b & B, k & K, m & M; was BSO on the radio - not for me anymore

[Ric Werme]

Dan wrote:

> All of your bit rates are expressed in kB/s (the B is capitalized).
> The capitalized B means the abbreviation stands for bytes/sec, not
> bits/sec--a difference of approximately a decimal order of magniture.
> (When you include the overhead, 1 kB/s is very close to 10 kb/s.)
> However, I believe that you mean bits/sec. If so, the b should be
> lower case. Better yet, spell out bits and bytes in all referencees to
> data rates; the extra work is minimal and you eliminate the confusion.

I figured out he meant b from:

> > Hybrid HD offers
> > 100 - 150 kB/s which must be divided amongst the subchannels.

Might as well keep going - oops, maybe not.  I was going to gripe
that SI prefixes greater than unity (K, M, G) are capitalized, and
those less than unity (m, µ, n) were not.  It appears that kilo is
lowercase.  (As are hecta and deka.)

I have a lot of trouble when people who should be writing MB write mb
instead.  Only wrong by 7 decimal orders of magnitude....

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