[G4] CMLXX's anyone....?

[Doug McNutt]

At 09:14 -0700 6/7/03, Ron wrote:
>No, it this case M means thousand. It comes from Roman numerals (L=50,
>C=100, M=1000) not the metric system nor computer jargon as in mega or
>giga...

on 6/7/03 6:25 AM, Richard Smykla at rsmykla at verizon.net wrote:
> > The letter 'K' is the abbreviation for a thousand. . . kilo

And the Imperial unit mile has to do with millia passuum, which I'll bet I have spelled wrong, but it's a thousand paces of a Roman Legion.

And the M is still a very common counting unit found in commercial purchase orders. A price per M, or $/M is widely understood to be dollars per thousand quantity. It is not a prefix in that usage.

Ant the capital letter K stands for a Kelvin which is a unit of temperature. People who care about precision use a small k for kilo. And they never use m for M. Little m is 1/1000.

And k is 1000 base ten. Using K or k for 2^10 or 1024 produces nothing but confusion but it's common in computer "science".

And to make it all back on topic. When Apple says your G4 disk is 10 GB does it mean 20 base 10 times 2 to the 30th power - 10,737,418,240 bytes - or does it mean 10,000,000,000 bytes? What about the disk salesman?

<http://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/cuu/Info/Units/binary.html> for a definition of kibi,


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