Re: Mega doesn't mean million

From: Max <max_at_maxie.com>
Date: Sat, 30 Mar 1996 14:44:02 -0500

At 12:39 PM 3/30/96 -0600, you wrote:

> While I've never actually seen a definition for the prefix "mega,"
>it's become popular to use mega as million. E.G. megahertz- one million

- MegaKat University Public Advisory -

* The Metric System

EXA (E) = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000
PETA (P) = 1,000,000,000,000,000
TERA (T) = 1,000,000,000,000
GIGA (G) = 1,000,000,000
MEGA (M) = 1,000,000
KILO (K) = 1,000
HECTO (H) = 100
DEKA (DA) = 10
DECI (D) = 0.1
CENTI (C) = 0.01
MILLI (M) = 0.001
MICRO (U) = 0.000 001
NANO (N) = 0.000 000 001
PICO (P) = 0.000 000 000 001
FEMTO (F) = 0.000 000 000 000 001
ATTO (A) = 0.000 000 000 000 000 001

And with that, the University closes its doors for the day. It *IS* a
weekend, after all! :-)

As you can see from the table, Mega, in its exact definition, is 1 million.
Lately though what has been popular to use it to describe anything large,
whether it's exactly 1 million or not. So the "Mega" in MegaKat City
probably just means they consider it a very large city compared to the rest
of the ones on the planet.

>megabyte-one million bytes

Only to hard disk manufacturers (so thier specs look better). The rest of us
know a megabyte is really 1,048,576 bytes.<G> (If I lost anyone on that one,
ask me in e-mail, it'd be off topic to ask here)

 Max




Received on Sat Mar 30 1996 - 14:52:39 PST