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IS YOU IS, OR IS YOU ISN'T?

by Tom Cantrell

Start ı Earth ToTom ı Name Gameı The Good Old Days ı Flash Forward ı Sources and PDF

Like a lot of my articles, this one is prompted by otherwise seemingly innocuous events in my day-to-day life. First, Iıll give you a bit of background.

Iım thankful for and proud of my association with Circuit Cellar. From the earliest days of the silicon, Steve has cut through the press releases and PR pitches to take us under the hood with the latest and greatest technology.

Part of my own mission in life is to make sure Circuit Cellar is the best it can be. Itıs a matter of personal pride, as well as understanding that you pay for the privilege and, therefore, deserve the best.

Dropping down 50,000 feet, to make a long story short, it freaks me out whenever I find a typo or mistake in a Circuit Cellar article. They are admirably rare, but that makes it all the more upsetting when I run across one. Unfortunately, our high-tech biz is particularly challenged with absurd acronyms and arcane abbreviations that make it all too easy for mistakes to creep in.

For instance, how many times have you read an article that got its bits (b) and bytes (B) confused. Another all-to-often encountered capitalization gotcha is milli (m) versus mega (M), which distorts the meaning a tad, like by a factor of 1B (as in billion, not byte).

This brings up another unique problem that goes back to the dawn of man, namely the fact weıve got 10 fingers rather than two. Thus, computer (binary) K and M donıt match up to their human (decimal) equivalents.

I seem to recall disk drive marketeers taking advantage of the confusion to the point of fine print. Does that 500-meg drive have 524,288,000 (500 ı 1024 ı 1024) bytes or a mere 500,000,000? Thatıs the 24-million byte question, but fortunately, disk drives are so inexpensive nowadays that I imagine nobody (except lawyers) cares.

I think 10-Mb Ethernet bandwidth is 10,000,000 bps because historically, the bandwidth version of "k" is interpreted as decimal, but for all I know it could be 10,485,760 (10 ı 1024 ı 1024) bps, or even 10,240,000 (10 ı 1000 ı 1024) bps for that matter.

NEXT

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