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)
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.
60 Doodles in a Dandy
giggity
That’s too straightforward. It should be 113 Doodles in a Dandy. And 73 Dandies in a Macaroni.
Maybe its the number of men in the boat number of dandies in a macaroni
4 Macaronis in a bit of an ounce.
8 Macaronis in a full ounce.
How many Macaronis in a Handy though? I’d say 1776.
… I’ll see myself out.
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.
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.
Ayyy, I’m in COLORADO so this would be great.
Congrats, in my almost year on Lemmy, this is the best comment I’ve seen!
- A nugget: 1 bit
- A tendy: 1 byte
- A hot dog : 1 kb
- A hamburger: 1 mb
- A KFC bucket: 1 gb
The conversion to metric is way to easy
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
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.
1 sperm is 37.5MB.
If it’s for American context then you mean 1 baby
Every sperm is sacred.
Letter to Grandma, The Bible, Vacation photo album, and Video Collection
No, those are not metric, they just borrowed some prefixes, although it’s not like metric designers invented those anyways.
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.
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.
MigaBytes?
MiB = mebibyte
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.
Computers have ruled the planet for longer than the Greeks ever did. The history lesson is appreciated, but we’re living in the future, now, and the future is digital.
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.
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.
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.
If you aren’t using metric then the metric prefix definitions don’t apply.
Yes it does wtf?
The metric system is fascist. It was invented by aristocratic elitist control freaks. It is arbitrary and totalitarian.
“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.
Or maybe metric should measure in Hartleys
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.
most personal computers still report in the binary way.
Which ones?
Windows reports using binary and continues to use the Greek terms. Windows is still the holder of largest market share for PC operating systems.
Hey how is “bit shifting” different then division? (The answer may surprise you).
Bit shifting works if you wanna divide by 2 only.
interesting, so does the computer have a special “base 10” ALU that somehow implements division without bit shifting?
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.
The difference really needs to be enforced.
My ram is in GiB but advertised in GB ???
Your RAM is in GiB and GB. You can measure it either way you prefer. If you prefer big numbers, you can say you have 137,438,953,472 bits of RAM
Pretty sure the commenter above meant that the their RAM was advertised as X GiB but they only got X GB, substitute X with 4/8/16/your amount
As far as I know, RAM only comes in GiB sizes. There is some overhead that reduces the amount you see in the OS though. But that complaint is valid for storage devices if you don’t know the units and expect TB/GB on the box to match the numbers in Windows
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.
Bushels of data
What can you fit in a bushel?
That’s 1 day of Facebook, or 5 minutes of Netflix, or roughly 11.2milibits driven over 2 Chicago style city blocks.
TiB
One tebibyte equals 2^40 or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.
What makes that more intuitive than any of the others?
I thought you wanted it to be more american
Yeah, American stuff makes sense unlike the metric system which is completely unintuitive /s
This whole post is meant to be a joke. The metric prefixes are perfectly understandable even if they’re technically off the decimal benchmarks by a handful of bytes
Metric is intuitive, but also shit. Just because you have 10 fingers doesn’t mean you should formulate a measurement system out of it. In fact if you actually give a shit about intuitiveness you’d go back to the American system which is roughly base 12 and therefore easier for division and manual estimations.
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 tweet = 140 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.
1 moa (minute of audio in 128000 bps mp3)
Give me 320000 bps or give me death!
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?
American football fields.
AmericanFootball fields.
Those are units of discrete quantity, so couple, dozen, score, gross, grand, etc.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-numerical_words_for_quantities
Fractional bits come up in non-deterministic situation, sometimes.
Just use fractions, like with inches. ⅞
See, that’s actually the one thing I really like about imperial. Binary subdivisions are good.