4 G And Yotta

Pic from Wikipedia

I consider myself a nerd.  But I am beginning to realize how un nerdie I am.  3 G, 4 G, Gigabyte, Gig, terabyte and the Lord and mathematics folks know what next.

3 G's or 4 G's in my mind still means 3 thousand or 4 thousand.  And the person saying 3 G or 4 G was a movie star gangster like Edward G. (snicker) Robinson,  James Cagney or George Raft.  You dirty rat!

pic from Top 20 Gangster Movie list

So when I hear cell phone companies touting 3 G and 4 G I think thousands of dollars, not generation of cell phone technology.

And gig is something musicians did or that a beatnik would say.  Well, at least back in my time.

Pic from Wikipedia

Gig was, also, something people did to frogs to catch them.  It is something Texas Aggie fans yell at sporting events.  Some people call their jobs a gig. I had other names for most of my employment opportunities. wink.

I cannot even imagine why anyone would want to gig a computer.  It sounds destructive to me.  Now, I fully understand a disk crash cause I just this week I dropped a cup.  The cup shattered, nicely in the sink and garbage disposal.  I had a crashed cup.  So a crashed disk is broken. That is logical and generally understandable to plain Elaine's like me.

Not a yotta. but I grabbed the
picture from Wikipedia!

When I googled "gig" I found a site with a subtitle of "What the hell is a gig?"  My sentiments exactly.  After reading a bunch of information not related to technology I went back to the search line.  I googled "giga" instead of "gig".  Well, that helped some.  All this byte stuff has nothing to do with insects.  Though I did get over 125 chigger bites when I was 9 months pregnant.  That was a couple of miserable days cause there were more places to scratch than usual.  But I digress.

So Wikipedia helped to untangle this confusion somewhat. All these deca, kilo, giga and tera all refer to multiples of 10.  Think way back to multiplication and to the power tables and it might help.  A giga is 10 to the 12th power.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga- has a chart if you are really interested in what yotta is and why someday you might give a byte.

So in closing tonight may the power of 12 be multiplied in all you do till you reach a cell tower.  But I would rather have 4 thousand dollars than a 4 G phone that costs 4K.