Comment on Bit flips: How cosmic rays grounded a fleet of aircraft
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 4 days ago
…disrupt tiny bits of data stored in the computer’s memory, switching that bit – often represented as a 0 or 1 – from one state to another.
Top notch science journalism there.
Devial@discuss.online 4 days ago
This isn’t a scientific journal or news paper. It’s a main stream article by the BBC, intended to be consumed, and understood, by people who have zero knowledge of how computers, bits or binary numbers work, so I really don’t see the issue here.
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
And, if the top levels of the BBC weren’t staffed with time-serving Conservative Party appointees who spend all their time interfering in politics, they could get their journalists to fact-check their articles by asking someone who knows what the fuck they’re talking about.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 4 days ago
So what do bits represent then, if not ones and zeros?
Devial@discuss.online 4 days ago
Read that sentence again. They didn’t say bits represent 0s and 1s, they said bits are represented BY 0s and 1s, which is entirely correct.
Physicsly speaking, in a modern silicon based PC, bits are the presence or absence of electrons in an electron well. That presence or absence is often represented by binary numbers, because it makes the math easy, though it can also be represented in other ways, such as “HI” and “LO”.
The statement from the article is entirely correct.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 3 days ago
A bit isn’t represented by a one or a zero, that’s nonsense. A bit can take the state of a one or a zero and is represented in various ways in digital circuitry.