Mega Bits, Mega Bytes & Mega Hertz

are you good? I have some listener mail? All right? Then, this listener mail comes from Ja, and Jay says, Hey, guys, I was listening to the USB versus FireWire episode and thought of a great podcast idea. Will be the judge of that, Jay, You guys should cover the data transfer rates megabits, storage capacity gigabytes, and processor speeds giga hurts, and naturally all the other variations of those instances. I'm pretty computer savvy, and even I couldn't tell you the

differences on the fly, only that bigger is better. I'm sure lots of listeners would appreciate this info. Keep up the great work, Jay. Thanks Jay. We're calling this episode mega mega Mega short, but it's actually megabits, megabytes and mega hurts just because it was easy to do that terminology. Then it sounds more fun. Yeah, it sounds kind of like, you know, the Monster truck rallies Mega Mega Mega. So let's start off by talking about bits. Yes, I thought

that was a good place to start at the beginning. Yeah, and the start at the very beginning a very good place to start. So a bit, yes, is it is a very very tiny chunk of information. Yes, it's a binary digit. Yes, that's what bit is short for. And uh. Basically it is a one war zero or the memory space used to store that one or zero um. And you can think of it's sort of like a if

you will, a digital ad um. It's basically the smallest I mean, there are pieces that are actually technically smaller I think than a bit, but it's just like there's just like that are pieces that are smaller than an ADAM. But I think ADAM is the kind of a basic building block for information. Yes, and uh. And you can also think of them kind of as a switch as either being on or off or a or b or whatever two one, zero, one or zero. That would be one or zero. That's the on or off. And so

eight of these bits packaged together have a special name. Steve. No, that's the guy who runs Apple. Yeah, you're right, No, it's bite, B Y T E can make up a byte. So um uh. Depending on who you talked to, you can find out different reasons for why eight bits are a byte, but in general it represents the the maximum amount of information that early early computers could send at one time. Yeah, it's really the smallest amount of information

that is readable. Yeah, I mean a bit is readable, but not a bite actually says something like I might say a letter, or it could create a character exactly. Um. So that's you know, it's big enough to you know, have a range of values and you can use it for, you know, to represent different things. Okay, so eight bits equals one byte. We got that right, So let's move on. Let's say that you have a kilo byte. The prefix kilo usually means what, So a killer byte must be

a thousand bytes? Right, Um, not exactly? Shut your mouth. Yeah, I'd like to take eight seconds here, maybe a bite worth of seconds, and point out that this is not very metric. If you're looking for nice even tens, you're not going to get it here. It's because the entire world of computer Uh, information really is based off of a concept of twos, as in zero and one, So you've got, you know, this whole binary mindset, same sort

of thing here. Um, the kilobyte actually represents two to the tenth power number of bites, which does not equal one thousand. It equals one thousand. But because one twenty four is awfully close to a thousand, computer engineer said, hey, why don't we just call it killo. That's that's what this number of bites represents. A kilo bite. It's thousand, twenty four bytes, because that makes sense because computer engineers are sadists. You know, there are other people who don't

agree with that. Should I take this opportunity to my verbal sidebar? They call them kimi bytes k i b I bites instead of kilo bites because kilo is misleading. Yes, I had not heard of the kimbi byte faction. Yes they're there. It goes all the way up. Do they does bytes and and gimby bytes? And yes, I I'm

having trouble processing this information. Perhaps you need a faster processor. Okay, So, uh so kilobyte is one thousand, twenty four bytes, so a megabyte would be one thousand, twenty four kilobytes technically one million, forty thousand, six bites. Oh wow, awesome, yes, uh so how many bits would that be? Did you work that out? Ha? Ha, eight million, three thousand, six

hundred eight bits. Suck it, pillette. Um. So yeah, So you remember if you have if you have anything that's in byte form, you have to multiply it by eight in order to find out how many bits there are that will become important in a little bit, so a little bit, a little bit, so a gigabyte, gigabyte would be one thousand, twenty four megabytes or I don't even know. I'm not even gonna go there. I was gonna try and say how many bites it is? But it's a lot.

It's a lot of bytes. Um and uh it's over a billion obviously because it would have to be since you're talking about thousand, twenty four times a thousand, twenty four times a thousand. So that's where the you know, if you're talking about bites, that's that's the numbers were chatting about. That. It gets really confusing if you're talking about I have a hundred twenty megabyte hard drive, Uh,

does that mean it has a hundred twenty million bites. No, it doesn't because you have to multiply that thousand twenty four in there. Plus hard drives are never exactly the same size as as advertised on the right. That's also another element is that you know you'll you'll get a capacity that's listed on the box, but in reality there's, uh, you're never gonna have that exact amount of space available. You could not actually pack as many bites into it

as it says you can. Yeah. I love it when you open the box that says gigabyte hard drive and you put you know, attached at your computer and says, yes, it's four gigabytes. You're okay, where's my other four gigs? I want back? I guess that must have fallen out in the box and shipping or something. I don't know. It's a hole in the hard drive and they escaped are leaking out. Damn it. Ah, there goes that screenplay.

So so that's going over to two megabits as in as in, uh, what you had a little more about bites, I had a little bit more for a lot bit more if you will, yes, um, you know actually you go past gigabytes, yes, that's true. Yes, you can go further just because it's it's cool and and you never hear about it. But it's the kind of thing that you will hear about because hard drive is nothing. Now

you can get a terabyte hard drive for a reasonable price. Now, Producer Tyler was just talking about that's the only kind of drive he'll he'll buy because you know, screw those smaller drives. Um, he's snorting at us right now, he's gonna spit in our in our audio. Now you sound like chipmunks. Um, totally from you. Okay, So, so terabyte is next bite or tippy bite if you will. Um,

it's the next step up from from gigabytes. But you know, this is where they start to become vague because people just don't talk about these petta bytes or pivvy bites. And then you lost YadA bites YadA, that's right, YadA, YadA, YadA yea y O t t A bites. And if you really want to know, YadA bites are two to the power bits or one million trillion megabytes, which is in my terms a lot. My wife picks on me because she asked me what kind of dog we just

saw it? And go, yeah, it's medium. Right, so you know in my in my terms, that is a lot. That's a lot of bites. Okay, So that's that's what I have for bites. That covers the bites. So when we're talking about bites, we're really talking about you know, either storage space or file size, that kind of thing. We're talking about space. So the final frontier, if we're talking about megabits or even gigabits or whatever, you're talking

more about transfer speed, data transfer speed. Yes, so uh like, uh, let's say that you have an Internet connection and it's a five megabit per second connection. Okay, so that means you can get in one second you can transfer five megabits worth of information. Now this is megabits, not megabytes. It's a thousand four bits. No, no, no megabits, it's

five megabits. Would be five million bits, five million, yes, I can't believe I had that so terribly terribly kill a five kill a bits would be five thousand, Okay, but you don't do the twenty four that thousand, twenty four. You're not talking about bytes, you're just talking about bits. So now the mega means what it normally means. I

was trying to go metric there. That's the thing is that it gets confusing because megabyte megabyte you have to multiply the one thousand, twenty four times the kilobytes are you know, but megabit is totally different. So five million that means you could do five million bits in a second um And then you start to think, okay, well what does this mean in practical terms? Like if I wanted to download a large file, how long would it take me using that speed? And of course we're just

using five megabits as an example. That's not too uncommon, I guess, and cable connections, connections. But assuming that you are getting the advertised download speed, which very much like hard drive capacity, is very rarely what they claim it to be. But let's say you're getting a five megabits down connection, so you're able to download it five megabits per second. Uh, And let's say that you want to

download a file that's a hundred and twenty megabytes in size. Now, how would you figure out how long that's gonna take you to download? Besides the fact of just sitting download and watching, because that's how I do it. Yeah, that's how any normal six seven minutes. What is it going up? Moving on, let me get this back under control, pie um. So you multiply that by the radius that they bandwidth, Yes, exactly,

so a hundred twenty megabytes. First you have to figure out, all right, well, how many bytes is a hundred twenty megabytes? So remember a megabyte is one million, forty eight thousand, five d six bites. So you multiply that by a hundred and twenty and you come up with a hundred five million, eight hundred nine thousand, one twenty bytes. Now you need to figure out how many bits that is?

So how many bits to a bite? Eight? That means you have to multiply a hundred million, hundred twenty nine thousand, one d twenty bytes times eight, which comes out to one billion, six million, six thirty two thousand, nine hundred sixty bits. Okay, so you have a five megabit per second connection. That means you download at five million bits

per second. So you divide the one billion, six million, six hundred nine hundred sixty bits by five million, and you come up with two hundred and one point three. With some other numbers that I dropped off, that's how many seconds it takes to download a hundred twenty megabyte file with a five megabit per second connection two hundred and one seconds or three point three six minutes, so just under three and a half minutes. Your mileage may vary.

Some restrictions apply, but that's if you ever wanted to figure it out. That's how you do it. Now, if it's a gigabyte, well that just means you gotta multiply by bigger numbers. Gonna need a bigger calculator. Yeah, So remember megabytes, we're talking about file sizes, hard drive space. We're talking about space, megabits, we're talking about speeds. So mega hurts it's speed, but of a different variety. Yep. And again mega hurts that's just the term we picked.

But I mean, processors now are out in the giga hurts range, so we're really mega hurts. Were is a throwback to old school? Really at this point, well depends on what you're talking about, right, I guess it does. Yeah, because there are some processors and you know, all kinds of things. Actually, there are processors in virtually everything, that's true, and some of them don't require giga hurts. And you're in your average computer that you would purchase today we're

talking about giga hurts easily. So now we're talking about cycles, all right, so cc yes, clock cycles, clock ticks or clock cycles. Now, this can be a little tricky to get your mind around if you're if you're not familiar with the way computers work. But the cycle is a very is the basic unit of computational time, all right, And it's uh essentially how much time it takes to perform a single instruction. And you can have multiple cycles

per second. Um, so it's really you're telling. It's telling about how long it takes you to do a certain task to perform a very basic instruction. Um, it doesn't and so it's variable. A cycle is not like you can't say a cycle is one one thousandth of a second or something like that, because depending on the speed of your of your processor, you can fit in more in the same amount of time. So it's a variable time things. You can also fool your computer into more,

you can over clock, but we'll get into that. So we're talking about hurts. Hurts is the cycle per second, So one hurts would be one cycle per second, which would be a monumentally slow computer. Um. If you're talking about mega hurts. You're talking about millions of cycles per second. So your your process is able to perform um millions of sets of instructions per second that passes um. Some commands requires several cycles to complete. It's not necessarily a

one it's not one command per cycle. That's not the way it necessarily breaks out. But in general, the more mega hurts or giga hurts, your processor has, the more information that can it can process within a second. Now that's only half of the equation. Because if you're computer processor is able to to uh handle all these instructions, that's great, but it also has to pull data to perform instructions upon. Now, in that case, it needs to have a pretty wide uh essentially like a data avenue.

It's gonna be able to pull on as enough data. Because the way I think of it is that imagine that you are capable of, say wrapping a box. Um, you could you could do maybe five a minute. Let's say, all right, so you're standing at a conveyor Seriously, it's a little little box. Are you doing this twisting a

little thing? You can do five a minute, but the conveyor belt that you're working on is only spitting out boxes like, you know, one a minute, so you're able to do five a minute, but you're only getting one box, so you're you're you've got all this power that's going to waste. The same thing would happen if you had a processor that had a monumentally high giga hurts capacity, but you didn't have a very wide avenue for data

to get in. Uh, it would have be able to perform lots and lots of instructions, but it wouldn't have enough information to really be a great processor. So you've got to have that second half in there, which is really going back to the whole megabits gigabits thing. How much data can you pull through transfer into the processor so that you can run these instructions that that it's capable of doing. So when we're talking about the mega hurts or giga hurts or whatever, we're talking about the

speed at which you're microprocessor can perform calculations. And the microprocessor could be a CPU, it could be a graphics processing unit. There are a lot of different things, and of course it doesn't even have to be in a computer, as you were pointing out, true, true, And then there's another measurement of computing power that I just thought of, and I looked up to make sure I could actually talk about it. FLOPSY, which is short for floating point operations,

also describes some actors. I know, yes, that's true, that's true, but you would explain the flop sweat um. But it was a floating point operation, a floating point operations basically a mathematical calculation and operation UM that that a processor can run. And you know, you hear people talk in this it's they're using the same the same prefixes mega, giga, terra, peter, And basically a mega flop is, according to what is dot com, a million floating point operations per second UM.

So that's you know, a fair number of of operations, certainly more than I can do per second. It's definitely tiny compared to what you see supercomputers capable of doing, since those are all on the pida or higher range UM. We're talking about operations, you know, really complex operations that are designed for things like like cerns large Hadron Collider if it ever goes online, it's going to need those kind of computers to to process the data that comes

out of those experiments. Yeah, because those can turn out quite a bit of information in a very short time, right, but if you need it to you know, you don't need necessarily a computer that has that capability if you want to run Doom, because I can run Doom on my Android phone, I'm pretty sure it doesn't have the pedophal up, not at all. Well, uh, I think that's a good roundup of bits, bites, hurts. I mean I hurt my all my bits and bites are hurting right now.

So yeah, hopefully that clears that up or anyone who was unfamiliar with those terms or in a well, there there were points where I mean I fall victim to it all the time when I'm thinking, oh, five megabits for a second, that means it's gonna take me blah blah blah to download this file. And then I remember, ah, wait, no, that's bits, not bites. And you know, you have you have a whole you have to I forget the multiply

by eight um. And then of course, if you forget the whole one thousand four thing, that means that you're not really thinking accurately about the size of a file, and it just gets really kind of complicated. If you are not of the computer science world, and since I'm of the liberal arts arts world, Yeah, I get confused pretty quickly. But uh, I guess does that do you have anything to add? Well, then I suppose that brings us to a listener mail, And this listener mail comes

from Josh. Hey, guys, I was just wondering if Lennox has a vulnerability to viruses. I know that one of the reasons Mac is mostly virus free is because there is a much smaller population relatively speaking of Mac os users. Does this mean that Linux users also do not need to fear viral attacks from a oil listener Josh, Josh, Uh, yeah, we're telling you about the whole security through obscurity concept

here about. You know, if you're if not a lot of people are using it, then there's not a big target and therefore there it's not worth writing any uh, any kind of mount malicious software for people who use that just because you're not gonna hit that many people. Uh No, No, Linux is not automatically immune to viruses. Um. In fact, the day that we're recording this podcast, there was a critical vulnerability found in the Linux kernel dating

back several years, which has since been patched. But the uh, you know, that's the thing is that any kind of software, there are chances for her abilities to exist, and if a vulnerability exists, you can bet someone out there is trying to figure out a way to exploit it. UM. Now, does this mean that Linux users are likely to encounter a virus? Probably not, But that doesn't mean that they can just assume that they are, you know, untouchable. Yeah,

it's um. UM. I booted up my Linux system yesterday and it was offering me some patches for critical updates. UM. So you can bet that the Linux community is already on top of it. Um. You know, as soon as they figure out that there's something going on. UM. The thing is, you know, security through obscurity. There are so many fewer people using the Linux operating system than there are Windows that you know people are. It's sort of

like other criminals. I mean basically, Uh, somebody who's looking to mug somebody for their wallet isn't gonna hang out, you know, in a place where no one is. They're not gonna hang out in the middle of a pasture because you know, unless they want to. Good cow. So this explains why my misspent youth wasn't that misspent exactly? They're hanging out in the pasture waiting for somebody to combined around. There are a lot of cows who want to have some words with me. Yeah, okay, you actually

that's not true. I grew up in chicken country. Anyway, this is great, Um, but yeah, I mean it's it's a case of I mean, just because you use you know, any particular operating system or other programs. I mean there there have been some things going on for Adobe Acrobat in the not too distant past, um where or you know, some of the web browsers, and those things are cross

platform vulnerabilities. UM. So you know, you just need to make sure that you keep everything patched up and and you know, an eye on what's going on, just to make sure that you are, um, you know, keeping yourself safe. And it's always good to practice uh safe interneting skills. You're watching where you're getting, watching with which links you click on and uh you and keeping an eye out for fishing. You know, fishing doesn't require an operating system,

that's true, um, and that is certainly a vulnerability. So well, thanks a lot for writing in, Josh, Hope that answered your question. If any of you have any questions you'd like to ask us, you can write us our email addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com. And of course we've got tons of articles on the site all about computers and processing and all that sort of fun stuff that's at how stuff works dot com. Crispy and I will talk to you again really soon for

moralness and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com And be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on the how stuff Works homepage, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you