Information Age...

An interesting convo came up today regarding the term 'kilo' which is meant to mean 1000 of something, like kilometre, kilogram etc... but we came to the discussion of using the kilo and giga prefixes in computing which is not entirely correct... a kilo byte is actually 1024 or 2 to the power of 10 bytes. So the terms that should be used is a kilo binary or 'kibi'... similarly 'gibi' instead of giga, and mebi instead of mega... and how did I know... I googled it as usual...

Anyways I emailed people on the project team the page I found on this and won the 'Nerd of the Week' award, and was ousted to the kitchen where other nerd conversations have been heard in the past. I found this quite interesting, amusing and disturbing at the same time as I realised that most people nowadays have access to all this information, but most of which are unverified, and most people take it as fact. In fact, someone said this afternoon that they could not find the information on google to which I jested "If it's not on Google, it does not exist!"

Me thinks I need to go back and read some books as sources of information. And yes, I am talking about the ones printed on paper... and I know that's very old skool, but hey I'm sure they are verified prior to print. Incidentally I inherited my family's Encyclopædia Britannica, in all it's 30 volume glory, and it's own bookcase as well... much cooler than a single DVD edition... ;)