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.

[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.

[(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!

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

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

[venta.livejournal.com]

The 'do you know this' question was really aimed at whether you knew that an "English billion" doesn't really exist as a concept any more.

I put it to you that base two values are not pronounced anything like that. Any sensible person says "kilobyte" and means 1024 ;)

[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.

[venta.livejournal.com]

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

[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 :)

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

Maybe they've already been 'converted'. Not here though.

[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.

[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.

[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]

Blimey, that's just pure Dutch. (Miljard = billion, although I have no idea about the scale.)

[mrlloyd.livejournal.com]

Yes, but clearly only when talking about computing.

To put it another way gigabyte means 1024*1024, but I'd be a fair bit more careful in my use of billion....

[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.

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

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

[secondhand-rick.livejournal.com]

Ah. Righty ho. My apologies.

You do know about the switch to new pence, right?

[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.