Talk:Quad

Kiloquad, Gigaquad, Teraquad
Once all the relative information is already on the quad page. --MstrControl talk 03:39, 3 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * Merge into an all-inclusive page like latinum, which is a very comprehensive and informative article that provides more accessibility than having brick, strip, slip, etc. by themselves. However, I'd like to see the italicized text turned into a normal background section, as that would help further consolidate and make it flow easier -- but that's something we can discuss on a talk page. :) --Broik 04:06, 3 Dec 2005 (UTC)
 * Merge. I agree that the sum of the whole is greater than that of the parts. Weyoun 02:27, 4 Dec 2005 (UTC)
 * This was on my "todo" list anyway...now that it has been merged it can be archived. --Alan del Beccio 08:23, 5 Dec 2005 (UTC)

Relation to "real" computing
It is highly unlikely, nay, impossible for the Federation to be still using 8-bit binary even in the era of the Next Generation let alone Voyager. Even today massive advances are being made in the field of trinary computing where the spin on the electron provides the third variable. This advancement might even be seen within our lifetime and would revolutionise computing (again), communication and data storage by allowing us to send/store three times more data with every additional bit rather than the current two. --Filth 17:55, 28 Aug 2005 (UTC)


 * Trinary code is not more advanced than binary, and in fact a quaternary code is exactly as advanced as a binary code using twice as many symbols: the set of possible states of N quaternary digits is isomorphic to the set of possible states of 2N binary digits. If a kiloquad was a thousand quaternary digits it would be a ludicrously small amount of data.  Is it possible that "quads" is just short for "quadrillion bits" or "quadrillion bytes"?  We currently use slang like "megs" and "gigs" derived from SI prefixes, but that may be unnatural when you get to the quadrillions and don't want to call your data "pets".  In that case it might seem odd to refer to "kiloquads" rather than "exas" or "quints", but that would be as linguistically natural as people who say "thousands of kilometers" instead of "megameters" --Roy S.


 * I think you've hit it right on the nose. It makes far, far more sense to me that "quad" is short for "quadrillion bits" instead of a quaternary digit (and shouldn't that be a "quit" anyway?) -- otherwise a kiloquad = four kilobytes, a megaquad = four megabytes, et cetera, and that seems ludicrous given the amount of data the series is typically referring to when these terms are used.  Of course, the real answer is stated in the article -- that the production crew simply wanted to guard against obsolescence, lest TNG/DS9/VOY end up sounding like TOS referring to "data tapes".  Gregly 18:50, 30 March 2007 (UTC)


 * When I first heard it, I thought quad meant 4 bytes (as in common use of a 32-bit word). Then when I realized that was a bit small, I thought it might have meant the amount of data addressable by 4 bytes, or 2^32 = 4 GB. That seemed more reasonable (for some definition of reasonable in this context). -- A passer-by

Trinary code references and speculation

 * "However, it has been solidly established that Federation computers utilize both binary and trinary code..."

And


 * "A quad could refer to a pentabyte."

Binary, yes. Trinary, no, other than a single mention of "trinary syntax" by Janeway. Unless somebody can point to further instances where trinary code was mentioned, I believe this reference to it should be stricken.

Also, in current computer terminology, a quad is a rare term for 2 bits of binary data (4 possible data states), which is 1/4 of a byte.

First... a pentabyte!? This would be five bytes, or 40 bits, making the "hundreds of kiloquads" that Voyager transmitted from the Delta Quadrant all fit on a few 1.44MB floppies. Where in blazes did this idea come from? Second, I can't find a single instance in which "quad" is currently used to refer to a pair of bits. Both of these statements seem like wild speculation to me... can anybody provide solid references? Gregly 18:57, 30 March 2007 (UTC)


 * No doubt a typo for petabyte, one quadrillion bytes, though I prefer the petabit's quadrillion bits. (What's so special about the byte? Only its power-of-two size, sufficient to hold a 20th century ASCII character code.) --82.36.30.34 02:04, 4 August 2007 (UTC)

Removed text
I removed the following (nonsense) text:
 * (On the other hand: growth in real world computer science is exponential, and technicians sometimes exaggerate when talking to outsiders. Nonetheless, speaking of information technology, using this vast masses of data seems like the Star Trek Universe is spoiled by technology, but does not know how to efficiently use resources. It is hardly believable that there's no knowledge about cybernetics or compression, left alone artificial intelligence, but Star Fleet is going on with our ruinous use of statistics and masses of data.)

-- Renegade54 13:46, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Quad=QWORD?
I was thinking, could a 'quad' be a shorter name for a QWORD, or Quadruple Word? For those who don't know, a word is 16 bits, or 2 bytes, so a QWORD would be 8 bytes.

Just a thought. So a kiloquad would be 8 MB, a megaquad would be 8 GB, a gigaquad would be 8 TB, and so on and so on. For comparing, all the files at Filefront is over 48 TB (terabytes, and that's not a typo) of space, totalling over 1.5 million files. 23:26, October 7, 2007

Unnecessary - Realworld comparison

 * From the terminology, a kiloquad is perhaps one thousand (103), a gigaquad one billion (109), and a teraquad one trillion (1012) quads. Colloquially, the modern term kilobyte is usually used to refer to 1,024 (210) bytes, megabyte to 1,048,576 (220) bytes, and gigabyte to either 1,000 megabytes (103 * 220 bytes) or 1,024 megabytes (230 bytes). Because of this confusion, the International Electrotechnical Commission introduced the prefixes kibi-, mebi-, gibi- (et cetera) to refer to powers of two; under this system, the technical name for 210 bytes is a kibibyte, and 240 bytes is a tebibyte.

speculation &mdash; Morder 10:29, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Two issues
"...Of that, Arturis was able to reconstruct over 68 kiloquads of information, however, much of it was still garbled. " Setting aside the run-on sentence (and voice change), the content is confusing. Much of what "was still garbled": another (possibly overlapping) subset of the data sent by Starfleet or portions of the subset reconstructed by Arturis? (I was going to correct the grammar until I realized I couldn't apprehend the intended meaning.) Does someone know? 15:42, February 13, 2011 (UTC)
 * 1) The first section's heading ("Measurement table") indicates there will be a discussion/listing of the various levels of quads in tabular form. The article then proceeds to use a mixture of sub-sections, bullet lists, and prose – ie, no tables. I'd expected to see info organized similar to the Warp factor article (tables+discussion). Maybe it's ok as-is; it just seemed odd (to me).
 * 2) The kiloquad sub-section contains this: