>>I was commenting the piece of data on the site - whoever gave the technical data to the web designer was... well, just the same as whoever made one kilocalory equal to one US calory. The same type of technical literacy that produces "gm" for gram (SI proscribes just g), "kph" (kilo
what? per hour - kmh is SI).
>>
>>This sort of thing annoys me regularly - if you're publishing technical data about your product, you may be sure that the people who really bother to read those data would try to make some sense out of what they read, and that the readers of such pages are likely to have some technical knowledge. It's not a place for a marketing pitch and soundbites. I came to see the data, give me data. And if any of the data do not make sense, I'm gone.
>
>I guess it must really bug you when you see newspapers usurping the Roman numeral 'M' to mean Million. I remember back when I first started seeing that, and I'd see a headline talking about some project or other costing $10M and I'd think to myself that $10,000 didn't seem like so much money.
Not really - putting a Roman numeral next to an Arabic digit makes no sense, so it doesn't have a context to be interpreted as such; it must be megabytes :).
What really made me laugh years ago, was the "XXIII
rd Olympiad". Roman numerals are used as ordinals only - nobody does any calculation with them anyway - so XXIII means twenty-third. XXIIIrd is probably twenty-thirdrd :).