Just a Q - Is Irish BB measured in Bits or Bytes?

Maddzy

Was talking to a guy in Holland who has an 8MB connection. I was very jealous of his "8MegaBytes" when he told me it wasn't measured in Bytes at all, but Bits. His connection is 8MegaBits. He claims that most ISPs all over the world measure connection speeds in Bits. Now I'm pretty sure that 512kb/s is what we think it is - 512 KiloBytes. Simply because if you work it out in Bits then 512000 bits = 64000 bytes, or 64kb/s. And I know I can get better then 64kb/s downloads. But now that I think of it... I can rarely maintain a download connection greater then 60kb/s....

So - Is it Bits or Bytes???

Hmmm....

DonkeyStyle \o/

bits
The speed of connections is rated in bits... people generally clock their download speeds in bytes.
1MB = one mega-bit = 1024 kilobits/sec = 128 kilobytes/sec (devide by 8)
Most people in Ireland have 512kbits which is half of a 1 megabit line.

tomk

Bits.

Maddzy

Ahhh ok cheers for the fast reply - It actually makes a lot more sense. And I thought all this tim eit was 512KiloBytes. What a noob

dawballz

It's supposed to be MB == MegaBytes, and Mb == Megabits, small b for bits. But people don't adhere to that much. So you're almost right. imo.

popinfresh

and there's 1024 bits in a kilo-bit (not 1000) If you're wondering why that is, well 2,4,8,16,33,64,128,256,512,1024. It's handy to give 1024 a new name i.e. 1024GBs is a PetaByte.

Maddzy

Theres 8 bits in a byte. So just devide the KiloBytes by 8.

This stuff confuses me and I do binery in college lol

Oh and 1024GB is a TerraByte. 1024 TerraBytes is a PetaByte and 1024 PetaBytes is a ExaByte

popinfresh

1024 Exabytes is a Zeta-byte, 1024 Zeta-bytes is a Yota-byte :eek:

Of course there's probably only collectively a few Exa-bytes of information in the world

Maddzy

lol yea I didnt bother to mention the Zetta or Yotta bytes. It'll be a long time before a YottaByte exists lol.

kasintahan

Maddzy wrote:

Theres 8 bits in a byte. So just devide the KiloBytes by 8.

Sort of... in Intel land.

There are sytems that use different sized bytes.

That's why data transfer rates are quoted in bits per second : aka "baud"

optiplexgx270

Isnt 1024GB = Terabyte

1024TB = Petabyte

Adey2002

popinfresh wrote:

1024 Exabytes is a Zeta-byte, 1024 Zeta-bytes is a Yota-byte :eek:

and 1024 Yota-bytes is a bloody big byte.

Maddzy

I doubt we'll see a BBB in our life time But maybe :P

popinfresh

and 1024 Yota-bytes is a bloody big byte.

I like the sound of that . I wonder will computers have Exabytes of information in our life time (Bear in mind that's like 1,000,000,000<one thousand million> GB :eek: ) Not bloody likely

Capt'n Midnight

popinfresh wrote:

I like the sound of that . I wonder will computers have Exabytes of information in our life time (Bear in mind that's like 1,000,000,000<one thousand million> GB :eek: ) Not bloody likely

Actually an increase of a Billion times in the amount of ram on the standard home PC has already happened in the lifetime of many people on boards. The ZX81 had 1KB of ram. At the rate of development since the sixties we should have Exabyte on PC's in about 2035, sooner if you are only talking off line storage or any of the holographic technoligies that have been promised for decades now come on line.


http://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/HPDOCS/intro_para.html

Data production primarily occurs on three Origin 3800 systems with over 200 CPUs and 100 GB of memory. The current data archive volume is almost 1 Petabyte and this volume increases daily.

That is one of many NASA projects.

The NSA would spend a tad more than NASA on IT , I'll let you figure it out.

digitalninja

you do binery in college?
you mustn't listen much.

kleefarr

Here's a unit converter

muckwarrior

kasintahan wrote:

That's why data transfer rates are quoted in bits per second : aka "baud"

Thats not entirely accurate. The data rate is expressed in bits per second, the baud rate is an expression of signal elements per second. In a two signal system the baud rate happens to be equivalent to the data rate, i.e. bits per second, but bits and bauds are not the same thing.