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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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