Recently I witnessed a colleague doing a search online. I know that this may not be ground breaking or surprising in this day and age, but what caught my eye was what he was searching for. This person was not searching for a simple text string, but rather an exact conversion formula. Actually, he was searching for the conversion of gigabits per second to megabytes per second. The think to remember is that bits are smaller than bytes as there are eight bits in a byte, but you already knew that right? This morning I was reading headlines as I always do and came across an article at Lifehacker titled "Top 10 Ways to Find Better Answers Online (That Aren't Google)" and number seven on this list was WolframAlpha which is the same site I saw in use the other day. The fact that I am now reading about this search tool days after seeing it in action for the first time made me think that it is God's way of telling me to share it with the world. It is an obscure tool as of recent.
Now, WolframAlpha is not the same type of search engine as Google or Yahoo. Rather than searching for popular restaurants, shopping ideas, or a historical article you would search for data transfer times (networking reference). In my example (see image below) I searched for data transfer time 1.5GB, 5Mb/s. What I am asking is for the time it takes to download a 1.5 gigabyte file over a five megabit per second connection. My example is just the tip of the iceberg as your equations can be more precise and cover fields from mathematics, physics, chemistry, weather, materials, to dates & times. If you are not sure how to ask your question there is a example by topic link on the home page.
Good luck balancing that check book now or that tricky math homework. ;-)
No comments:
Post a Comment