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Bully for bili
Meanwhile, at Altimus, Richard Rose has no time for this sort of frivolity. His is measured not in years, but in fractions of a second.
‘Reading last week’s Dilbert, in which the pointy-haired boss is told that frillion is not a number, reminded me of the new Microsoft unit of time,’ he says,
‘In the C# SQL DateTime object, you can have time measured to the bilisecond.’
He looked up the definition in Microsoft Books Online: ‘bilisecond: An integer value representing the bilisecond (billionth of a second) of the new SqlDateTime structure.’
Which, as you are already shouting at us, is not a bilisecond at all.
‘Assuming they mean 1/10^9 seconds, then the unit of time has an international standard name already – the nanosecond,’ says Rose. ‘In the unlikely event that they are using the old British definition of a billion (10^12), then the unit 1/10^12 seconds is a picosecond.’
Or, he offers a more contextual definition: a nanosecond is ‘about the time it takes to realise that you didn’t mean to irretrievably delete all that data.’
But Microsoft is saying nothing about that one.
It actually gets better. Apparently the code is written such that bilisecond actually means microsecond, according to someone working on the Mono project:
http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/mono-patches/2007-May/091598.html
Posted by :Anonymous | May 31, 2007 5:27 PM