The Exbibyte Wars Are Coming

[beamjockey]

As someone whose workplace is concerned with inverse femtobarns, I am somewhat aware of the importance of standard prefixes for very small or very large numbers.

In the article about puppies killing the Internet, the reference to a "zettabyte" got me thinking about prefixes we use for big binary numbers like kilobytes and megabytes. Turns out

Comments

[wcg]

Now I want to write a story about a Heinleinian family with children named Kibi, Mebi, Gibi, Tebi, Pebi, and Exbi. No doubt they're all red-heads.

[sethb]

Don't you mean 2^10N vs. 10^3N?

Also, your link to the "puppies" article is broken.

[beamjockey]

Fixed. Thank you for your polite corrections.

[whl]

I have occasionally used the binary prefixes; everyone that hears me either giggles or rolls their eyes...

And the root of the problem was advertising and the hard drive industry, who wanted to make their drives sound bigger.

[mmcirvin]

Yeah, while the strictly decimal prefixes are SI-consistent, I never heard anyone use the terms that way until disk manufacturers started doing it, which makes it grating that that mildly fraudulent use is now being enshrined as the correct one.

[von_krag]

Fun, I've sent this to the math geek grandchild & she rolls her eys and said "But EVERYONE knows this!".

[stickmaker]

You should'a run this all the way out to a googleplex, just to be thorough. :-)