• lqdrchrd@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    7 months ago

    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)

  • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
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    7 months ago

    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.

    • YodaDaCoda@aussie.zone
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      7 months ago

      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.

      • grozzle@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        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.

  • Rinox@feddit.it
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    7 months ago

    bit, Nibble, Byte, Word, doubleword, longword, quadword, double-quadword, verylongword, halfword

    They check all Imperial criteria:

    • confusing names
    • some used only in some systems
    • size depends on where you are
    • some may overlap
    • doesn’t manage to cover all the possible needs, but do you really need more than 64 bits?
    • would probably cause you to crash a rocket
    • uis@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      Words! Of course! Imperial measurement is words. Because they are as inconsistent as other imperial units.

  • solrize@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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.

    • Melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      7 months ago

      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?

  • tvbusy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 months ago

    I would suggest:

    • 1KB = storage capacity of 1 kg of 1.44 floppy disks.
    • 1MB = storage capacity of 0.0106 mile of CD drives.
    • 1GB = storage capacity of 1 good computer in the 2000s.
    • 1TB = storage capacity of 1 truck of GB (see above)

    PS: just to be clear, I meant CD drives, not CD discs.

  • Leo Uino@lemmy.sdf.org
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    7 months ago

    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).

  • leaky_shower_thought@feddit.nl
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    7 months ago

    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

    • uis@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      why go for RAMs when the constitution says ARMs…

      x86 is heresy

    • joelfromaus@aussie.zone
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      7 months ago

      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!

  • prime_number_314159@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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)

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      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”.

      • notfromhere@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        Great write up, glad to see mention of nibble (my favorite lol)… You forgot to mention byte order (Little/Big Endian).

      • prime_number_314159@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        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.

    • uis@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      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.

  • 𝕱𝖎𝖗𝖊𝖜𝖎𝖙𝖈𝖍@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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.

  • waz@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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.

  • TheOakTree@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    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.

    • Buttons@programming.dev
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      7 months ago

      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.

      Fixed it, I will not be oppressed by your standards

      • TheOakTree@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        Surely it would be a standardized png determined by each state legislation so… of varying sizes.

        • Adalast@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          It would be of the state flags, with resolution and compression determined by the state supreme courts obviously.