I use jiffies to refer to clock speed.
BogoMIPS
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
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
newtonnano 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
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.
Quite standard, actually. If you buy a fridge over here it’d say something like “150 kWh/a”, which is 17.12 Watts, which is how much the fridge uses on average. People don’t pay for Watts, though, but for kWh, that’s what’s on the bill so kWh/a is way more practical if you want to convert to €/a. Also if you put more than one number in Watts in the docs civilians might get confused, ideally the only one you put there is connection power.
What’s a hectare?
I actually have no idea. I know that it’s what farmers pick up women with but I have no real mental image of how much it is. 100m, sure, make that a square but it’s still somehow without meaning.
but I went into a cold sweat thinking about all the awful things that would happen with a 25 mm inch,
Blame the Swedes, or more precisely Carl Edvard Johansson, inventor and manufacturer of gauge blocks. Before that the US and Brits had slightly incompatible definitions of inches and he split the difference pretty much in the middle and rounded a bit and ended up producing 25.4mm gauge blocks, and only after that industry even started to be precise and actually adhere to proper measures – without wide availability of reference gauge blocks that was impossible. He should’ve rounded just a bit further.
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
TiB
One tebibyte equals 2^40 or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.
What makes that more intuitive than any of the others?
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.
Tell that to the romans and indians who based our numbering system on 10
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.
My CPU is running at 2.6 Triple thou cycles per imperial second (TTiS)
Don’t you mean Triple Imperial Thousand Seconds?
The Indians use Crore and Lakh
They use those for everything
Power of Two
1GB is 29.8975 pots
1MB is 19.9315 pots
Most people would use “word”, “half-word”, “quarter-word” etc, but the Anglophiles insist on “tuppit”, “ternary piece”, “span” and “chunk” (that’s 5 bits, or 12 old bits).
American football fields.
AmericanFootball fields.
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Try KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB, those are metric, KB is not
Other way round: prefixes that contain “bi” are binary, so 1024-based.
Somebody needs to make a satire piece on how the “woke mob” is ruining computers because these units of measurement are all bi.
Bipolar is 1024 based?
Jokes aside, you’re talking nonsense. 1024 based?
I think they mean “based off of chunks of 1024”, not “base 1024”.
1 bible = 69 porn clips = 420 feet (unrelated to the other measurement)
Letter to Grandma, The Bible, Vacation photo album, and Video Collection
As all your other measurements are based on the subjective measures of random people, I’d suggest using the amount of digits of pi a senior can remember in the time a new school shooting happens as a base, like a Bit. Then just multiply by a random amount for bigger sizes and prefix the name with random presidents names.
1 kB is 1024 bytes and a byte is 8 bits. That is not metric. It just uses metric prefixes.
1kB is 1000B you are using KiB which Windows to this day calls KB -.-
Linux kernel guilty as well. It reports memory in “kb”, but digging through documentation, you will at some point see that they actually mean KiB. The “kb” would be 1000 bits.
1kB = 1000 bytes, 1KiB = 1024 bytes
