[thechat] Zope on a Rope (or shoestring)

[Lachlan Cannon]

Simon Dell said:
> At 00:48 17/05/02 +0100, you wrote:
>
>>>Do they make hard disks that big? *:)
>>
>>The largest unit of data measurement I can find is a yottabyte.
>>
>>1 yottabyte = 1024 zettabytes
>>1 zettabyte = 1024 exabytes
>>1 exabyte = 1024 petabytes
>>1 petabyte = 1024 terabytes
>>1 terabyte = 1024 gigabytes
>
> I think these words are chosen to sound silly on purpose. The size of
> the thing being expressed is stupidly big, so it needs a stupid
> sounding word to accurately describe it.
>
> If tera, peta, exa, zetta and yutta are the 1024th multiples of their
> previous named multiple, what are the 1000th ones called?
> Are they equally comical? :-)

Well, technically those names are for decimal multiples - ie they only apply
for thousands, however the computer industry has applied them to 1024, since
they're so obsessed with powers of 2. So there are no other names for
1000ths.
And Shirley- surely you think a civilisation that conquered the known world
could come up with a better name than yotta? ;) The thing is, they never
needed to count that high, so mathematicians get to make numbers up, like
the one whose daughter named google. (1x 10^100) I think it was daughter
anyway, it was so long ago that I read about the naming of that number.

I want a yottabyte CPU & GPU.

Lach
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