Speaking of nerdliness...

[JR]

I'm sure each of you has some little thing, trivial to all who know you, that drives you up a wall. Maybe it's toilet paper with the free sheets falling over the top vs down the back. Maybe it's dirty dishes getting left in the sink.

For me it's bits vs bytes. Most of us know that a bit is the basic element describing binary data. Eight bits make up a byte. Here's how those terms are properly used in writing:


Abbreviations Table
bit = b
kilobit = kb (1000 bits)
kilobyte (binary) = KB (1024 bytes)
kilobyte (decimal) = KB (1000 bytes)
Megabit = Mb (1000 kilobits)
Megabyte (binary) = MB (1024 Kilobytes)
Megabyte (decimal) = MB (1000 Kilobytes)
Gigabit = Gb (1000 Megabits)
Gigabyte (binary) = GB (1024 Megabytes)
Gigabyte (decimal) GB (1000 Megabytes)


In the future, please refrain from refering to data rates by using a capital B. Do not refer to memory storage with a lower-case b. Or I will go stark raving mad.

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.

JR,
Trying to purge the marketing copy editor from my soul...

[germdoc]

Geez, who's had a little Bit too much coffee??

[LinuxRandal]

Geez, who's had a little Bit too much coffee??

I'll byte, er bite...

[gerti]

And while be are being anal... Used to be that some sane people suggested that 'k' being an SI prefix, should always stand for 1000, and for 1024 K (uppercase) should be used. But at least it was convention that k or K in connection with bit or byte meant 1024.

Then came the hard disk industry and perverted that idea, being that using 1000 instead of 1024 they could make their disks seem larger.

So now the next attempt to maintain sanity is to use Ki as prefix for 1024 (called kibibyte).

Most of the IT industry hangs on to the 1024 for k(bit|byte). But some black sheep now also use the bit/byte confusion to inflate numbers.

It's a big mess, so much so that I don't tend to trust any of these numbers anymore that I did not fabricate myself...

[germdoc]

OK, since you brought it up one of my pet peeves is people who say "Lyme's disease" instead of Lyme disease. It was named after Old Lyme, CT, not Dr. Lyme. For the record, a similar illness was recognized in our area over the last 100 years, but the docs up here must have been to busy to write it up.

Spelling Lyme disease "Lime" is also a no-no. And don't even get me started on people who claim to have chronic seronegative Lyme disease, "brain fog" and "massive coinfections".

Now if you claim to have "All-heimers", "All-timers" or "Old-timers" disease I'll give you a pass. And if you have "fireballs in the Eucharist" (fibroids in the uterus) or a history of "smilin' mighty Jesus" (spinal meningitis) I'll probably smile myself.