Orbiter Successfully Enters Orbit 156
dylanduck writes "Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has slipped safely into orbit - unlike two of the last four orbiters NASA sent to Mars. Remember Mars Climate Orbiter and the mix up between metric and English units? MRO is going to send back 34 trillion bytes of data, more than all the previous missions put together." From the article: "The spacecraft will use a suite of six instruments, including the most powerful camera ever sent to another planet. This will image objects as small as 1-metre wide and should be able to snap pictures of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. The instruments will track the planet's weather, geology and mineralogy, and even probe about a kilometre beneath its surface to hunt for water."
trillion? (Score:5, Insightful)
For christ sake this is slashdot!
Beagle 2 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not English (Score:2, Insightful)
What's your weight in stone?
How fast do you drive on the motorway?
What size containers can you buy milk in?
Re:trillion? (Score:2, Insightful)
Or 400 GB harddrives?
Or (now obsolete) '1.44 MB' floppies? (which was actually 1.44x1000x1024 bytes).
Sorry, but the (SI) metric system's prefixes for binary numbers isn't going to be changed, just because you think kilo should mean 1024.
Use kibibyte(1024 bytes), mebibyte(1048576 bytes), gibibyte(1073741824 bytes) and so forth. Otherwise, you wouldn't know whether a kilohertz is 1000 or 1024 hertz, or if a kilobit is 1000 or 1024 bits - which one is your linespeed measured in?
The misconception has also been magnified enormously, because Windows shows this incorrectly.
If there are 5,000,000,000 bytes of free space on a partition (called 'drive' in Windows), it shows '4.65 GB' of free space, which is wrong.
Even Microsoft isn't consistent in using one or the other way - I've read many articles in their support-database, where they use both (although rarely in the same article).
Re:"English" units?? (Score:3, Insightful)
For better or worse, they are units that the English came up with, used for quite some time, and we still use. If you don't like it, pour money into a metric USA campaign.
In the end, it's just a system of measurement. It's no better or worse than any other system. It's not good, it's not evil, it just is. One may be able to make the case that in some circumstances (or even most circumstances) another system is easier to use. For instance, those who can't deal with fractions may have some difficulty with the English system. Likewise, those that can't deal with decimal prefixes (milli, micro, nano, pico, femto, atto, etc) may find it easier to say "4 feet, 3 inche") even while acknowledging that they'd have difficulty multiplying that by 5 and expressing it correctly.
I believe that the more tools I have at my disposal, the better equiped I am at solving problems. Perhaps you feel more comfortable learning and using one system, and that's also a valid choice.
Complaining about the name of a system of measurement is petty, especially when everyone perfectly understands what is meant whether one calls it english or imperial.
-Adam
give it a rest (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't you hate it when you make a mistake and even your friends never let you live it down? I mean, isn't it galling to do something right and all people want to talk about is the one you screwed up years ago?