• benderbeerman@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Imperial, obviously: F(reedom)T(ons) and fractions thereof. 1FT is the amount of data that it takes to store the entire King James edition of the New Testament and the Bill of Rights as a PDF.

    • Wes_Dev@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      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.

  • Rinox@feddit.it
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    3 months ago

    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
  • lqdrchrd@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    3 months ago

    Size of an uncompressed image of the Washington Crossing the Delaware painting = 1 Yankee

    12 Yankees in a Doodle

    60 Doodles in an Ounce (entirely unrelated to the volume or weight usage of ounce)

  • waz@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I know you asked about memory, but the computer I just assembled had a 750watt power supply. As an American I think we should refer to it as a “one horsepower power supply” instead.

  • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
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    3 months ago

    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.

  • insomniac_lemon@kbin.social
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    3 months ago

    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?).

    • survivalmachine@beehaw.org
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      3 months ago

      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.

      • Kairos@lemmy.today
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        3 months ago

        No the correct way is to use the proper fucking metric standard. Use Mi or Gi if you need it. We have computers that can divide large numbers now. We don’t need bit shifting.

        • ursakhiin@beehaw.org
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          3 months ago

          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.