Running Out Of Greek Superlatives

from the kilo-mega-giga-tera-peta-exa...? dept

The Financial Times has a story saying that the rapid increase in email over the past few years has created an interesting problem: what Greek superlative can we use to put before "byte" in describing just how big our storage devices are? We've run through kilo, mega, and giga. Tera, peta and exa are next on the list, but no one is quite sure where to go from there. I'm not really sure the increase in email specifically has anything to do with it, but the article does bring up good points about being able to better categorize, archive, and search emails. All of that reminds me that I need to check out ZO�, a program that has been described as allowing you to Google your email.
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  • identicon
    John Matthews, 16 Oct 2002 @ 11:31am

    SI Prefixes

    Check out this table:

    Zetta and Yotta come after peta and exa.

    http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    wonko, 16 Oct 2002 @ 2:19pm

    Zoe

    I gave Zoe a shot today. Hated it. The interface looks wonderful in the screenshots, but in practice it's confusing, irritating, and inconsistent. Documentation is nonexistent, aside from a short and unhelpful FAQ, and despite claiming to be able to read IMAP mailboxes and import mbox mail files, I couldn't get it to do either. With a bit of work, I managed to get Zoe to import one small mbox file, but for some reason searches returned no results and I couldn't access any of my messages via the interface (although they were stored in a complex and confusing directory structure under the Zoe directory; not that this does me any good).

    In short, it probably works great for people who don't mind the interface, know exactly how to use it, and only set it up to sit between their client and their POP/SMTP servers, but for what I needed, it sucked.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    anymouse, 17 Oct 2002 @ 8:55am

    Greek Superlatives?

    i would use the fecka superlative;as in its fecking Mbytes or its fecka bytes huge.... much better than peta or terra :)

    link to this | view in chronology ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.