8 bits in a Byte

[Zak33]

Just for the record

People keep forgetting it, and it's a broadband marketing thing.

[Rabs]

Kilobits and Megabits .... Kb and Mb

[Haiku32]

Of course I knew there ware 8 bits in a byte, but I always thought any variation of kb (KB, kB, Kb) just meant kilobytes.

[Stoo]

half a byte (4 bits) is also called a nibble (seriously!)

and there's more.. (although unofficial)

2 bits = crumb

16 bits = plate

32 bits = dinner

48 bits = gobble

[manwithnoname]

My computer architecture (course CS102 I think) lesson:
Q: How many bits in a byte?
A: It depends how wide your byte is.

... it's never simple.

half a byte (4 bits) is also called a nibble (seriously!)

stoo's nibble could also be a whole byte depending on the architecture (albeit very old architecture)

Broadband marketing it terrible, it's bad enough the 'b' representing bits but:
up to 8Mb service

[aidanjt]

Useful (but short) table of prefixes and suffixes for data metrics:

1b (bit) = a single bit of data, i.e. 0 or 1
1B (Byte) = 8 bits of data
1kb (kilobits) = 1000 bits
1KB (kilobytes) = 1000 bytes
1Kib (Kibibits) = 1024 bits
1KiB (Kibibytes) = 1024 Bytes
1mb (megabits) = 1000 kilobits
1MB (Megabytes) = 1000 kilobytes
1Mib (Mebibits) = 1024 kibibits
1MiB (Mebibytes) = 1024 kibibytes

Before IEC/SI standardised (and ramsaked the kilo/mega/etc prefix, since most people assume kilo/mega = 1000) these prefixes and suffixes, every byte unit of data measurement was an exponent of 2 (that is, 2 to the power of 'n'). What confused people more was that hard drive manufacturers were advertising n GB HDDs as Base10, which was incorrect (at the time), so when they installed their hard drive in their computer and formatted it, the OS showed that the hard drive had less capacity than advertised and complaints ensued in all directions. So now we have more prefixes and suffixes for people to get confused about, but everyones asses are covered, legally (Well, except some software vendors).

For more information, see the Wikipedia article on binary prefixes.

[Perfectionist]

Broadband marketing it terrible, it's bad enough the 'b' representing bits but:
up to 8Mb service

Yeah, it should have been made illegal ages ago. There's simply no reason in this day and age to measure connection speeds in megabits apart from to mislead customers and potential customers who are nearly always used to Mb meaning megabytes.

[LuckyNV]

Nothing particularly wrong with the "upto" notation because its difficult for any adsl company to predict what actual speeds you will achieve with there being so many factors and some totally out of their control.

[peterb]

My computer architecture (course CS102 I think) lesson:
Q: How many bits in a byte?
A: It depends how wide your byte is.

... it's never simple.

By convention a byte is 8 bits (from when 8 bit computing was normal - 16 bits is a double byte (8 bit processors tended to have 16 bit wide address busses) and 32 bits was a word.

[TAKTAK]

theres nothing wrong with the terminology...

Bits per second for communications...
Bytes for storage...


bits are a little b

bytes are a big B

[Perfectionist]

Nothing particularly wrong with the "upto" notation because its difficult for any adsl company to predict what actual speeds you will achieve with there being so many factors and some totally out of their control.

Eh, I dunno, the prevalence of that term's annoying sometimes. I visited a friend in hospital a few days ago and even in the little cafe/food shops there they're doing this (think it was outsourced to a private comp), well the other term which is just the other end of the scale "from £whatever" - where the "from" price is water, and the rest are like £4 more expensive.

theres nothing wrong with the terminology...

Bits per second for communications...
Bytes for storage...


bits are a little b

bytes are a big B

The average person does not know that though. It's like if food ingredients were allowed to be listed in the kind of terminology used on stuff like shampoos - Latin and proper scientific chemical names etc. It's not, for hopefully obvious reasons.

[TAKTAK]

The average person does not know that though. It's like if food ingredients were allowed to be listed in the kind of terminology used on stuff like shampoos - Latin and proper scientific chemical names etc. It's not, for hopefully obvious reasons.

But you can't just go around changing measuring scales willy-nilly, communications are measured in bits per second...

It's like me saying i don't know what a Kilometre is so i'm going to change it from the official term to Kangaroo testicles...

[Perfectionist]

There's no logical reason for it to be measured in bits per second though, other than the cop-out "traditional" argument "it's always been that way". Today's speeds don't need to be measured by such a small unit.

[aidanjt]

There's no logical reason for it to be measured in bits per second though, other than the cop-out "traditional" argument "it's always been that way". Today's speeds don't need to be measured by such a small unit.

Exactly!.. Hence the k/m/g/t/etc prefixes.

[Haiku32]

There's no reason they can't put - "16 megabits per second" so the consumer will go and research what a megabit is instead of thinking that Mb is the same as MB (I did until a few hours ago ).

It's like advertising a processor and saying it's clock speed is 2,400,000Hz, instead of just saying 2.4gHz. It makes it sound alot better to the average consumer because they won't necessarily understand the prefixes, so is potentially misleading.

Sure, saying there broadband speed is 16Mb sounds alot better than 2MB, but it allows the customer to fully understand what they are buying.

[manwithnoname]

By convention a byte is 8 bits (from when 8 bit computing was normal - 16 bits is a double byte (8 bit processors tended to have 16 bit wide address busses) and 32 bits was a word.

I was harking back to the days when a 4 bit processor had a 4 bit byte (all my architecture course include history lessons). Convention has 8 bits to a byte - but I would put all my money on it. Words are another can of worms altogether, words could be 16 bits or 32 bits, even way back when.