Megabyte - /MEG A'BITE/ 1. 1,048,576 bytes. 2.
When someone asks you for a small bite
of your sandwich and ends up eating half of it. i.e. My sister
just took a megabyte of my
ice-cream cone. 3. In marketing terms this word has no
exact definition. If you see 500
Megabytes on a box of some hardrive, you can expect the real size of
the hardrive to really be
any where between 50 megabytes to 450 megabytes. The reason for
this is that since in
computer terms a megabyte is equal really to 1,048,576 (a number by
which a technician
working on the Altair computer miscounted a bunch of flashing lights
and suddenly realized that
mega meant 1,048,576 instead of 1,000,000 as previous dictionaries
had said) and not
1,000,000, then people in marketing departments everywhere decided
that they could miscount
too. So because of the original definition of mega was now distorted,
noone would notice if it was
distorted a little more. Using catch words like "compression",
"utilities included", "designed for
Windows 95" & many others, marketing departments of popular hardrive
companies could now
take a simple 250 megabyte hardrive and say that it is 500 megabytes.
Scientists studying
this mathematical phenomenon can find not reasonable explanation for
this. A related matter is
called cafematics in which when you go into a cafe, no matter how many
times you try to add up
your total for your coffee, danish, tax, and tips, you will not ever
get the same total twice.
Theory states that in places where food is served there is a whole
new rule of mathematics and
all previously known rules are thrown out of the window. This
could be possibly related to the
amount of energy being released to burn the food in the kitchen causing
a mathematical
wormhole to be released and emanated from the food brought out into
the dining area.
Accountants for restaurants are often seen sitting in alleys behind
the restaurants just to avoid
the cafematics. Usually if you try to add up your receipt out
side of the cafe in question you
will almost always find that you have been over charged. If you
take the receipt back into the
cafe and complain to a manager then all the numbers suddenly change
their properties and the
manager agrees that there is a mistake and says you are short $5 for
your coffee and danish
that you have already shelled out $10 for. It just does not add
up and that is the theory
behind cafematics. Applying this theory to the amount of coffee
that is burned in break rooms
in marketing departments across the country, it is possible that a
mathematical wormhole of
cafematics could theoretically be opened around marketing professionals
as they stand around
trying to come up with good sounding sales pitches. Under the
effects of cafematics, the
numbers that marking professionals come up with for harddrives are
completely honest and
truthful. It is not until the product hits the shelves and the
effects of cafematics has worn
off in some UPS truck between here and there. Side note:
Research is being done to find out
how much coffee that Bill Clinton drinks.
