We got an inside look at the process behind putting a Newsweek cover together;  staging a photo shoot with Conan Obrien; blow-drying Martha Stewart’s Hens for a photo shoot; and rebranding the New York Magazine with Pentagram. More than that, we got an inside look at where the editorial world is heading and, yes, it has to do with the iPad and the tablet computer. We took a sneak preview at InDesign 5.5 with the good folks from Adobe and saw some of the digital tools they are building into future versions. Exciting stuff, to be sure.

Stepping outside of the daily goings- on around the office and listening to some great talks was both refreshing and inspiring. Overall, we brought home more ideas and inspiration than our brains could carry from some of the top professionals in our industry. The day was topped off by excellent food and conversation in Portland’s Old Port. Many thanks to AIGA Maine for putting together an excellent conference.

Techy Russian Dolls (Image Credit: LaughingSquid.com)

Computers use binary to compute and store data. The binary numeral system (base 2) consists of 1′s and 0′s which represent ‘on’ and ‘off,’ respectively, to the computer. A bit is a single binary digit, and therefore is read as either a 1 or and 0 by the computer. A byte is a collection of eight bits in modern computing systems, and therefore consists of a sequence of eight 1′s or 0′s.

For a (somewhat) practical example of how bits and bytes work, lets look at writing a sentence on your computer. The alphabet consists of 26 letters, each with an upper and lower case symbol, there are 10 numbers (0-9), and a wide variety of symbols, equaling a fair number of different characters that must be represented. Since a byte is 8 bits long, there are 255 different possibilities that a byte can represent (11111111 in binary is 255). This is the foundation for the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) system, which assigns a different character for each possibility. The shortest complete sentence, “I am.”converts to 0100100100100000011000010110110100101110 in binary, which is 40 bits or 5 bytes long. If you separate that string into sequences of 8 bits, you can see that 01001001 is ‘I’, 00100000 is the space, 01100001 is the ‘a’, etc. etc. This goes to show how bits and bytes are used to represent data on your computer, and how different the two terms are.

Anyways, it’s when you get to the speed of your internet connection that bits vs. bytes becomes increasingly relevant. When you go to order high speed internet, you’ll usually see Mbps after the connection speed. This stands for megabits per second, not megabytes per second like many think. A 1 Mbps (1,000,000 bits per second) connection is fast enough for most people, it allows a max download speed of about 125 kBps (kilobytes per second), but connections go as fast as 1 Gbps (gigabits per second [1,000,000,000 bits per second]) which allows a max download speed of 125 megabytes per second. People often write MBps when they mean Mbps, this is most likely a mistake. A 5MBps connection would be very expensive for anyone but a very large business.

As to why that new hard drive you bought isn’t as big as you thought it would be, the discrepancy comes from the fact that hardware manufacturers cut corners when they do their calculations. Since binary uses just two different symbols, the way you count is different from that in base ten. 1 in binary is 1 in base ten, 10 in binary is 2 in base ten, 100 is 4, 1000 is 8, and so on and so forth. It advances in powers of two, This means that it takes 1024 bytes to make a kilobyte, 1024 kilobytes to make a megabyte, and 1024 megabytes to make a gigabyte. The people who make hard drives cheat and assume that 1000 bytes is a kilobyte, 1000 kilobytes is a megabyte, and 1000 megabytes is a gigabyte and say it’s close enough that it doesn’t matter. They say that a hard drive which holds 120,000,000,000 bytes holds 120 gigabytes, while in actuality it only holds 111 gigabytes (120,000,000,000 ÷ 1024 ÷ 1024 ÷ 1024). This is why you never get as many gigabytes as you think you do.

Even people in the tech world have trouble with this concept of bits vs. bytes at times, but hopefully now you won’t. While this subject may not seem terribly important, it’s very relevant to computing in general and is a good bit of trivia. I hope that this post hasn’t bored you too much, and that you walk away knowing something new.

Google Voice was originally called Grand Central, a company founded in 2005 which Google bought in 2007 for 97 million. Even years ago it was a promising business opportunity, and it remains a great service.

But what does Google Voice actually do? Well, it’s essentially a new phone number that allows a number of features that most phone services don’t offer.

The Google Voice Inbox (Credit: Google)

First, it offers a unified number that you’ll never lose when you move, get a new cell phone, or change phone service. This number can ring any other number of phones that you own, for example, when somebody calls my Google Voice number, both my cell phone and my home phone ring, which means I almost never miss a call.

Google Voice also features a robust voicemail system. When somebody leaves a voicemail on your Google Voice account, it notifies you via text message and even email, transcribing the voicemail into text and delivering it to your inbox.

Finally, there are a host of other features  Google Voice offers. You can send and receive text messages for free online, screen calls, set different voicemail greetings to different contacts and groups, and more.

Google Voice is free, and a great service. I have been using it since 2008 and its unification makes life easier, which everybody deserves. I urge everyone to pick up a number and at least try it out.

The problem is usually a piece of javascript that a hacker has added to the site. It can easily be removed as long as you can find the infected files and remove the necessary code. We’re trying to figure out if this is a local occurence, or something that’s more widespread. We’d love to hear from you if you have any idea as to the source of the attacks, or encounter other sites that have been attacked. And as always, keep your passwords tough to guess, and close to the chest!

D!d U Kn0w?
Creating a great password is your first line of defense against a hacker. What’s a great password? One with upper and lower case letters, a number or two, and maybe an exclamation point! Make a password tough to guess (but memorable for you), and you’ll be one step closer to hacker-proof.