Hey... That Bytes!

I read a neat article in the news yesterday. It talked about the naming system for the International System of Units (SI).

Here's the official SI prefixes:

10 = deca

100 = hecto

1,000 = kilo

1,000,000 = mega

1,000,000,000 = giga

1,000,000,000,000 = tera

1,000,000,000,000,000 = peta

1,000,000,000,000,000,000 = exa

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = zetta

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = yotta

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = unnamed

As most of you know, these are used for our bytes in the computer systems. I have a terabyte hard drive at home, for example. I'd like to think I'd never fill it up, but who would have imagined that you could fill up a 4 gigabyte hard drive 10 years ago? I sure didn't!!! You can now get usb flash drives that hold that much for less than $30!

Well, the article goes on to explain that there are a group of people campaigning to name the "unnamed" unit "Hella". It goes on to claim that the word is California slang meaning 'very'. According to dictionary.com.... it means "(a) hell of (a)".

This may come to be a problem in the future when we use this unit of measurement for our technology. Would it be allowed on tv commercials? hmmmm. How will strict conservative families deal with it?

Makes one wonder!

~Matt