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Comment by thomasjames | Hacker News Reader

Ten TRILLION bytes...

It's okay, Nature, the word terabyte doesn't scare people and is indeed now part of common parlance...

Apologies (one of Nature's editors here). Believe it or not it was in terabytes when we sent the copy to our sub-editors (ie copy editors) and they changed it because they thought our readers wouldn't get it. We're as bemused as you.

Roughly 9.09495TB for anybody interested

Now you've done it, this thread is going to collapse into a binary-vs-metric data measurement flamewar.

Oh dear.. blame Google, not me!

Metric won that war ;-)

http://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megabyte

Wikipedia is not a source~

For proof that Wikipedia is more accurate than other encyclopedias, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia

(Though seriously, Wikipedia is about as accurate as the Encyclopedia Brittanica, at least for science articles: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a...)

That applies well to en.wikipedia.org, not as much to simple.wikipedia.org. See my reply to andyhmltn about how the properly researched page disagrees with the grandparent's link.

Don't trust a wikipedia page that has zero citations.

Flamewar: success! Pxtl wins!

Even though it's an argument about wikipedia and nobody has discussed the actual measurement system?

Eh, point. I count any thread with a buried comment (like yours) as a flamewar, is all ;)

These are good points and it would be quite helpful if you put them in the comment next time. "The simple english wikipedia page has these specific flaws" is substantially more accurate and informative than "Wikipedia is not a source."

Well, if you want to know, my original objection was toward using Wikipedia as the arbiter of correct stance on a political issue. Wikipedia itself tries to keep politics out, and for good reason with the way online communities can groupthink. Clearly I should have expanded on that in the first comment.

I was not aware at that time that Wikipedia actually contradicted itself, but that was a very easy way to demonstrate my point in a followup post. But the particular flaws in that article were never my main point.

I dislike when people say this. No Wikipedia in itself is not a source, but it's usually an aggregate of sources. If you scroll to the bottom of the article, if it's properly labelled up you can find the exact sources for everything said.

I scrolled to the bottom. The page had no sources. Then I went to the main English wikipedia page to get some sources, but apparently it completely disagrees with the simple English page.

The real megabyte page says that it has multiple meanings, and the mebibyte page says that "it was designed to replace the megabyte" and that "it is not commonly used". And I'll assume the sources listed are suitable for the moment.

Wonder if it would have without this comment.

Actually that's in TiB. TB is metric.

or about $300 worth of Hard Drives at Costco

Yeah but Ten Trillion Bytes sounds a lot bigger than 9 TB.

I think that's the intention. Regardless of how you look at it however: It's still really impressive

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