Slashdot Mirror
To Keep Track of World's Data, You'll Need More Than a Yottabyte (wsj.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In 10 or 15 years, Dr. Brown, who is head of metrology at the National Physical Laboratory in the U.K., anticipates the amount of computerized data worldwide will exceed 1 yottabyte in size, and without expanding the list of prefixes, there will be no way to talk about the next great chunk of numbers. Even worse, dilettantes could fill the void by popularizing glib prefixes such as bronto or hella -- terms that have already won fans. Without professional intervention, Dr. Brown fears, the next numerical prefix could become the Boaty McBoatface of weights and measures.
[...] For the record, there is an argument to be made for adopting a prefix like bronto: giga and tera are based on the Greek words for "giant" and "monstrous." Why not make bronto, named for the brontosaurus, official, perhaps along with tyranno, stego, colosso or even yeti? Dr. Brown is sympathetic to the argument but unconvinced. Instead, he proposes four prefixes that adhere to recent naming conventions [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; an alternative source was not available.]: ronna and quecca for octillion (27 zeros) and nonillion (30 zeros), along with ronto and quecto for their fractional counterparts, octillionth and nonillionth. Like the latest sanctioned prefixes, Dr. Brown's proposals are loosely related to Latin and Greek words for numbers (in this case, nine and 10). And like most of the prefixes, his suggestions end in "a" or "o." But the process of expanding, or even amending, the official measurements is lengthy.
[...] For the record, there is an argument to be made for adopting a prefix like bronto: giga and tera are based on the Greek words for "giant" and "monstrous." Why not make bronto, named for the brontosaurus, official, perhaps along with tyranno, stego, colosso or even yeti? Dr. Brown is sympathetic to the argument but unconvinced. Instead, he proposes four prefixes that adhere to recent naming conventions [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; an alternative source was not available.]: ronna and quecca for octillion (27 zeros) and nonillion (30 zeros), along with ronto and quecto for their fractional counterparts, octillionth and nonillionth. Like the latest sanctioned prefixes, Dr. Brown's proposals are loosely related to Latin and Greek words for numbers (in this case, nine and 10). And like most of the prefixes, his suggestions end in "a" or "o." But the process of expanding, or even amending, the official measurements is lengthy.
... ancient languages.
When we define the words and terms that are yet undefined, we can start fresh. We don't need to be chained to the past. And why not have numbers that sound cool to say that we can associate with things people know about it? This cult of ancient and dead languages is pretty disturbing. Since the naming convention is based on latin words for numbers is arbitrary in and of itself.
They're not.
they're making new prefixes for every third power of 10.
If a consensus isn't reached relatively soon, the whole "billion" thing will happen again. it's been defined as both 10 to the 9th power and 12th power.
Well, other than using powers of 1,024 (or powers of 1,000 for the pedantic types who are unfamiliar with base 2.)
I'm familiar with base 2. So I know that hard drives typically allocate blocks of size 2^9 or 2^12, and I know that there is nothing else in a hard drive related to powers of two.
Which means that insisting on using powers of 1024 notation is like demanding that we count everything related to the NBA in base 5, since basketball teams have 5 members.
(Actually, power-of-1024 notation is even worse than that, since it uses a *mixture* of various mutually incompatible 1024 powers combined with decimal fractions, all of which makes Roman Numerals look practical by comparison.)