Glenn Cole writes:

> Jerry Fochtman writes:
>
>  > Following 'TERA' is 'PETA', 'EXA', 'ZETTA' and 'YOTTA'.
>  > See http://www.ccsf.caltech.edu/%7Eroy/dataquan/ety.html
>
>  Very interesting!  Including the comment:
>
>  > Remember, both according to CGMP [French acronym for "General Conference
>  > for Weights and Measures] and SI [presumably the French acronym from
which
>  > we get ISO], the prefixes refer to powers of 10. Mega is 10**6, exactly
>  > 1,000,000, kilo is exactly 1000, not 1024.
>
>  Great.  Now it's all clear as mud. :/

The problem is that a different tradition is at work. For the SI units (which
stands for Systeme International, btw -- and doesn't particularly have
anything to do with ISO, other than the ISO is a strong proponent of the use
of SI), the tradition is decimal, thus kilo- means 10^3, mega- means 10^6,
giga- means 10^9, etc.

But in computers, where the tradition is binary, kilo- means 2^10, mega- means
2^20, giga- means 2^30, etc., as Jim Kramer said yesterday. (This 10 to 3
ratio of powers works reasonably well because the log base 10 of 2 is 0.30103,
which is close enough to 3 for government work).

The same problem permeates English pronounciations. In English, the root words
and languages dictate substantially different pronounciations, as in "power
mower" and "four hour tour".

You eventually get used to it.

Wirt Atmar