• Skydancer@pawb.social
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    2 months ago

    Americans used just over 100 trillion megabytes exabytes of wireless data in 2023

    Megabytes are absolutely the wrong unit for this amount of data.

    • Mac@mander.xyz
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      2 months ago

      nobody knows what an exabyte is so why would anybody use that?

      • mycodesucks@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        We live in a world where finding out what an exabyte is takes all of 3 seconds. You really want to argue the standard for communication of information should be based on the most ignorant and unmotivated people?

          • mycodesucks@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            I don’t know… I can’t answer what you’re trying to argue. That’s your hill to defend if you want to.

          • scholar@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            They are smaller, more familliar numbers paired with more appropriate units that people have heard of

            • Mac@mander.xyz
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              2 months ago

              I guarantee you that most people still don’t know what a terabyte is. gigabytes, probably…

              anyway all I’m saying is that a headlines goal is to reach and be understood by as many people as possible so obviously they’re not going to use something that nobody knows, like exa, peta, and terabytes.
              I think most people have a general feeling for how much a megabyte is because most of the things that we deal with are sized in megabytes.

              • Strykker@programming.dev
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                2 months ago

                But a hell of a lot more people will know what a gigabyte is compared to an exabyte, even I had to think for a few seconds to figure out what scale exabyte was compared to what I know, and I work with computer hardware everyday.

                  • Strykker@programming.dev
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                    2 months ago

                    I misread and thought you said people wouldn’t know gigabytes, I disagree that people won’t know Tera bytes especially since most laptops seem to ship with at least 1TB drives these days.