The $2MM meal

originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
I'm interested, Keith: in what milieu do you see this notation? I read fairly widely, both news and bound print.
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Financial and banking folks seem fond of it. It always struck me as having an extraneous byte, since everyone's going to read "$1.2m" and $1.2MM" as the same thing.
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It also has widespread use in a variety of business functions beyond financial and banking unless you mean financial in its broadest sense. Anything dealing with budgets, projections, actual expenditures and performance, inventories, capacity, etc. It's used for money, as well as volume/unit sales. In that sense it is completely equivalent to using a single "M". In my experience use of a single M or double MM is cultural/historic within a company.
 
And to make it slightly less/more confusing, in a number of worlds K is used for thousand. But then again, Latin/Greek mixing is a feature of English.
 
And French. I had a friend who used to rail against the use of "salle polyvalente" for small town multipurpose municipal rooms. Multivalente, it should be.
 
K still means 1024 in computer-related contexts. M is also understood to be 2^20, not 10^6. To confuse matters further, people will even use SI prefixes like kilo-, gigs- etc. in this nonstandard context. Very cornfuzzling and a terable situation.

Mark Lipton
 
Base 16 (hexadecimel) rules in computer circles...8 bits to a byte, 16 bits to a half word, 32 bits to a word, and so on.

. . . . . Pete
 
originally posted by Peter Creasey:

Base 16 (hexadecimel) rules in computer circles...8 bits to a byte, 16 bytes to a half word, 32 bits to a word, and so on.

. . . . . Pete
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Base 16 should be a contradiction in terms since the numeral 16 is a symbol based on base 10 or base 6. A true base 16 numerals would have a set of single numerals to signify the numbers from 10 to 15 and what base 10 designates as 16 would be designated as 10. To rephrase Tom Lehrer, base 16 is the same as base 10 if you have 16 fingers.
 
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
And French. I had a friend who used to rail against the use of "salle polyvalente" for small town multipurpose municipal rooms. Multivalente, it should be.
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Well, once you start with heterosexuality (or hexadecimals for that matter), it's all downhill.
 
originally posted by Cole Kendall:
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
And French. I had a friend who used to rail against the use of "salle polyvalente" for small town multipurpose municipal rooms. Multivalente, it should be.
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Well, once you start with heterosexuality (or hexadecimals for that matter), it's all downhill.
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There's a line about this in Stoppard's Invention of Love. A.E. Houseman, in the play at least, objected to the word homosexuality (which predates heterosexuality) for the same reason.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by Peter Creasey:

Base 16 (hexadecimel) rules in computer circles...8 bits to a byte, 16 bytes to a half word, 32 bits to a word, and so on.

. . . . . Pete
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Base 16 should be a contradiction in terms since the numeral 16 is a symbol based on base 10 or base 6. A true base 16 numerals would have a set of single numerals to signify the numbers from 10 to 15 and what base 10 designates as 16 would be designated as 10. To rephrase Tom Lehrer, base 16 is the same as base 10 if you have 16 fingers.
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Pete's statement should be taken in two parts, a statement about hexadecimal (hex), then a (not-quite correct) statement about how information is typically stored in computers that underlies why hex representation is so useful. Arranging bits into groups of eight allows a simple translation between the binary and hex representations: represent each group of four bits by the equivalent hex digit (see below).

I would say that "hexadecimal rules" for computer folks who work at the machine level. I rarely use it except when I teach Machine Organization or when I talk about the distinction between numbers and the representation of numbers.

And if you've read this far: Hex conventionally uses a set of sixteen digits [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, F]. Computer scientists often use the prefix 0x (from the C programming language) to indicate hex, for example the ever-popular-with-undergrads hex value 0xDEADBEEF.
 
It should have been clear that I was talking about numerals, not numbers. And, in fact, in terms of numerals, to designate a base 16 system, all you need would be 16 discrete symbols (0-15)that start repeating as 10 (or whatever) at 16. It sounds like you guys have that, though my math is insufficient to determine whether you are actually using base 16 for your calculations or why you would bother.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
It should have been clear that I was talking about numerals, not numbers. And, in fact, in terms of numerals, to designate a base 16 system, all you need would be 16 discrete symbols (0-15)that start repeating as 10 (or whatever) at 16. It sounds like you guys have that, though my math is insufficient to determine whether you are actually using base 16 for your calculations or why you would bother.
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It was clear. I was giving my interpretation of why Pete lapsed into decimal representation after he'd said that "hexadecimal rules". I left your post in between because I wanted to show that the sixteen-symbol system you proposed is used in practice. As for why we bother, Jayson's post nails it: it's a whole lot easier for people to work with eight-digit hex numbers than it is to work with the equivalent 32-digit binary numbers.
 
Alphabets provide convenient long sequences of conventional symbols; e.g., our alphabet is easily re-purposed as a base-26 number system. Cyrillic and Thai alphabets provide longer established symbol sequences; Greek, a shorter one. The number 16 in English alpha would be p; in Thai it would be ฐ.

Perhaps the value of the alphanumeric chimera used by specialists is that, in context, it offers less opportunity for misunderstanding: 'pi,' for example, could be read as the value pi, rather than 17, and ฐ is exotic to the point of unrecognizibility.

In the subculture where MM equals million, Is a billion expressed as MMM? But then why not express these numbers as powers of M; or, as the general public is wont to express exponential acronyms, multiples of M; that is, 2M for M^2 (million), 3M M^3 (billion).

Anyway, $X m doesn't seem less efficient than $X MM. Language is interesting.
 
originally posted by Peter Creasey:

In fact, G (giga) for billion and T (tera) for trillion.

. . . . Pete
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Although our local newspapers use 'G' (as in 'grand') for thousands, e.g., "Commissioners Approve $12G Purchase".
 
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