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A "while" is a unit of time in the SSMS (Southern Standardized Measurement System) that could indicate anywhere from 5-10 standard minutes (NB: A "standard minute" consists of sixty seconds, cf a "football minute" which can last up to a standard hour), as in "She's going to be on the phone a while", to 5-10 years, as in "He spent a while in jail". I hope this helps clear things up.

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From:

liquidfun.livejournal.com

"jiffy" has also been rigidly defined, unfortunately too many times.

Back in the early 80, when microcomputers were just becoming available to the public, a "jiffy" was defined as a tick of the system timer, which usually ran off household power ("mains" to the brits). This meant 1/60th of a second to us in the US, which was convenient, as it kept a constant ratio for hours to minutes, minutes to seconds, and seconds to jiffies. In most of the rest of the world, it meant 1/50th of a second, which while not as consistent at least had a nice decimal representation of 0.02 seconds.

Documentation for accessing devices would often include a reference to place a request in this register, wait some number of jiffies, then read the answer from that register.

With the advent of faster computers, 1/60th of a second was far too long a period of time to consider waiting on anything, so a millisecond was adopted by many manufacturers as the new interpretation of a jiffy. Although to be honest, now that microcomputers are not a hobby, nearly everything is measured in terms of either discrete S.I. units or as some number of either FSB cycles or CPU cycles.

Sadly, in other disciplines a jiffy was often defined in other ways, for instance, physicists have referred to a jiffy (mostly jokingly) as the amount of time required for light to travel one foot (which is within several percent of one nanosecond).

I look the above ... and I say "GEEK" and point at myself.

I think I'll go soak my head in a bucket for a "while". Or for a "jiffy". Whatever.