Tuesday, March 09, 2010

I dub thee ....

Yottabyte.

The best new nickname/callsign since PITA and Copernicus.

For that shipmate whose ego is just, well ......

at 05:57
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18 comments:

Grumpy Old Ham said...

Huh.  The Economist got it (slightly) wrong.

1000 bytes is a kilobyte, 2^10 bytes (1024 bytes) is more correctly referred to as a kibibyte, and so on down the orders of magnitude:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte

One can imagine that names for 10^27 (2^90) and 10^30 (2^100) prefixes are waiting in the wings.  I suspect the latter will be some variant of "google" as that is the name for 10^100:

http://www.physlink.com/reference/DecimalPrefixes.cfm

IIRC, one of the big hard disk manufacturers was sued some years ago over labeling disk drives using powers of 10 instead of powers of 2.

Your J6 in waiting.

07:37
cdrsalamander said...

Nerd.

07:41
Grumpy Old Ham said...

You say that as if it's a bad thing.

Off to order my "Pi Day" shirt from that second link... :)

08:00
DeltaBravo said...

Y'all make my brain smile....  :)

10:30
Old NFO said...

We once had a lieutenant who was THE West Coast expert on S-3 Viking software and could speak extemporaneously for hours on the formula for expanding far on circles or areas of probability for ESM fixes.  Once a week he gave a lecture to the rest of the NFO's (the pilots ran screaming from the room.)  He spoke so quickly that most of us simply couldn't listen that fast.  On one occasion he mixed up two words and then spoke absolute gibberish for several seconds before he realized it.  During the few seconds that elapsed while he was rebooting the lecture in his brain one wag said "Drop sync, say again."  It brought down the house.  Yottabyte would have been the perfect call sign for him.  :-D

12:10
YNSN said...

I first saw this the other day in an article in the.... Crap, I can't remember the periodical.  I think it was the NYT Online.  The article was about the topology of the whole of the internet.  The way the amount transfered of data on the internet is now measured is in just that.  Insane.  There are more ones and zeros floating around the internet, than there are atoms that make up the solar system. 

12:10
Casey Tompkins said...

They might have been sued, but the solution was simple: even today you can find a note on the packaging specifying that one gigabyte = 1,000,000,000 bytes. This is why the OS reports a different size than advertized on the shelf, since it uses powers of 2 counting.

As far as I'm concerned, the standards group screwed the definitions up, since they're referrring explicitly to bytes, which is a power of 2.

We lost this battle a long time ago when everyone started talking about 14,400 "baud" modems instead of bits per second. Baud <> bit rate.

Not even gonna get into conversion of fractions to binary floating-point, then back. Or how all "random" numbers on computers aren't truly random... :)

12:19
Grumpy Old Ham said...

And to think our host called *me* a nerd.

IIRC, that labeling of one GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes is a direct result from that lawsuit.   Too lazy to find the story on Google right now, it happened sometime around the debut of Win98 (maybe Win95) as that was the first OS to have a convenient way to graphically represent disk space.

The "baud" vs. "bit rate" inaccuracy drives me about as batty as the LSM's misuse of "hacker" when they mean "cracker" (and no, I'm not referring to our FL shipmates with that word :) ).  Both instances of mis-use are far too entrenched to fix, though.

15:27
Anonymous said...

It's so fun to demean smart people, and it can even make one feel street smart whilst doing it.

17:24
DeltaBravo said...

Philobobguest, if you think anyone here is demeaning GOH, you don't know a thing.

It's called TEASING.  As opposed to the potshots you take.

18:32
Byron said...

Not to mention that old friends on the Porch quite often rag the hell out of each other....but friends can do that. The difference, you anonymous little troll, is that you crawl out from the rock you live under and take a little cheap shot at people you don't know then duck back in. You think about it, that's the cowards way of dealing with real people. So either man up or go back to video games, Pepsi, and your blow up girlfriend.

19:16
DeltaBravo said...

Aww, Byron, maybe he just needs the process of humor explained to him.  He's unfamiliar with teasing as a backhanded salute to the absolute eyes-glazed-over immensity of GOH's knowlege on the given subject.   Same for you too, Casey!  Get a life!  Back away from the computer!  (The only thing I knew about bauds was my rate made my old computer dialup modem really slow.)  Doh!

20:13
cdrsalamander said...

"... whilst ... "

Dude - I hope you are a Brit ... otherwise .... GEEK!

20:32
Casey Tompkins said...

Um, DB? I was speaking very much tounge in cheek. In fact I was aiming for the response that I got from GOH. :)

20:35
DeltaBravo said...

I know.  Still, y'all know way too much about arcane stuff.  ;)

20:42
Grumpy Old Ham said...

Well, ya did reel me in, hook, line, and sinker.  Well, played, sir, well played...

21:17
UltimaRatioRegis said...

Pulled....  muscle.....  in....  head....

Worse than hamstring....  need ace bandage for my skull....

22:09
Casey Tompkins said...

Whoa! 'Phib's taking off the gloves, now. =-O

20:13

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