Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> I guess if you were talking about kiloBITS, then you would have "kilo 
> binary bit", and allegedly "bit" is short for "binary digit"... It's 
> tenuous though.

  Btw, I have never understood why "kilobit" is so popular of a term.
Many things are measured in kilobits for no apparent reason, even though
other similar things are measured in kilobytes.

  To me "kilobit" is a very confusing term. It doesn't tell my anything.
If someone says to me "the file was 150 kilobytes in size", I immediately
get a grasp of whether it's a large or a small file in that context, without
needing to think about it. However, if someone said "the file was 150 kilobits
in size" that would tell me nothing. I would have to perform some mental math
in order to comprehend the meaning. (Of course an easy approximation would be
to divide by 10... assuming the 25% error isn't significant in the context.
In many contexts that's a huge error.)

  The only rational reason for using kilobits rather than kilobytes would
be if you need to express sizes which are not multiples of 8 bits. However,
in practice that's *never* the case. All practical sizes in computing are
multiples of 8 bits. There's absolutely no reason to use kilobits. There's
unnecessary accuracy in the unit.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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