Technology is confusing. It's not really helped by the way that people who know how to use it tend not to be so good at explaining it to normal people.

So a few years back, when I'd realised that I didn't want to be stuck in the job I was in but had no real clue what sort of career I wanted to carve out for myself, I decided that I'd quite like to be a technical author. I'd done some technical writing before, and I liked the idea of writing manuals that would help normal people make the most out of the gadgets that they were spending small fortunes on.

The problem with manuals is that they usually are full of too much technical stuff. With a more straightforward and readable presentation, I figured that there was a better job that could be done.

However, what I discovered while trying to figure out how to get into that kind of job was that if you want to write technical manuals, then you have to spend 90% of your time writing with a focus on the needs of engineers, instead of the needs of the end user. So the people who are doing the job are also busy learning skills that are pretty much the polar opposite to the skills they need to communicate with actual end users— the normal people who buy and use the products.

As a result, I found myself convinced that I'd actually be more of an expert on how to do this particular job if I didn't do it on a professional basis. If I had gone down that road, I'd end up so immersed in engineering jargon that I probably wouldn't be able to talk about it to a "normal" human being in language that they would understand— let alone put it in writing, where I wouldn't be able to see their eyes glaze over as they read it. So I decided that it wasn't what I wanted to be doing with my time.

So now, along with thousands of other bloggers, I'm writing about technical issues on an amateur basis, talking about personal experiences, complaints, frustrations as well as the things that have impressed me and things that I'm looking forward to seeing.

Compared to a professional news site that's written by full-time, professional journalists with access to reports from journalists all over the world, do you trust me?

Perhaps you should.

I came across this news article on Yahoo about BT's next generation of broadband. Basically, BT are going to invest £1.5 million between now and 2012 (the digital world's new millennium, it seems) on next-generation broadband. Great stuff for the UK;

The company said the programme represents the largest ever investment in super-fast broadband, which can deliver speeds of up to 100 Megabytes per second through fibre cables.

Wow. That really is super-fast broadband. But what does 100 Megabytes per second really mean?

I'll probably talk about the implications of "next generation broadband" from a user/consumer point of view elsewhere later (specifically, a user/consumer who is angry with Virgin Media for aggressively throttling their connection to dial-up speeds), but this is my nerdier rant about the confusion of the terminology.

(Feel free to let your eyes glaze over as you read this next bit until you get to a sentence that doesn't have numbers or Greek in it.)

Firstly, you have to understand that a "bit" is the smallest possible unit of information. It's a binary unit that's either on or off, positive or negative, 1 or 0. That much is pretty straightforward. But the next steps get a bit more complicated…

A byte is the next unit of measurement of information. Usually, a byte consists of 8 bits. There are 256 different combinations of 1s and 0s in those 8 bits, so 1 bit can represent a number between 0 and 256. Or 1 bit can be used to represent whether the number is positive or negative, and the byte can represent a number between -128 and 128. Or each combination can be assigned to represent something other than a number- say, looking up a character from a list of 256 characters (think of all the letters- lower and upper case- numbers and punctuation marks/symbols.)

However, there are different sorts of bytes, depending on the context. Hard drives might package data up into anything from a 7-bit to 12-bit bytes to encode 7 bits of code. Computers might process information in bytes of 8, 16, 32 or 64 bits. As a result, when talking about data transmission, bits rather than bytes are the units usually used.

On top of that confusion, you've got the fact that you need to understand Greek to know what a kilobit, megabit or gigabit is. You might know that "kilo" means thousand, "mega" means million and "giga" means billion- that is, the "short scale" billion of a thousand million, rather than the "long scale" billion that means a million million. (Although short scale has been the standard in the UK since 1974, you might still encounter some confusion over the meaning of a "billion.")

Then there's even more confusion because of the binary system- an eleven bit byte can have 1024 combinations, and this number has traditionally been used to measure a kilobyte of information. This causes some confusion on larger scales, when you're talking about hundreds or thousands of kilobytes (eg. when buying a hard drive, when a drive can be marketed with a capacity that is actually much lower than it's true capacity, once it's been formatted for Windows and kibis and kilos have been resolved.) So there's also the "kibibyte", which is 1024 bytes, rather than the kilobyte which is 1000.

So… it's all a bit of a confusing array of terminology.

Considering all that confusion, Yahoo might be forgiven for mistakenly quoting BT as providing a 100 kilobyte per second broadband. After all, why would a technical writer, writing for a major website care that;

Upper case B= Byte. Lower case b= bit.

The answer is pretty straightforward; because they aren't interested in the technicalities of the technical. Someone's said "meg", someone's familiar with "megabytes" and the news propagates through some sort of professionally accredited version of Chinese Whispers. What journalists are interested in is taking a story from a reputable source (in this case, Reuters) and basically re-writing it in their own words so that they can move on to the next breaking story. (I'm possibly being a little unfair to Yahoo here- the Reuters article carries the same mistake, and they don't have a possible Microsoft takeover fight to distract them.)

But this brings me, very slowly, meandering to my point; if they had a comments facility, then I would probably have fired off a short comment and forgotten about the story. They could have either, published it, ignored it or reacted to it, but I would feel like I'd done something helpful, and perhaps the mistake would have been rectified.

As it is, I'm posting about it here, which I think is safe to say something that Yahoo's editorial team will never bother to read. And I'm spotting the difference because I'm someone who cares about technology. People who care about technology usually work in technology, or in related fields. And people who work in technology-related fields aren't the people who are given the job of making technology something that's understandable and accessible to the wider public.

So I'm trying to learn how to position myself somewhere in that gaping chasm between people who understand people and people who understand technology. It's an interesting challenge.

So in my part to help clear up the confusion, here's a cartoon from XKCD on the subject. Unfortunately you'll probably need to be nerdy enough to know the difference between all those bits and bobs before you can get the joke about bytes, but maybe the incentive of a possible laugh at the end will make it into a useful learning experience…

What can I say. I'm still learning…