mlm@homxc.att.com (Mark L Milliman) (07/30/89)
For the past year or so I have noticed a trend that disturbs me and could confuse others. I first saw this happen in our company's sales and marketing departments, but then I saw it in our technical organization a couple times! Now I see it used in industry publications and on the net. I am talking about how we are misusing our units of measurement. More specifically, dropping the "per second" from Megabits/second. Most of us deduce that the "per second" should be appended to the Megabits when we see it missing, but novice readers could be confused by the omission. Can I connect a T1 line to my PC and use it to store 1.544 Mb of data? I can think of some more ridiculous examples, but I am sure that you understand. Can anyone explain why this is happening? Are we just too lazy to type an extra two letters or is the "per second" meaningless? I am curious to know why this is proliferating. I am waiting to see it in advertising. I'm not picky, just an engineer, Mark L. Milliman Internet: mlm@homxc.att.com AT&T Bell Labs UUCP: att!homxc!mlm Holmdel, NJ 07733 (201)949-0796
tgg@otter.hpl.hp.com (Tom Gardner) (08/03/89)
Mark Williams comments about the new "habit" of dropping the "per second" from "Megabits per second". I agree that it's lazy, sloppy and (unforgivably) potentially confusing/ambiguous. My own pet peeve on this subject is authors who think "nS" is a unit of time. It isn't. The Siemen (S) is a unit of conductance, i.e. the reciprocal of resistance, units amps per volt. You most often come across Siemens as the unit of transconductance in semiconductors. The unit of time, seconds, is written as "s". N.B. lower case. When I see, for example, a RAM access time written as 100nS, I note that the author does not have a particularly wide or deep understanding of this subject area. HENCE I TEND TO DISCOUNT ANYTHING ELSE THE AUTHOR WRITES, unless it is, in all other respects, clear concise and comprehensible. Moral: using incorrect units makes you appear ignorant.