once in a forever

L

Lichen

Well-known member
There's certainly a difference between a UK and a US billion. I think it's as follows: a US billion is hundred million, a UK billion is a thousand million. I suppose the same ratio applies to trillions.
 
F

Freakaholic

not just an addiction
Lichen said:
There's certainly a difference between a UK and a US billion. I think it's as follows: a US billion is hundred million, a UK billion is a thousand million. I suppose the same ratio applies to trillions.
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thats it.

so whats a UK hundred million? a hectamillion? millimillion? centimillion?
 
T

tryptych

waiting for a time
Lichen said:
There's certainly a difference between a UK and a US billion. I think it's as follows: a US billion is hundred million, a UK billion is a thousand million. I suppose the same ratio applies to trillions.
Click to expand...

No - it used to be that a UK billion was a million million, and a US billion was a thousand million. Thi change in fact originated in the 17th C in Italy and France, or so Wikipedia tells me. Now most countries use a thousand million as standard, and so does the scientific community.

A trillion is a million million in the modern system.
 
nomos

nomos

Administrator
droid said:

d/m/y (day, month, year) is used by:

* Canada

m/d/y (month, day, year) is used by:

* Canada
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for god's sake! this country can't take a stand on any damn thing. of course you know it'll be a whole truckload of the latter now that the bloody conservatives are back in.
 
nomos

nomos

Administrator
bruno said:
the ISO recommendation is far more logical, and useful when arranging things in modern filesystems (computers, mainly):

year/month/day hours/minutes/seconds

2006.04.05 01.02.03

i use it :D
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yes! good! order!
 
bruno

bruno

est malade
here is the ISO 8601 standard.

you can reduce date and time to something like this: 20060407T202942. beautiful! i'm trying to figure out how to have this added automatically to files (on os x), but so far no luck.
 
M

michael

Bring out the vacuum
Freakaholic said:
so whats a UK hundred million? a hectamillion? millimillion? centimillion?
Click to expand...
Assuming you meant a thousand million, it's a milliard. But yeah, everyone I've spoken to in the UK uses billion for this measure now. Not that it comes up too much in conversation, of course. :D

I have to say, I was quietly excited when I found out the Japanese do the yyyy/mm/dd thing. One small step for nerd-kind. ;) Although, of course, they do have two different names for each year...
 
D

droid

Guest
Here's a new one:

On the 4th of May 2006 at 2 minutes and 3 seconds after 1 o' clock in the morning, the time and date will be 01: 02: 03, 04/05/06.

This would not happen again in our lifetime. It will be approximately 400 generations before this occurs again.
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woops

woops

is not like other people
That Was Fucking Wicked!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
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T

tryptych

waiting for a time
This would not happen again in our lifetime. It will be approximately 400 generations before this occurs again.
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Bollocks - who's writing this stuff? :p

It'll happen in 100 years time - which is not 400 generations.
 
D

droid

Guest
laugh.gif
 
N

Ness Rowlah

Norwegian Wood
bruno said:
here is the ISO 8601 standard.

you can reduce date and time to something like this: 20060407T202942. beautiful! i'm trying to figure out how to have this added automatically to files (on os x), but so far no luck.
Click to expand...

OS/X is Unix (some BSD or other) is it not. So in a shell script it would
look something like this (parameters might be slightly different / check your man
page):

year=`date +%Y`
month=`date +%m`
day=`date +%d`
hour=`date +%H`
minute=`date +%M`
datestamp=$year$month${day}T${hour}$minute

cp -p myfile myfile.$datestamp or
touch myfile.$datestamp to just create a file
 
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bruno

bruno

est malade
Ness Rowlah said:
OS/X is Unix (some BSD or other) is it not. So in a shell script it would
look something like this (parameters might be slightly different / check your man
page):

year=`date +%Y`
month=`date +%m`
day=`date +%d`
hour=`date +%H`
minute=`date +%M`
datestamp=$year$month${day}T${hour}$minute

cp -p myfile myfile.$datestamp or
touch myfile.$datestamp to just create a file
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thanks for the tip, ness. finally an excuse to overcome my 'fear of the terminal'.
 
B

bassnation

the abyss
spackb0y said:
Bollocks - who's writing this stuff? :p

It'll happen in 100 years time - which is not 400 generations.
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depends whether you are talking about humans or rodents. actually, 400 is a bit low for mice - a single one can have 1000 descendents in its own lifetime. i can't be bothered to do the maths, but you get the idea.
 
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