Re: Types of numerals; bases in natlangs.
From: | Tristan McLeay <conlang@...> |
Date: | Sunday, January 15, 2006, 12:44 |
Andreas Johansson wrote:
> Quoting Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>:
>>There have been efforts to introduce -i and -o suffixes (thus Mi for 2^20,
>>or Mo for 10^6, for example) to help cut through this confusion, but I've
>>only encountered them sporadically, and frankly only in cases where the
>>conversants ought to be familiar with which base was in play anyway.
>>They're fighting 50 years of computer-geek groupthink, and frankly that's
>>seldom a good idea.
No; it's a pity when people can't admit they've always not only been
wrong, but also ambiguous.
> There's also Mo = megaoctet. But I seem to see MiB, TiB, etc with some
> frequency.
"Megoctet", I think, isn't -a dropped before o-? (Also "megohm".)
I also see KiB, MiB etc. occasionally---when my computer starts up, one
of the things it says that I ignore is "... KiB ...". Some Linux module
or other... I also saw something advertising a computer somewhere just
recently that said it came with 512 MiB of RAM, upgradable to 2 GiB.
--
Tristan.
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