Size of an uncompressed image of the Washington Crossing the Delaware painting = 1 Yankee
12 Yankees in a Doodle
60 Doodles in an Ounce (entirely unrelated to the volume or weight usage of ounce)
That's too straightforward. It should be 113 Doodles in a Dandy. And 73 Dandies in a Macaroni.
Better yet, just use "cooz" as the "common unit"
Then it's proportioned following fluid ounce measurements from there. e.g. "coc" (computer cup) is 16 coozes.
I second this. It makes total sense - computer memory is a volume to be filled with data. They ain't call parts of a hard drive volumes for nothing.
Sampled at what resolution, though? It's a physical painting and the true, atomic-scale resolution would make this whole system useless.
May I suggest the entire constitution in ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) instead? Bonus points if any future amendments change the whole system.
Edit: I suppose you actually want to start small. Maybe just the declaration sans-signatures, then. So, 6610*7 = 46,270 bits.
How about feet of IBM punch cards?
A 1 foot tall stack holds 1,647,360 bits of data if all 80 columns are used. If only 72 columns are used for data then it's 1,482,624 bits of data and the remaining columns can be used to number each card so they can be put back in order after the stack is dropped.
I like this because the amount of bits in a stack can vary depending on whose foot you use to measure, or the thickness of the card stock.
IBM standard cards are one 48th of a barleycorn thick. I believe IBM measured from the 1932 Iowa Reference Barleycorn, now kept in the vault inside Mt Rushmore.
1 tweet = 140 bytes
1 (printed) page = 60 lines of 60 characters = 3600 bytes
1 moa (minute of audio in 128000 bps mp3) = 960000 bytes
1 mov (minute of video) = typically around 30MB but varies by resolution and encoding, like ounces vs troy ounces vs apothecary ounces.
1 loc (library of congress, used for measuring hard drive capacity) = around 10TB depending on jurisdiction.
bit, Nibble, Byte, Word, doubleword, longword, quadword, double-quadword, verylongword, halfword
They check all Imperial criteria:
Words! Of course! Imperial measurement is words. Because they are as inconsistent as other imperial units.
I would suggest:
PS: just to be clear, I meant CD drives, not CD discs.
Naw, it's actually one Kinda Gallon; a Kinda Gallon of course referring to the average of the masses of a gallon of water, a gallon of beer, and a gallon of whiskey.
I know you're joking, but that first Kb definition makes me grind my teeth!
1.44 floppy disks can store, well, 1.44 MEGAbytes. So how can 1 kg of floppy disks can just store 1 KB?
Thank you for your compliment. I love it. The floppy disk is 1.44 non-freedom MB, not 0.015264 miles of CD drives.
KiB, MiB, GiB etc are more clear. It makes a big difference especially 1TB vs 1TiB.
The American way would probably be still using the units you listed but still meaning 1024, just to be confusing.
Either that or maybe something that uses physical measurement of a hard-drive (or CD?) using length. Like that new game is 24.0854 inches of data (maybe it could be 1.467 miles of CD?).
Your RAM is in GiB and GB. You can measure it either way you prefer. If you prefer big numbers, you can say you have 137,438,953,472 bits of RAM
Pretty sure the commenter above meant that the their RAM was advertised as X GiB but they only got X GB, substitute X with 4/8/16/your amount
As far as I know, RAM only comes in GiB sizes. There is some overhead that reduces the amount you see in the OS though. But that complaint is valid for storage devices if you don’t know the units and expect TB/GB on the box to match the numbers in Windows
Most people would use "word", "half-word", "quarter-word" etc, but the Anglophiles insist on "tuppit", "ternary piece", "span" and "chunk" (that's 5 bits, or 12 old bits).
@cupcakezealot yeah but I'd love to hear about megatrumps. but that could also be a measure for mass destruction
Because trump’s processor doesn’t have an IPC. It uses CPI instead and w’d have to start using scientific notation
I’ve seen so many products advertised by how many “songs” or “movies” it can hold. Never mind you can encode the same movie to be massive or small. So I think we’ve found the right answer!
why go for RAMs when the constitution says ARMs...
and no more bits or bytes too, double bytes small or quadbytes regular size all the way.
kilo bytes is a grand
mega bytes is a venti
giga bytes is a grand venti
terabytes is a doble venti
really large amounts of ARM is a ton
From smallest to biggest:
Bits (basic unit)
Bytes (8:1 reduction)
Words (4:1 reduction)
KiB (32:1 reduction)
MiB (1024:1)
GiB (1024:1)
TiB (1024:1)
PiB (1024:1)
A normal amount of porn (237:1)
All definitely not metric as metric uses steps of 1000 (and there's also 10 and 100 and 1/10th and 1/100th but that doesn't extend to 10000 and 1/10000th).
The KiB, MiB, etc, the 2^10 scale is called binary prefixes (as opposed to decimal prefixes KB, MB, etc) and standardised by the IEC.
And while the B in KiB is always going to mean eight bits it's not a given that a byte is actually eight bits, network people still use "octet" to disambiguate because back in the days there were plenty of architectures around with other byte sizes. "byte" simply means "smallest number of bits an operation like addition will be done in" in the context of architectures. Then you have word for two bytes, d(ouble)word for four, q(uad)word for eight, o(cto)word for 16, and presumably h(ex)word for 32 it's already hard to find owords in the wild. Yes it's off by one of course it's off by one what do you expect it's about computers. There's also nibble for half a byte.
EDIT: Actually that's incorrect word is also architecture-dependent, the word/dword/qword sequence applies to architectures (like x86) which went from being 16-bit machines to now being 64 bit while keeping backwards compatibility. E.g. RISC-V uses 32-bit words, 16 bits there are a half-word.
The bit, at least, is not under contention everyone agrees what it is. Though you can occasionally see people staring in wild disbelief and confusion at statements such as "this information can be stored in 1.58 bits". That number is ~ log2~ 3, that is, the information that fits in one trit. Such as "true, false, maybe".
Great write up, glad to see mention of nibble (my favorite lol)… You forgot to mention byte order (Little/Big Endian).
So you're saying my proposed imperial units depend on where you are, and who is using them, for what purpose? That just sells me on them as imperial units even more. :)
Thank you for the details.
Words (4:1 reduction)
Word is imperial unit. Like one british gallon is not equal to one us gallon, one x86 word is not equal one ARM word.
12 bits to an eagle
27 eagles to a liberty (changes whenever an amendment is added)
1776 liberties to a freedom
Computers are still programmed in bytes, but filesize is always in freedoms.
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.
We should measure size of files/storage as a function of how many standardized png's of an american flag would fit in the same amount of space.
We should measure size of files/storage as a function of how many
standardizedpng’s of an american flag would fit in the same amount of space.
Fixed it, I will not be oppressed by your standards
Surely it would be a standardized png determined by each state legislation so... of varying sizes.
It would be of the state flags, with resolution and compression determined by the state supreme courts obviously.
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.
May I suggest OB for Ounce Byte, or 28.35 Byte, one 16th of a PB PoundByte which is 453,6 Bytes.
These measures are both practical as freedom units because it's base is close to 28, which is clearly more suitable than 32 as a freedom unit base number, and the Pound Byte can be easily halved 4 times to make an Ounce Byte. Which makes it about as convenient as other freedom units.
Finally someone is making sense. I was getting depressed with all the logical metric inspired units disguised as jokes everywhere in this thread. You get it. Thank you 🙏