I've always been perfectly happy with bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes with 1024 of each in each, I've always grown up with that. And yet I've come to learn that when transferring data, it tends to be quoted in kilobits, a number 8 times greater than the file in kilobytes, with there being exactly 1000 kilobits in a megabit.
So the more I understand this, the less I really understand the purpose of it. What exactly is the need for the 'kilobit'. Why can data transfer not be quoted in kilobytes per second? I see no problem with that at all, rendering the kilobit useless.

I can only see that the kilobit is for advertising malarkeys that just want a big number that sounds impressive, and are too stupid to handle '1024'.

What really is the purpose of the kilobit?

to give a more impressive number...

Aye. It makes it sound like you are getting more bandwidth when you really aren't.

^Basically.

It's the same thing with hard drives. Hard drive manufacturers measure the size of their hard drives using the 1000byte standard, instead of the 1024byte standard, meaning your hard drive looks larger than it really is. That explains why your 40GB hard drive shows up as ~32GB, etc.

aye! i think we outta to have an pirate swarm on those doods and rip em apart for cheating us out! arr! :p

yeah i'm bored and sleep deprevated and annonyed, gotta to fill in that freaking withdrawal form this morning before class blegh

check the failure of group thread

So THATS where that missing 14 gigs is...

They should really start using the "bi" naming convention, i.e. a kilobyte is exactly 1000 bytes, but a "kibibyte" is 1024 bytes.

Technically kibi means 1024, kilo 1000. The SI conventions say kilo = 1000.

But SI was made by the French, so it can't be trusted.

But, yes, I would much rather have data transfer measured in bytes. Screw bits.

Bit-ba-po-ba-da-pop

I'd actually say that it's probably a holdover from the days of baud-listed modems (300, 1200, 9200, etc)-- for one baud is one bit. In essence, a three megabit connection is actually a 3000000 baud connection.

da da da daa daaaaa da da da deeee da da da deee da daaaaaaaaaa!