6 little-known things you didn't know about your computer

 

It's a ritual across the globe: somewhere between sticking the kettle on and complaining about last night's match, you'll probably hit the button on your ageing company PC and wait while it slowly thinks about turning on.

Rather than take it for granted, though, it's worth taking a couple minutes to realise a few of the things that your poor robot slave does without you ever knowing.

Bits, bytes and size

Every gigabyte, there's 1,024 megabytes; 1,024 kilobytes in a megabyte, and 1,024 bytes in a kilobyte. Breaking it down to the lowest level, you've got 8 bits in a byte. Why does that matter? Because on a flash drive, each bit of data is made up of eight separate floating gates, each comprising two physical transistors, which can record themselves as either a '1' or a '0'.

That means that an 8GB iPod Touch has 549,755,813,888 gates arrayed inside that svelte aluminium body.

Everything on net is on your computer

Every time you stream a video or the week's latest Top 40 off the web, it's actually, technically playing off your computer. Every internet media file has to make a local copy of itself on your machine, first. Ever wondered what that white buffering bar means on YouTube or Netflix?

It's the amount of video that's been copied to the local cache, aka the amount you can still watch if your net decides to up and die.

The distance data travels

A quick experiment for you: click this link, which should take you to Wikipedia. With one click, you've just fetched a bunch of data from servers in Virginia, 6,000 km away.

Your request has travelled from your computer, through a local Wi-Fi router or a modem , up to a local data centre, from there onwards (under the Atlantic Ocean, if you're in the UK), all the way to Virginia, and back again – in around 0.1 of a second, depending on how good your internet connection is. Think twice before you complain about 'bulky' Ethernet again.

Counting starts at zero

Thanks to the way its intrinsic circuitry works, every action that takes place at a base level is happening in binary, where things are either a 1 or a 0, with no shades of grey in between.

This actually translates up to a neat bit of programming trivia – in the computer science world, all counting starts at zero, not one.

The work that goes into Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V

The amount of copying that solid state drives do is a rather under-appreciated fact. Because of the complicated way it works, over-writing a block of old data with some new data isn't as simple as just writing the new stuff in with a bigger Sharpie.

Rather, the storage drive has to do some complicated shuffling. In practice, this can mean that writing a tiny 4KB file can require the drive to read 2MB, store that temporarily, erase a whole tonne of blocks, then re-write all the data. It's rather labour-intensive, so think before you juggle your files around next time.

Code isn't as clean as you think

The majority of us put faith in bits of technology you don't quite understand – be it committing your life to a 747, or your dirty pics to Snapchat's auto-delete.

Generally we tend to assume that the code's been scrupulously examined by teams of caffeine-fuelled programmers, with most of the niggling little bugs found and nixed. The reverse seems to be quite the opposite.