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

[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)

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

I've seen money described in the news recently as so many zeroes, which is equivalent but friendlier.