• How about feet of IBM punch cards?

    A 1 foot tall stack holds 1,647,360 bits of data if all 80 columns are used. If only 72 columns are used for data then it’s 1,482,624 bits of data and the remaining columns can be used to number each card so they can be put back in order after the stack is dropped.

  • bit, Nibble, Byte, Word, doubleword, longword, quadword, double-quadword, verylongword, halfword

    They check all Imperial criteria:

    • confusing names
    • some used only in some systems
    • size depends on where you are
    • some may overlap
    • doesn’t manage to cover all the possible needs, but do you really need more than 64 bits?
    • would probably cause you to crash a rocket
  •  tvbusy   ( @tvbusy@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 
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    3 months ago

    I would suggest:

    • 1KB = storage capacity of 1 kg of 1.44 floppy disks.
    • 1MB = storage capacity of 0.0106 mile of CD drives.
    • 1GB = storage capacity of 1 good computer in the 2000s.
    • 1TB = storage capacity of 1 truck of GB (see above)

    PS: just to be clear, I meant CD drives, not CD discs.

  • KiB, MiB, GiB etc are more clear. It makes a big difference especially 1TB vs 1TiB.

    The American way would probably be still using the units you listed but still meaning 1024, just to be confusing.

    Either that or maybe something that uses physical measurement of a hard-drive (or CD?) using length. Like that new game is 24.0854 inches of data (maybe it could be 1.467 miles of CD?).

    • The American way would probably be still using the units you listed but still meaning 1024, just to be confusing.

      American here. This is actually the proper way. KB is 1024 bytes. MB is 1024 KB. The terms were invented and used like that for decades.

      Moving to ‘proper metric’ where KB is 1000 bytes was a scam invented by storage manufacturers to pretend to have bigger hard drives.

      And then inventing the KiB prefixes was a soft-bellied capitulation by Europeans to those storage manufacturers.

      Real hackers still use Kilo/Mega/Giga/Tera prefixes while still thinking in powers of 2. If we accept XiB, we admit that the scummy storage vendors have won.

      Note: I’ll also accept that I’m an idiot American and therefore my opinion is stupid and invalid, but I stand by it.

      • Kilo comes from greek and has meant 1000 for 1000’s of years. If you want 2^10 to be represented using greek prefixes, it better involve “deca” and “di”. Kilo (and di) would be usable for roughly 1.071508607186267 x 10^301 byte. KB was wrong when it was invented, but they were only wrong for decades at least.

      •  kbal   ( @kbal@fedia.io ) 
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        Calling 1048576 bytes an “American megabyte” might be technically wrong, but it’s still slightly less goofy-looking than the more conventional “MiB” notation. I wish you good luck in making it the new standard.

        • The metric standard is to measure information in bits.

          Bytes are a non-metric unit. Not a power-of-ten multiple of the metric base unit for information, the bit.

          If you’re writing “1 million bytes” and not “8 million bits” then you’re not using metric.

          If you aren’t using metric then the metric prefix definitions don’t apply.

          There is plenty of precedent for the prefixes used in metric to refer to something other than an exact power of 1000 when not combined with a metric base unit. A microcomputer is not one one-thousandth of a computer. One thousand microscopes do not add up to one scope. Megastructures are not exactly one million times the size of ordinary structures. Etc.

          Finally: This isn’t primarily about bit shifting, it’s about computers being based on binary representation and the fact that memory addresses are stored and communicated using whole numbers of bits, which naturally leads to memory sizes (for entire memory devices or smaller structures) which are powers of two. Though the fact that no one is going to do something as idiotic as introducing an expensive and completely unnecessary division by a power of ten for every memory access just so you can have 1000-byte MMU pages rather than 4096 also plays a part.

          • The metric system is fascist. It was invented by aristocratic elitist control freaks. It is arbitrary and totalitarian.

            https://archive.ph/EB5Qu

            “The colorfulness and descriptiveness of the imperial system is due to the fact that it is rooted in imagery and analogies that make intuitive sense.”

            I’ll save my own rant until after I’ve seen the zombies froth.

            • The meter is an French fascist measurement made by the court jester.

              “Since 2019 the metre has been defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of
              1/299792458 of a second …” [Wikipedia]

              What is wrong with this definition?

              The metre claims to be a ‘non-imperial’ basis of measurement.

              But the basis of the metre is the imperial or ephemeral second, which is the ultimate imperial measurement. Seconds are an imperial unit. The measurement of time is fundamental to the ruler … get it?

              So the arbitrarily devised metre is founded upon the imperial second. Oops. Now why again did you say the metric system is ‘superior’ to the imperial system?

              Metric supremacists are fascist rubes who don’t realize they were pwnd by the empire before their rebellion even had a name or gang sign. They wanted to overthrow the king and based their coup on the king’s fundamental unit of regal measurement: time. Oops. This is a case of killing the baby in the cradle.

              Imperial units of measurement are based upon things found in nature. The second is a division of the solar and astronomical day. A second is 1/86400th of a day, and is based again on sexigesimal math, which is found EVERYWHERE in nature.

              Every good programmer should already know where this is going.

              Day: 86400 seconds.
              Day: 24 hours.
              Hour: 3600 seconds.
              Hour: minute squared.
              Minute: 60 seconds.
              3600 seconds * 24 hours = 86400 seconds.
              60 seconds * 60 minutes = 3600 seconds = 1 hour

              There is nothing arbitrary about this. The imperial measurement is neatly aligned to solar and astronomical cycles and to the latitudes and longitudes of the earth. In short, the imperial system of measurement had already measured the equatorial and tropical circuits of the earth and the sun’s path over 3000 years ago, and based measurements upon that.

              Then along came the metric aristocrats, who pretended this had never been done before, speculated a _false_ circumference of the earth, and came up with a flawed metre based on that false measurement, then changed it decades later to the distance traveled by light in an imperial second, unaware that no constant speed of light has yet been proved conclusively, but only assumed.

              Whereas the imperial system is based upon measurements which have been observed unchanged, verifiable, and reproducible, FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS.

              Tell me again why the metric system is, ‘superior’?

              The metre is merely a speculation and the so-called speed of light has NOT been conclusively proven, considering special relativity and all that other aristocratic bollocks. Also complicating the matter is the specific definition of, “light traveling in a vacuum.” OK, sparky, how are you going to locate a laboratory in a vacuum at least 1 light second in length to conduct this experimental measurement and prove it?

              This fallacy is called an ‘unfalsifiable’ claim. Yup, The metric system is based upon a pseudo-scientific conjecture and fallacy. Whereas the imperial system is based upon thousands of years of repeatable observation. And yet ‘scientists’ somehow are confused about the reality of the situation.

              As I’ve said elsewhere, worldwide science and academia have been growing progressively more delusional for the past couple of centuries.

              In the end the aristocrats will bow to the king they hate. Thank God Americans have refused to bow to this dumb idol. Stay strong Murrikanz.

              Here’s a shout out to the limeys who still weigh in stones! Long live the king’s foot!

              academicchatter@a.gup.pe

        • This is such a weird take to me. We don’t even colloquially discuss computer storage in terms of 1000.

          The Greek terms were used from the beginning of computing and the new terms of kibi and mebi (etc.) were only added in 1998 when Members it the IEC got upset. But despite that, most personal computers still report in the binary way. The decimal is only used on boxes for marketing terms.

              • In general integer division is implemented using a form of long division, in binary. There is no base-10 arithmetic involved. It’s a relatively expensive operation which usually requires multiple clock cycles to complete, whereas dividing by a power of two (“bit shifting”) is trivial and can be done in hardware simply by routing the signals appropriately, without any logic gates.

                • In general integer division is implemented using a form of long division, in binary.

                  The point of my comment is that division in binary IS bitshifting. There is no other way to do it if you want the real answer. You can estimate, you can round, but the computational method of division is done via bitshifting of binarary expansions of numbers in an ALU.

  • 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).

  • why go for RAMs when the constitution says ARMs…

    and no more bits or bytes too, double bytes small or quadbytes regular size all the way.

    • kilo bytes is a grand

    • mega bytes is a venti

    • giga bytes is a grand venti

    • terabytes is a doble venti

    really large amounts of ARM is a ton

    • Cut to a younger me looking at HDDs in Walmart, and wondering why the fuck they were using much higher numbers than what the drive actually had. That’s when I learned the difference, and started grow my hate for advertising bullshit.

  • Probably something based on 1/6 th of a byte that originates form old IBM systems that used 6 bits per byte that was then later never changed into 8 bit systems so you now have to convert between 6 bit and 8 bit systems and then fractions, gotta get those good fractions. So they’d say something like my SSD is 170⅔ GB for a 128GB drive

  • 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.