Those pesky computer innards

This was a headline this morning on msnbc.com: IBM says it has doubled speed of computer innards.

Of course that got my attention -- did IBM really say "innards"?

No innards in the story. "IBM has devised a way to triple the amount of memory stored on computer chips and double the performance of data-hungry processors..." Faster memory and processing is great, but I was really more intrigued by the idea of faster innards.

As in journalism, it's often a temptation in technical writing to slip into the casual tone and conversational vocabulary. Unfortunately, casual and conversational tend to make things fuzzy just when the reader is counting on precision. A recent example I came across was "Clear the directories and try again." Um, do I delete everything in the directories and leave the directory structure, or delete all of the directories? I guess I'll just delete the innards and see what happens!