To use an analogy, imagine if someone wrote: "$1.5M B" instead of 1.5 quadrillion or 1,500,000,000,000,000. You'd be confused, and rightly so. A lot of people would mistakenly read it either as $1.5M or $1.5B, neither of which is right.
In this case a lot of people are misreading it as 1.5 GB/Day instead of 1.5 PB/Day.
PS - The way Google uses it in the Blog post is pretty clear, they're describing what a petabyte is. My issue is with the HN title only.
I'm sure I'm strange, but I find "$1.5M B" clearer than talk of "quadrillion"s, because I'm not confident I know what power of 10 a quadrillion is, but when I see M B I just add 6+9. Even then, the British sometimes say things like "thousand million", because billion over there used to mean 10^12, but now means 10^9 (which they used to call a milliard); as with other wordy number-words they've succumbed to American usage¹.
To use an analogy, imagine if someone wrote: "$1.5M B" instead of 1.5 quadrillion or 1,500,000,000,000,000. You'd be confused, and rightly so. A lot of people would mistakenly read it either as $1.5M or $1.5B, neither of which is right.
In this case a lot of people are misreading it as 1.5 GB/Day instead of 1.5 PB/Day.
PS - The way Google uses it in the Blog post is pretty clear, they're describing what a petabyte is. My issue is with the HN title only.