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Mega and kilo are from Greek. Apart from that, great comic!
Classic undecipherable miscommunication between client and developer.
How often to developers deal with print jobs?
Ha!! That is so true! I’ve done that so many times with clients. There’s even a television ad going around where they interview a bunch of people, and just show their responses to the question, “What is a megabyte?” and it’s hilarious how folks might know what it is, but can’t explain it.
Yup good idea to round ‘em down to 1,000 and 1,000,000 … “1 Kilobyte is 1024 bytes” always is followed by a “Why?” and generally the conversation degrades a lot after that …
It’s also wrong. Kilo and Mega (i.e. KB and MB) are defined by the SI (same guys that maintain the metric system and all the other un-American devil units) as 1000 and 10^3 and 10^6 respectively. The correct prefixes for 2^10 and 2^20 are Kibi and Mebi (i.e. KiB and MiB).
There are historic reasons software people prefer the binary scale (and why they originally had the decimal prefixes in software), but that doesn’t make it less wrong to mix up the definitions. As a programmer, let me tell you that there is no reason left to confuse the prefixes or even rely on the binary prefixes at all outside a very small niche.
lol – damn those sorcerers and their evil metres! It’s heresy, I tell thee!
Interestingly, according to the almighty Wiki, it’s only American, Burma and Liberia who haven’t adopted the pagan voodoo metric system.
The UK has grudgingly adopted most of it, but there were a lot of unhappy greengrocers at the time…
mega and kilo come from greek, not latin.
Mega- (symbol M) is an prefix in the metric system denoting a factor of million. Confirmed in 1960, it comes from the Greek μέγας, meaning great
The kilo prefix is derived from the Greek word χίλιοι (“chilioi”), meaning thousand. It was originally adopted by Antoine Lavoisier and his group in 1795, and introduced into the metric system in France with its establishment in 1799.
I love this! So darn true!…. I give private 1-on-1 classes, and when I start explaining the bytes, Kb, Mb, Gb… people frown as if computers are SO complicated… But when I turn things around and say that this isn’t computer gibberish, and that they already use “kilometers” and “kilograms”, they actually realize that they’re somewhat dumb and it’s not as hard as they to-quickly thought…
Ah crap. So much for fact checking! Thanks for calling me out on the oversight, everyone. Gonna try to have a new comic uploaded with the error fixed.
It’s true, I think people have heard the explanation at least once before but fail to accept it as REAL information. Not just a random fact or those nice-to-know theories. Clients are manageable; try explaining MB and KB to my mom. Sheesh. Great comic!
So True. And then you also get the clients who embed 15 .75GB TIFF files that break your email when you try to load the darn thing. lol
get comic! i am pretty sure all of us have had this conversation a 100 times!
Don’t forget bauds, for the truly old-school.
Wow, I went through a few scenarios like this the other day. I wish all clients were tech savvy.
Funny, something like this happened to me once.
Personally, I would rather talk to them about image resolution than filesize: they might send a tiny yet uncompressed jpeg that is just large enough to be 750Kb instead of sending an image with a large enough resolution to be printed.
(of course in that case, they might also send an upcaled version of the tiny cropped image instead of sending the original with a large enough resolution, but that’s another problem).
True. The filesize is hardly a useful measurement of how suited something is for printing. It’s amazing how ignorant some people can be about resolution, too, though — maybe this is even worse because most programs let you zoom and CSI taught everyone the wrong ideas about how that works.
Those prefixes are so confusing!