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somebody <x### [at] y com> wrote:
> Good intentions, but "kilo binary binary digit" - what were they smoking?
Where did you get that name? It's "kilo binary byte".
--
- Warp
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>> Good intentions, but "kilo binary binary digit" - what were they smoking?
>
> Where did you get that name? It's "kilo binary byte".
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.
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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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Warp wrote:
> 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.
The only place I've seen it used is in networking (most kinds of
networks transmit individual bits) and data compression (you might want
to send the data over a network or other transport, and you need to
compress it enough that the decoder can receive the data fast enough).
Haven't seen it anywhere else. (As you say, it wouldn't make much sense.)
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"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message
news:4a449e36@news.povray.org...
> somebody <x### [at] ycom> wrote:
> > Good intentions, but "kilo binary binary digit" - what were they
smoking?
> Where did you get that name? It's "kilo binary byte".
"Kilo binary" as a prefix is not limited to bytes, another (less ambigious)
unit is the bit, hence kibibits, mebibits... etc.
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On 06/26/09 00:21, Darren New wrote:
> Errr, no, I don't think so. The top half is where google says 100,000
> megs is 97 gig, implying 1024 meg to the gig. The bottom half is wolfram
I can't read...
Anyway, to the best of my knowledge, kilobyte is the only one agreed
upon. In my high school textbooks, 1 KB was 1024 bytes, but 1 MB was
1000 KB (not 1e6 bytes).
--
Q: What do you call a half-dozen Indians with Asian flu?
A: Six sick Sikhs (sic).
/\ /\ /\ /
/ \/ \ u e e n / \/ a w a z
>>>>>>mue### [at] nawazorg<<<<<<
anl
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On 06/26/09 05:31, Warp wrote:
> 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.
Like Andrew, I've seen it only in communications (and encoding is also
considered part of communications...).
Think modems (the phone ones). In the old days, it was all baud. 1 baud
is 1bit/s. It probably has stuck since.
Incidentally, I think with old modems, sending 1 byte didn't entail
sending 8 bits. I think they had two error correcting bits, making
sending 1 byte the same as 10 bits. If there's truth to that, I can see
why it'd make sense to specify bits.
--
Q: What do you call a half-dozen Indians with Asian flu?
A: Six sick Sikhs (sic).
/\ /\ /\ /
/ \/ \ u e e n / \/ a w a z
>>>>>>mue### [at] nawazorg<<<<<<
anl
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Mueen Nawaz wrote:
> Anyway, to the best of my knowledge, kilobyte is the only one
And if you look back at the instruction manuals for old 8-bit computers,
like the TRS-80 model 1 or the Apple ][, you'll see them described as having
65K of memory. I suspect nobody wanted to advertise 64K and have someone buy
the competitor's machine because it had 65K. :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Insanity is a small city on the western
border of the State of Mind.
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Warp wrote:
> Btw, I have never understood why "kilobit" is so popular of a term.
It's a PSTN term. I.e., it's used in communication mediums like the public
switched telephone network where data isn't always byte-aligned. For
example, an American T1 circuit delivers 193 bits per frame.
Nowadays, it's more common to pad things out to the byte, since line speeds
are much higher. Nobody really tries to speed things up by using 5-bit
characters any more, so the need for kilobits is lessened.
Of course, audio is still in kilobytes per second, where a kilobyte is 1000
bytes and not 1024.
> 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 25% is probably insignificant if the kilobits is communication speed,
because you have TCP overhead, framing overhead, etc.
> 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.
Not any more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code
Of course, on serial lines, you have start bits and stop bits, so you're
really sending anywhere between 9 and 12 bits per character, sometimes
including even half-bits.
> 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.
Again, yes, that's true now. Once people started mass-producing machines,
and the software got to where it was reasonable to run software from one
machine on another machine, 8-bit seemed to become most popular.
The intel 4004 was four bits, the PDP-8 was 12 bits, etc. Nowadays,
machines are powerful enough that you have protected memory mapped virtual
memory capable machines sitting in boxes with no user interfaces on them.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Insanity is a small city on the western
border of the State of Mind.
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Mueen Nawaz wrote:
> Think modems (the phone ones). In the old days, it was all baud. 1
> baud is 1bit/s. It probably has stuck since.
Technically, one baud is one symbol per second. A 9600bps modem is a 2400
baud modem with 2 symbols per baud.
> Incidentally, I think with old modems, sending 1 byte didn't entail
> sending 8 bits. I think they had two error correcting bits, making
> sending 1 byte the same as 10 bits. If there's truth to that, I can see
> why it'd make sense to specify bits.
One or two start bits to synchronize, one stop bit (or sometimes 1.5 stop
bits) to process, and perhaps a parity bit. No error correcting bits, but
parity might give you error detection if you're lucky.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Insanity is a small city on the western
border of the State of Mind.
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