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?
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.
Bytes are not part of the metric system because computers use base 2 instead of base 10. However, the metric system does borrow prefixes to express data sizes, such as kilo-, mega-, giga-, tera-, and peta-, so we could just use english for the prefixes
Increments of 700 MB. As laid down by the wizards of usenet: 1CD, 2CD, 3CD, etc.
And then extending that idea, 1.44 MB, 4.7 GB, and 50 GB units.
A disk is 1,510,294 bytes - because it’s 1.44 American megabytes, and a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, god dammit. They’re binary. A CD (or “disc”) is 486 disks. A DVD5 is 6 CDs, because a DVD9 only holds 12. A BDRXL is 24 DVD5s.
From there we have to defer to the other kind of “elders of the internet” and say a “terabit” is exactly 10 BDRXLs, because my dad absolutely refuses to use the word “terabyte.” It’s decimalized from there on out. Which sounds great until you realize an American terabit is 5.7% more than asinine SI “hard drive manufacturer” terabytes, but only 98% of a proper binary figure given the even dumber name “tebibyte.”
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.
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.
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.
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