KB, MB, GB, and TB are all part of the metric system. What empirical measurements should we Free™️ Americans use for computer memory?
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)
Make sure to make the specific term "Computer Ounce", or co. oz.
Better yet, just use "cooz" as the "common unit"
Then it's proportioned following fluid ounce measurements from there. e.g. "coc" (computer cup) is 16 coozes.
Ayyy, I'm in COLORADO so this would be great.
I second this. It makes total sense - computer memory is a volume to be filled with data. They ain't call parts of a hard drive volumes for nothing.
Sampled at what resolution, though? It's a physical painting and the true, atomic-scale resolution would make this whole system useless.
May I suggest the entire constitution in ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) instead? Bonus points if any future amendments change the whole system.
Edit: I suppose you actually want to start small. Maybe just the declaration sans-signatures, then. So, 6610*7 = 46,270 bits.
Congrats, in my almost year on Lemmy, this is the best comment I've seen!
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.
I like this because the amount of bits in a stack can vary depending on whose foot you use to measure, or the thickness of the card stock.
IBM standard cards are one 48th of a barleycorn thick. I believe IBM measured from the 1932 Iowa Reference Barleycorn, now kept in the vault inside Mt Rushmore.
THIS is what I’m talking about!
bit, Nibble, Byte, Word, doubleword, longword, quadword, double-quadword, verylongword, halfword
They check all Imperial criteria:
Words! Of course! Imperial measurement is words. Because they are as inconsistent as other imperial units.
1 tweet = 140 bytes
1 (printed) page = 60 lines of 60 characters = 3600 bytes
1 moa (minute of audio in 128000 bps mp3) = 960000 bytes
1 mov (minute of video) = typically around 30MB but varies by resolution and encoding, like ounces vs troy ounces vs apothecary ounces.
1 loc (library of congress, used for measuring hard drive capacity) = around 10TB depending on jurisdiction.
These are all rough averages, of course, but Tweets can be rather bigger than 140 bytes since they're Unicode, not ASCII. What's Twitter without emoji?
1 moa (minute of audio in 128000 bps mp3)
Give me 320000 bps or give me death!
I would suggest:
PS: just to be clear, I meant CD drives, not CD discs.
1 kg
(͡•_ ͡• )
Don't you mean one pound, abbreviated lb?
Naw, it's actually one Kinda Gallon; a Kinda Gallon of course referring to the average of the masses of a gallon of water, a gallon of beer, and a gallon of whiskey.
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.
Absolutely, I started computers in 1981, for me 1K is 1024 bytes and will always be. 1000 bytes is a scam
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.
Kilo comes from greek and has meant 1000 for 1000's of years. If you want 210 to be represented using greek prefixes, it better involve "deca" and "di". Kilo (and di) would be usable for roughly 1.071508607186267 x 10301 byte. KB was wrong when it was invented, but they were only wrong for decades at least.
MigaBytes?
MiB = mebibyte
Did anyone say Magabyte yet?
1/6th of a MAGAbyte is an insurrection
Ugh. I hate you.
Upvoted.
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).
A milebyte is 5280 bytes
my harddrive is 250 toby keiths and my processer is 500 lee greenwoods
@cupcakezealot @BmeBenji why not 100 trumps processor rate.
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.
really large amounts of ARM is a ton
why go for RAMs when the constitution says ARMs...
x86 is heresy
Mp3s, standard def movies, HD movies, and 4k movies.
I’ve seen so many products advertised by how many “songs” or “movies” it can hold. Never mind you can encode the same movie to be massive or small. So I think we’ve found the right answer!
From smallest to biggest:
Bits (basic unit)
Bytes (8:1 reduction)
Words (4:1 reduction)
KiB (32:1 reduction)
MiB (1024:1)
GiB (1024:1)
TiB (1024:1)
PiB (1024:1)
A normal amount of porn (237:1)
All definitely not metric as metric uses steps of 1000 (and there's also 10 and 100 and 1/10th and 1/100th but that doesn't extend to 10000 and 1/10000th).
The KiB, MiB, etc, the 2^10 scale is called binary prefixes (as opposed to decimal prefixes KB, MB, etc) and standardised by the IEC.
And while the B in KiB is always going to mean eight bits it's not a given that a byte is actually eight bits, network people still use "octet" to disambiguate because back in the days there were plenty of architectures around with other byte sizes. "byte" simply means "smallest number of bits an operation like addition will be done in" in the context of architectures. Then you have word for two bytes, d(ouble)word for four, q(uad)word for eight, o(cto)word for 16, and presumably h(ex)word for 32 it's already hard to find owords in the wild. Yes it's off by one of course it's off by one what do you expect it's about computers. There's also nibble for half a byte.
EDIT: Actually that's incorrect word is also architecture-dependent, the word/dword/qword sequence applies to architectures (like x86) which went from being 16-bit machines to now being 64 bit while keeping backwards compatibility. E.g. RISC-V uses 32-bit words, 16 bits there are a half-word.
The bit, at least, is not under contention everyone agrees what it is. Though you can occasionally see people staring in wild disbelief and confusion at statements such as "this information can be stored in 1.58 bits". That number is ~ log2~ 3, that is, the information that fits in one trit. Such as "true, false, maybe".
Great write up, glad to see mention of nibble (my favorite lol)… You forgot to mention byte order (Little/Big Endian).
So you're saying my proposed imperial units depend on where you are, and who is using them, for what purpose? That just sells me on them as imperial units even more. :)
Thank you for the details.
Words aren't always four bytes
Words (4:1 reduction)
Word is imperial unit. Like one british gallon is not equal to one us gallon, one x86 word is not equal one ARM word.
12 bits to an eagle
27 eagles to a liberty (changes whenever an amendment is added)
1776 liberties to a freedom
Computers are still programmed in bytes, but filesize is always in freedoms.
Perhaps bandwidth could be calculated around the fire rate of an AR15?
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.
That’s not bad, but is there a digital equivalent of a horse we could use?
Nyan cats
One hor... Bwahahaha!
(GIF)We should measure size of files/storage as a function of how many standardized png's of an american flag would fit in the same amount of space.
digital freedom units
1 sperm is 37.5MB.
If it's for American context then you mean 1 baby
Every sperm is sacred.
M$ already fucked that up for everybody calling GiB GB.
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.
May I suggest OB for Ounce Byte, or 28.35 Byte, one 16th of a PB PoundByte which is 453,6 Bytes.
These measures are both practical as freedom units because it's base is close to 28, which is clearly more suitable than 32 as a freedom unit base number, and the Pound Byte can be easily halved 4 times to make an Ounce Byte. Which makes it about as convenient as other freedom units.
Finally someone is making sense. I was getting depressed with all the logical metric inspired units disguised as jokes everywhere in this thread. You get it. Thank you 🙏
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
My CPU is running at 2.6 Triple thou cycles per imperial second (TTiS)
Don't you mean Triple Imperial Thousand Seconds?
1 floppy = 1.44 MO
1 CD = 700 MO
1 DVD = 4,7 GO
1 HD DVD = 15 GO
1 Blu-Ray = 25 GO
Calling bytes 'O' is rather unamerican.
ASCII byte is 7 bits. 8 bits is an octet.
I second floppies being our new base unit
This is the logical answer (so maybe not American?), as it would relate to how we handle data.
Also add 1 HDD = 1 TO
Football fields, Olympic size swimming pools, hotdogs, and quarters
All, of course based on how many kerned 1s and 0s (alternatingly) you could fit printed in 12pt Times New Roman font within the thing's length.
Also, you need to alternate rounding your error (i.e. quarter rounds down, but hotdog rounds up, etc)
You forgot washing machines.
1 bible = 69 porn clips = 420 feet (unrelated to the other measurement)
I use jiffies to refer to clock speed.
BogoMIPS
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.
Those are units of discrete quantity, so couple, dozen, score, gross, grand, etc.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-numerical_words_for_quantities
A bit in Freedom units is 2 metric bits because it wouldn't be freedom units without unnecessary confusion. A metric bit is equivalent to a freedom unit lil'bit, because it's smaller than a bit. A bite (no relation to a byte) is 25 lil'bits because saying 25 ones and zeros outload is a mouthful. A hot dog is 4.2 bites or 105 lil'bits because that's how many bites it takes me to eat a hot dog. A hamburger is 6.4 bites because it takes more bites to eat. A double with cheese is 7.8 bites. A whole hog is 233 hot dogs. A stampede is 23146 hamburgers.
The Indians use Crore and Lakh
They use those for everything
Why did I think that quote was from Clifford Stoll? (Sp?)
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.
The conversion to metric is way to easy
Hahahahahaha! That's true.
1TB can be Recommended Chrome Ram?
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:
We already have a confusing abbreviation: B vs b. 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
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
Power of Two
1GB is 29.8975 pots
1MB is 19.9315 pots
TiB
One tebibyte equals 2^40 or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.
What makes that more intuitive than any of the others?
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.
1 kB is 1024 bytes and a byte is 8 bits. That is not metric. It just uses metric prefixes.
1kB = 1000 bytes, 1KiB = 1024 bytes
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.
I propose the base measurement is a Reagit - equal to 36 bit states, or half-bits (36 was the age of Ronald Reagan when the transistor was first invented in 1947)
The next smallest is the Nuclearyte equal to the quantity of times the United States has proven technological superiority in war by using an atomic bomb offensively. So 2 Reagits is 1 Nuclearyte.
After that is the number of US presidents to have survived an assassination attempt (8) known simply as the ‘Merit (and don’t forget the apostrophe). 8 nuclearytes is 1 ‘merit.
Next is the number of years after the birth of Our Lord when Americans landed on the moon. 1969 ‘merits is 1 L-unit (pronounced like Loon)
Even bigger still is the number of amendments it took for the damn commie government to realize that alcohol is essential for human survival. The 18th amendment was a mistake, but the 21st amendment was blessed by Our Father who Art in Heaven without a doubt. 3 L-units is 1 chug
Next is the number of young men who died fighting for the rights of our United States to remain unquestioned by the damn commie federal government during the great war for individually united liberties between 1860 and 1865. 490,309 chugs is 1 Right
And so far we haven’t needed any larger measurements.
We can use bits instead of bytes. That way it can look 8x bigger than it really is and have no real bearing to modern computing.
These units are too logical and scientific for my free, spirited, emotional, irrational Christian brain so I need something that’s more intuitive.
Letter to Grandma, The Bible, Vacation photo album, and Video Collection
American football fields.
American Football fields.
Octal. Start expressing it in maga Octal with thoughts prayers and bullets for ones
An Uvalde is the memory equivalent of PCM 48 kHz sample rate of children screaming.
No, those are not metric, they just borrowed some prefixes, although it's not like metric designers invented those anyways.
We should be using KB, MB, GB, and TB. Also we should adopt the entire International System of Units and stop with the shit we use. The army uses metric. Why can't the rest of the population?
This is a joke post. That’s why it’s in the programmer humor community
Oh damn. Well then I rescind my statement. We should obviously use a Base-50 system. One bit for each state.
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.
KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB
