Two centuries' worth of porn, eh?
Bring it on.
Wired has thrown down the gauntlet to El Reg's Standards Soviet by defining the storage "PornYear" - equivalent to 0.94 petabytes. Yes indeed, forget Jubs, Linguine, and the theoretical maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum - the future will be measured by the number of millions of hours of HD vid smut you can theoretically …
Kilo, Mega, Giga, Tera et al are SI _decimal_ prefixes denoting factors of 1000.
Kibi, Mebi, Gibi, Tebi et al are the IEC _binary_ prefixes denoting factors of 1024 that were introduced to avoid confusion.
It's only been that way for the last 10 years or so *sigh*
Bonus factoid: Megabyte used to have 3 definitions - the third being 1000 kibibytes (as used on the IBM floppy). A quick back of the envelope calculation reveals this to be about 1/30 of a porn second - roughly equal to a money shot ;)
Those that the prefix-nazis seem to impose on stuff that has always been measured in base-1024. Nobody but disk manufacturers use base-1000, and even then, sometime around the 80's the HDD sizes were actually 1024-based. Either that, or the loss wasn't that much for users to notice.
BTW, RAM does come in base-1024, as base-1000 would break quite a lot of stuff!
to use anything as usefull as Watts Joules or KW/hr When talking about green energy perhaps you should add units of power and energy to the convertor (just mix them up together, journalists don't know the difference anyway)
I'd propose
'enough to power a house' (this can be a random number)
'enough to boil a cup of tea'
'Enough to power the streetlights in birmingham' (during the day)
'Enough to power a town the size of Stoke'
Hmm. You're right. That *is* the way it would be phrased, but (just going off topic for a moment) can any journalists here explain why "a town the size of Stoke" is never abbreviated to "Stoke"?
Is there some reason why you wouldn't want to power Stoke itself, but would be happy for an similar-sized settlement to enjoy the benefits of a 21st century lifestyle?