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

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

I've a vague recollection of a 1.44M floppy being a somewhat ludicrous 1.44 *1024000 bytes..

[rabbit1080.livejournal.com]

I've a vague recollection of a 1.44M floppy :=P

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

*ding* correct. (1440 sectors of 1024 bytes each, which does at least make some sense, but isn't either a MB or a MiB.) Anyone care to take a guess at the modem number?

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

*cheer* (I guess at least that way it's an exact figure..)

Given the context, and in the absence of other responses, I'm going to guess it's an exact multiple of the speed of ye olde 2400bps modems, and plump for 57,600 bits per second. And 56k just sounded like a nice round number.

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

Also correct, giving you a slightly ridiculous 1028.57 bits per kb. ISTR I found some other examples, too, but those were the two that stuck in the mind....

[ulfilias.livejournal.com]

Slow.....Improbable and only hypethericaly achievable anyway !