There are lots of widely and frequently used measurement units in the computing world. Even after frequent use, many of us use these units wrongly. Here wrongly I mean to say, that the way shorthand notations of units need to be written is not proper. This may happen due to the ambiguity that we have. The units that we are talking about are very general units used in the computing world like bits, bytes, kilo, mega …… etc. This article covers the overview of some of these units and the convention which should be used for these units.
The very basic unit of time is second, is shortened as s. The two basic information units are byte and bit, abbreviated as B (byte) and b (bit). 1 B is equal to 8 b. The other units are floating-point operations, abbreviated as a flop. A unit of computing speed is the number of floating-point operations per second i.e. flop/s. A unit for information transfer rate is the number of bytes per second i.e. B/s. The execution rate of a processor is often measured as million instructions per second i.e. MIPS.
The first unit which most of the time brings confusion in the computing world is kilo when to be considered as 1000 (decimal interpretation) and when to be considered as 1024 (binary interpretation). The other confusion regarding the plural convention of the unit.
Ambiguity which we normally have are
The difference between kilo that is the decimal interpretation 10^3 and the binary interpretation 2^10 is only around 2% but this difference increases when it comes to mega, giga, and so on. So this ambiguity must be clarified. In computers binary interpretation is used when we talk about information transfer speed, storage like the size of memory, hard disk, etc, and decimal interpretation is often used when we talk about execution time, computational workload, etc.
Regarding the convention for the plural form of a unit, the unit will be pluralized when the whole word is used not when the abbreviation is used. For ex. 4 GB or 4 Gbytes or 4 Gigabytes all are same. However, the conventions for plural form for the same 4 KBs or 4 Kbyte are not appropriate to use.
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