of Mr Blunn without ever hearing his "the thing about megabytes" speech. It's a timeless classic!

[venta.livejournal.com]

I've heard it many times. I'm well aware of the byte-related size confusions - that was just preamble for people who weren't to understand why packaging should need to specify how big a gigabyte was.

My complaint was about the UK switching 30+ years ago to using 1 billion != i million million, but the education system still assiduously teaching me that it was.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I'm slightly boggled that you'd managed to miss billion=10⁹; that's been the value used in (for instance) the British press for multiple decades now. The only case where I've seen billion=10¹² is people who object to the change, or (now) one who'd managed to miss it. (Any schools still teaching billion=10¹² need re-education fast!)

I had a 4GB Sandisk CF card arrive today, and noticed the same gigabyte=10⁹ bytes rubric on the (frankly excessive) packaging. Disk Utility reports it as “3.8GB (4,110,188,544 Bytes)” so in fact it's neither 4 binary gigabytes nor 4 decimal gigabytes.

In fact I suspect it contains exactly 4 binary gigabytes of underlying physical storage and the 176 (binary) megabytes not presented to the user stores private metadata (for wear leveling etc).

Finally the interesting thing to notice is that (in storage at least) the only people who use decimal units are the storage device manufacturers: if you ask an OS how big a device is it is reported in binary units (usually, though not always, without the irritating 'MiB' versions).

I consider this to be just plain old lying by the storage manufacturers: they are choosing an unusual definition for a unit that everyone else already has an understanding of in order to make the numbers they can put on their packaging bigger.

Finally I don't think the 'MiB' versions were necessary at all: using kilo- on its own to mean 1024 would arguably be confusing but in fact that is not what is going on - it is only used to mean that in the context of 'bytes'. IMV refusing to account for context is nothing more than stupidity and should not be encouraged, particularly so when the context is in the same word rather than e.g. in the surrounding paragraph where it might actually be lost at some point.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

By “arrive today” I actually mean yesterday.

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

Goodness! I can't say for sure what my school taught me, but all the maths-is-fun books I read insisted on the difference between UK and US billions. I'd inferred that American usage had come to dominate in the press but, like you, I'd no idea that a governmental decision had been taken - clarity is not the British way.

Executive summary: Me too.

It is canny of George Osborne to warn that the national debt could reach a 'trillion' pounds, knowing that many people will take this to be 10⁶ times as much as it is!

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Actually I have been avoiding using the word "billion" except when I am vastly exaggerating something, for exactly that reason. Generally I can get away with this because I can safely assume most of the people I know understand standard form, so I just say 10⁹ or 10¹².

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

(Perhaps we should just give up on all these illions and just say what power of ten for large amounts of money)

[ulfilias.livejournal.com]

I knew the MB/GB was a fairly wooly figure, even less so once there is a file system, which i've always thought was a bit of a con.

I did not know that in '74, the year i was born that we stopped having a UK billion and am a tad upset that my schooling also seemed to miss this fact and as such lead me down the garden path !

[mister-jack.livejournal.com]

Standard usage is GB on a storage media is 1,000,000,000 bytes, while a GB in memory is 1024*1024*1024 bytes.

I think the British billion has pretty much passed from this world except as a lingering cause of confusion.

[chrisvenus]

I didn't know that the government had made a decree on it and certainly not that it happened that long ago but I was aware that in this country common usage is for the US billion. I might occasionally feel the need to clarify what I mean if it is particularly important (eg comparing two lots of billions it probably matters less what your billion is, just that there are twice as many of one).

So I was halfway there. And I can't actually remember what I learnt in school. I think I at one point derived that million million makes more sense because you should come up with new words when compounds of old ones start needing duplications (clearly ignored below a thousand). I think that was my own conclusion though rather than something taught in school. Then experience seemed to prove that I was wrong so I switched. :)

I'm now (after reading comments) trying to work out where I might have seen billion in a context to tell me what it meant...

[cocacolasurfer.livejournal.com]

I've never let it bother me. I figure I'm never going to be a millionaire, let along a billionaire....so the values lost all meaning.....even in physics, where you just cheat and use 10^6, 10^7, 10^8, 10^9 etc where appropriate. But I guess that wouldn't look to good on the BBC for the mass public when they are announcing how much money the government doesn't have.

"And in today's headlines, Brown is said to have spent £2.3x10^12 on doughnuts for his new cabinet"

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Or possibly £2.30x10^12, depending how accurate the accounting was.