Horsepower is not horsepower. American "HP" is not the same as the horsepower (PS, pferdestärke) we use in Europe when we talk about "horsepower".
a kW is always 1000 watt, not 992.3 watts because of course it's a Canadian kW.
>Two common definitions used today are the mechanical horsepower (or imperial horsepower), which is about 745.7 watts and the metric horsepower, which is approximately 735.5 watts.
I guess speaking as a Brit the foreigners just didn't have proper horses.
F*ck :D
Wish we could all start understanding the difference between kilo and kibi, mega and mebu and so on for bits and bytes.
After many years and different widths the smallest common unit of exchange evolved to be a power of two: 8 bits are a byte, not 9, 10, 27, 30, etc; though Unicode might have been better off if 32 bits were the base character. However then older systems would have been at least 75% less useful.
Physical addressing units are also binary, because literal address lines (or their virtually latched equivalents on a serial bit-shift register) are used.
ROM, RAM, and correspondingly non-volatile writable storage inherit this basic premise.
So a non-sales computer person speaking 'kilo' or 'mega' or any other SI unit in relation to a computer part means it will hold or be able to transfer at least that many SI units in the quoted units. Everything gets rounded to the nearest useful neighbor. A digital kilo is not 1000, it is 2^10. A digital mega is correspondingly also 2^20. This is very similar to the exponents in SI units.
For that matter, humans have 8 fingers and 2 thumbs. Wouldn't an octal numbering system make more sense? Though for that we'd have to come up with new unit names near 2^3, 2^6, 2^9, etc that don't sound silly.
Each of the 4 long fingers has 3 phalanges, so an interesting possibility is to use each thumb to count up to 12 on each hand. Given that many ancient units of measurement where base-12, I wonder why we didn't develop base-12 languages.