Gadgetory


All Cool Mind-blowing Gadgets You Love in One Place

Bits vs Bytes as Fast As Possible

2013-05-22
bits and bytes absolutely ghoulish oh my god this is Kathy no but seriously bits and bytes are the units to measure computer data it is the smallest form of data and it's basically like an on-off switch it can be either a 0 or a 1 but that's it even basic information like a letter of the alphabet cannot be expressed as a bit in spite of the name alphabet you'll need a byte which is a series of 8 bits in order to express even something as simple as a character of text you can think of it as 8 on or off switches which can be configured in any number of different combinations to represent different values often a letter of the alphabet or another character for example this is TQ for tech quickie represented in 16 bits or 2 bytes and this is a smiley face represented in 16 bits or 2 bytes but you're a sophisticated guy you might need to store data that's more complicated than a single letter of the alphabet and the simple answer is you're going to need more bytes by the way these taste awful for example even a text document that contains only 3 characters would need more than one byte of data to represent it that is why we have prefixes like kilo mega and Giga to refer to much larger file sizes I mean otherwise in casual conversation we'd have to say things like oh hey man how BIG's that song around three million five hundred and twenty one thousand three hundred and sixty two bytes or you could just say three and a half Meg's so when do you use bits and when do you use bytes the general rule that I use is bits for interface speed bytes for data storage so here's an example your internet service provider has a plan for you that's a hundred megabit per second and you have a file that's a hundred megabytes don't get confused you're not going to be able to download a 100 megabyte file size in one second with that plan it'll actually take more like about eight seconds because 100 megabit is around twelve point five megabytes where it gets really confusing ah sometimes they represent speeds and bytes too like when you transfer files on your computer from one folder to another one so the best way to keep from getting confused is to follow a couple of simple rules number one rule is the big B anytime it's denoted is four bytes the bigger unit and a small B is four bits which is the smaller unit big letter big unit small letter small unit and rule number two is you can use this simple and approximate very approximate not correct conversion where you take a number that you read in bits and you divide it by 10 to get bytes for example that internet service provider that advertises a hundred megabit per second in theory 12.5 megabytes not going to happen in the real world due to network protocol inefficiencies or any other snafus that might occur in the advertised speed so it'll probably be more like 10 megabytes per second even if your service provider is being honest about their speeds speaking of reading this video is brought to you by audible.com I've heard well and experienced that you can download e-books from the megabits actually no I'm just kidding you can actually download books from the internet you can listen to them whether it's on your smartphone on your couch and your car while you're commuting or whatever else the case may be you can even get a free ebook by visiting audible.com slash tech quickie where you can download pretty much anything you want I meant to read this book and instead what I ended up doing is picking up the e-book because even though it'll take about twice as long to listen to this book as it will to read it I don't have the time to sit down and dedicate to reading it whereas I can listen to it while I'm doing other things the other cool thing about this one is the fact that the audible ebook is read by Jim Collins himself which means he added a little bit of insight and tailored the experience to the listening version as opposed to the reading version which was very very cool now I'd like to change things up a little bit for my next ebook and I'd love for you guys to check out the audible bestsellers list and leave your suggestions in the comments in this video I would like to try something that is entertaining as opposed to business oriented I'd like to try something that was read by someone other than the author so that I can have that experience as well and as always guys don't forget to like this video share this video if you enjoyed it and don't forget to subscribe
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.