Unlike people, machines can exchange data about anything -- temperature, moisture levels, pressure, vibration and so on -- in small fractions of a second.
Gregory Lagana, a DynCorp spokesman, said that the amounts involved were small fractions of the $1.2 billion paid to DynCorp since 2004.
The companies that license it, including Motorola, Palm and HTC, a Taiwanese manufacturer, have carved out only small fractions of the overall smartphone market.
He said that when he was young, he had wanted to be as triumphant and right as Lenin, but that he now knew that he could only cultivate those small fractions of life that meant something to him.
At a time when telecommunications stocks around the world are trading for small fractions of what they commanded two years ago, it had seemed that China Telecom might become one of the few success stories.
But it does mean that, if the ICB's sums are correct, the cost of borrowing is not about to explode: the extra interest charged on loans should be counted in small fractions of a percentage point.
Even The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, whose Web sites are perhaps the best examples of paid-for digital news, generate only small fractions of their budgets from Internet subscriptions.
Issues like this can cause temporary slowness for small fractions of users from time to time.
Yet most applications only achieve small fractions of this performance.
"It's only small fractions that we are losing out on medals.
Cores drilled from Greenland ice were cut into small fractions, which were analyzed for δ18O.
