Know These Facts

Here are some terms to help you know just how fast "FAST" is: (information taken from http://whatis.techtarget.com , http://www.free-definition.com and http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae281.cfm In Network testing, time is measured in milliseconds (one thousandth of a second). Does that seem fast? Well if there are 6000 send and receive commands on the network and each takes a millisecond, that is a 6 second delay. Would you wait that long for a web page to be displayed? Probably not! So from that you can see in the computer world that there needs to be other clocked times that are much faster. (This definition follows U.S. usage in which a billion is a thousand million and a trillion is a 1 followed by 12 zeros.) Millisecond (ms or msec )- one thousandth of a second and is commonly used in measuring the time to read to or write from a hard disk or a CD-ROM player or to measure packet travel time on the Internet. Microsecond (us or Greek letter mu plus s) - one millionth (10 to the 6th power) of a second. Nanosecond (ns or nsec) - one billionth (10 to the 9th power) of a second and is a common measurement of read or write access time to random access memory (RAM). Picosecond - one trillionth (10 to the 12 power) of a second, or one millionth of a microsecond. Femtosecond - one millionth of a nanosecond or 10 to the 15th power of a second and is a measurement sometimes used in laser technology. Attosecond - one quintillionth (10 to the 18th power) of a second and is a term used in photon research. Yoctosecond - is one septillionth (10 to the -24th power) of a second and if you can think this small....... Planck length - is the scale at which classical ideas about gravity and space-time cease to be valid, and quantum effects dominate. This is the 'quantum of length', the smallest measurement of length with any meaning. And roughly equal to 1.6 x 10 to the -35 m or about 10 to the -20 times the size of a proton. The Planck time is the time it would take a photon traveling at the speed of light to cross a distance equal to the Planck length. This is the 'quantum of time', the smallest measurement of time that has any meaning, and is equal to 10 to the -43 seconds. No smaller division of time has any meaning. With in the framework of the laws of physics as we understand them today, we can say only that the universe came into existence when it already had an age of 10 to the -43 seconds. ("We can say only".... Some times scientists just make me smile.... But at least now you know how fast I can test an application and find a bug in it.... ha ha ha )