The firewire misunderstanding

[Sillyname]

Brian the Anal


------------------
Deep is not the root word of depression.

[Sillyname]

Even NASA makes mistakes regarding ISO standards: The landing/guidance systems on the last Mars lander being in metric and inches, for example.

It's the decline of the Western civilization. First we denounce the Bible for science, then we denounce ISO standards for sitting at home on the couch, smoking pot, eating cheese doodles, and playing videogames!

Help us Brain, I mean Brian!

[intomisery]

the point is this:
if someone posted a msg containing the letters MB, we would recognize this as meaning megabyte. Is this a correct abbreviation? Perhaps not entirely. Does it do it's job: abbreviating an excruciatingly long word into the smallest quantity so the typer does not have to go through the tedious routine of using every single letter of the word every single time he/she needs to convey it yet still have those who are reading the post understand him/her. The answer, of course, is yes. So why the fuss?
In this topic specific forum, we do not talk about Baud extremely often. Nor do we ever use a term that needs to be explained by 10^-3. We use abbreviations as need and do not confuse them with others used in other places (if I'm not mistaken, m also refers to meters...) We use what we need, shortening when we need to and others 99.99% of the time understand us.

[dgcom]

Hi!

I think, the biggest problem is in US, not in the rest of the world. Here is why:
- _Inability_ to switch to metric units, US is the last huge country still with oldish English units.
- Larger number of people are not educated enough (this is very "soft").
- Marketing in US is trying to get buyers using "more zeros" in product's description - that's why they use 1000000=1000k=1M for hard drives - real space is usually smaller.

As a person with Master degree in radioengineering, I'd fully agree with Brian.

Unfortunately, if you want people to understand you faster, you'd have to use "their language".

The only way to do it right, is to include "wrong" names as a footnotes in documentation/messages which are targeted to general public.

DGCom

[Patrick]

Dawgone it, eff'n we all jest talked like this, then none of us'd evah haf a problem unnerstan'in' etch other. Ah say we git ahold of some fine likker an' fo'git about dem stoopid ISO stan'ards. No o'ganizashun is a-gonna tell th' US of A how t'do ennythin'! Fry mah hide!

[Sillyname]

Gawlly Patchrick! How cum ya' just don writ yerself one a' them ther new-fangled wood pulp konstructshuned thingies? Lawst ya' on tha first thawt!

------------------
Deep is not the root word of depression.

[Brian Ellis]

Just to prolong the agony (yes, I know I'm a proctalgia, but you may have guessed that I feel slightly strongly about this), I'll reply to a few specific points.

There is some overlapping of units: after all, there are only 52 letters (UC & LC) in the Latin alphabet and 48 in the Greek, some of them being the same as Latin ones. I think there are over 1000 (1 k) units commonly abbreviated (never counted them!). So, B is used for both baud and bel (named after A.G. Bell, a good Scotsman), but a baud is a data rate and a bel is a power ratio. There is therefore unlikely to be confusion if the interpretation is taken in context. In our case, bit, byte and baud are all in related technologies and this thread exists because there IS confusion and context cannot always separate the bits from the bytes. It therefore behoves us to be extra careful when using units and the surest way is to always use bit and by as the respective abbreviations. That way, the reader KNOWS for sure what you are talking about and never has to (wrongly) second-guess.

dB as decibel is quite correct and conforms to ISO and is an official derived unit.

m is metre but is never used, in this context, as a prefix: it is always a unit. m, as a prefix, meaning 1/1000, is always in front of the unit, e.g. mm, millimetre; mg milligram etc.

Yes, I understand MB, but is it that much more difficult to use the totally unambiguous Mby? What I can never be sure about is Mb, if I don't know whether the writer would use bit. As I said before, bit is already an abbreviation (and an acronym) and must never be further abbreviated. If everyone respected that rule, then the Mb for megabyte would, at least, be understandable and unambiguous in context, if not strictly correct.

I won't go into the politics of the USA other than to say that Congress passed a metrication bill about 120 years ago!!!!!! It just takes a few years to implement it For the anecdote, I was told many years ago that there were just two countries in the world that did not currently use the A0, 1, 2; B0, 1, 2; C0, 1, 2 series of paper sizes, the USA and North Yemen. Since then, N. Yemen was taken over by S. Yemen, so now I guess there is only one, even though the USA signed the international agreement on it.

------------------
Brian (the terrible)

[This message has been edited by Brian Ellis (edited 01 September 2000).]

[Sillyname]

"I was told many years ago that there were just two countries in the world that did not currently use the A0, 1, 2; B0, 1, 2; C0, 1, 2 series of paper sizes, the USA and North Yemen. Since then, N. Yemen was taken over by S. Yemen, so now I guess there is only one, even though the USA signed the international agreement on it."

By paper sizes do you mean A, B, C, D sizes that are used on large inkjet plotters?

------------------
Deep is not the root word of depression.

[Brian Ellis]

That's only the half of it. What about letter, legal, executive, monarch and all the rest of it?

The A0... series is used mainly for ordinary sheet paper. Ordinary writing paper is 210 x 297 mm (A4) for example. A3 is double this, 297 x 420 mm and A5 is half, 148.5 x 210 and so on. You will see that one dimension is constant, up and down, so cutting any size sheet in half ups the the A number by 1 and the number of sheets doubles. Obviously, the aspect ratio must be 0.707.. (portrait) or 1.414.. (landscape), which is constant throughout the series: these figures just happen to be the square root of two and half thereof (not resp.) and this is not coincidence. Logical, if you think about it, especially if you try to cut a US B sheet into legal or letter size paper without wastage.

The B0... and C0... series are used mainly for such things as folders and envelopes, both being slightly larger than the A0... series for obvious reasons, but maintaining the same aspect ratios.

However what bugs commerce between the USA and the rest of the world is each trying to file the paper from the other

------------------
Brian (the terrible)

[peterclifton]

Ah the paper issue :-)

Does anybody rmember the trouble in the early eighties when people first started using dotmatrix printers with A4 fanfold paper on their micro computers.

The question "How come when I press FF, the paper never lines up with the top of the form" could be heard the length and breadth of the UK

Peter

[This_Idiot]

Is it time to call Silly Season when the punters start arguing about paper sizes ?

Since many of us (especially oldies with mainframe backgounds) can't spell in UC and LC, there are only 26 letters in the western alphabet. Therefore, it is only sensible to realise that TLA's (vary the 'T' according to verbosity) will mean different things to different folks. For instance, my dear missus is (nearly) an accountant, and has completely different views on ISA and PCI to those that we'd recognise. Since she works in a Hospital environment, DOA is taken a little more seriously than the delivery of a non-functional piece of hardware. I worked on a Public Utility billing system for some years, and am a foremost expert in the subject of PIA's (any one want to hazard a guess).

Brian may be a purist on a losing view, but calling him Anal is a bit strong innit ?

[Brian Ellis]

Piss In the Air ???

------------------
Brian (the terrible)