What comes after the beat. Information units

99663 08.08.2009

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First, let's try to figure out what bits and bytes are. A bit is the smallest unit of measure for the amount of information. Along with a bit, a byte is actively used. A byte is 8 bits. Let's try to visualize this in the following diagram.

I think everything is clear with this and it makes no sense to dwell in more detail. Since bits and bytes are very small values, they are mainly used with the prefixes kilo, mega and giga. You have probably heard of them since school curriculum. We have combined the generally accepted units and their abbreviations into a table.

Now let's try to determine the values ​​​​of measuring the speed of the Internet connection.

talking plain language, connection speed is the amount of information received or sent by your computer per unit of time. In this case, it is customary to consider a second as a unit of time, and a kilo or megabit as the amount of information.

So if your speed is 128 Kbps it means that your connection has a bandwidth of 128 kilobits per second or 16 kilobytes per second.

Much or little is up to you to judge. In order to more materially feel your speed, I recommend using our tests. Determine the time it takes to download a file of the size you specify at your connection speed. You can also see how large a file you can download for a certain period of time with your connection speed.

When using our tests, you need to remember and take into account that our server, on which all these tests are actually located, is far enough from your computer and, accordingly, the results can be affected by the workload of our server (on our site during peak hours, we simultaneously measure the connection speed of more than 1000 people), as well as the congestion of Internet lines.

We are constantly measuring something - time, length, speed, mass. And for each quantity there is a unit of measurement, and often several. Meters and kilometers, kilograms and tons, seconds and hours - all this is familiar to us. But how to measure information? For information, they also came up with unit of measure and named her bit.

A bit is the smallest unit of information.

One bit contains very little information. It can only take one of two values ​​(1 or 0, yes or no, true or false). It is very inconvenient to measure information in bits - the numbers are huge. After all, they do not measure the mass of the car in grams.

For example, if we represent the volume of a flash drive in 4GB in bits, we get 34,359,738,368 bits. Imagine you came to a computer store and asked the seller to give you a flash drive with a capacity of 34,359,738,368 bits. It is unlikely that he will understand you

Therefore, in computer science and in life, bit-derived units of information are used. But they all have a remarkable property - they are powers of two with a step of 10.

So, let's take the number 2 and raise it to the zero power. We get 1 (any number to the zero power is equal to 1). This will be a byte.

There are 8 bits in one byte.

Now we raise 2 to the 10th power - we get 1024. This is kilobyte(KB).

There are 1024 bytes in one kilobyte.

If we raise 2 to the 20th power, we get megabyte(MB).

1MB = 1024KB.

Name	Symbol	Degree
byte	B	2 0
kilobyte	kB	2 10
megabyte	MB	2 20
gigabyte	GB	2 30
terabyte	TB	2 40
petabyte	PB	2 50
exabyte	EB	2 60
zettabyte	ZB	2 70
yottabyte	JB	2 80

Understanding this topic will allow you to successfully and to

As you know, the computer operates with information, but it is obvious that not in the same way as we do. How and how to measure this information? What is information? Let's figure it out! For those who need to translate bits, bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, I have made a handy "counter" that you can download at the end of the article.

Information is all that you could see, hear or read. Volumes of information are constantly growing, and every day faster and faster, so there is a problem of storing and systematizing it, so that later you can easily find something. Mankind has gone from rock records and parchment to digital storage media, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to understand information storage devices.

It has been mentioned more than once that a computer processes information with the help that it is transmitted from device to device in system unit using cables. You also already know that there are, for example, input devices (keyboard and mouse, for example), with which we can give commands to the computer, which means they also transmit some information. To do this, they connect to . We have already learned how to connect some devices. And finally, the processed information is used by us. For example, it returns to us through output devices, an example of which is the image on the monitor. We are all accustomed to information, such as letters in a book, our entries in a diary. Everything is simple here: the information is stored in the book in the form of text, and the book is on the shelf in the library. How could you have read information in a computer is stored on media. For example, HDD(we read about him) in the system unit (he is in the photo)

We can only read what is on the sticker, and even then the meaning of most of the inscriptions is not clear. However, this small piece of iron, which can be put in your pocket, can store millions of books and documents, thousands of images, audio and video recordings. In what way? The fact is that a computer is a machine, current flows through the wires, and the computer cannot perceive the same book or the world around us as we do. But it can perfectly determine whether there is a signal or not, well, or a small or large voltage, respectively. Thus, the computer can perceive information about the presence or absence of a signal as "yes" or "no" or, in digital terms, 0 or 1. Thus, we have a simple system of zero and one, which is called binary since there are only two digits. One digit (0 or 1) is called bit is the smallest unit of computer information. Her computer can store and transmit. However, this is very little, how to store, for example, words?

What is a byte. How many bits are in a byte.

You have probably heard about Morse code, where combinations of long and short signals (dots and dashes) were deciphered into words. And if we take a combination of 8 numbers, each of which can be one or zero, we get 256 combinations, which is enough to display both numbers and letters, and more than one alphabet. And these 8 bits is called a byte. In this way 8 bits in a byte. It is not necessary to keep this in mind or learn by heart, you can work on a computer without such knowledge, but you still have to evaluate the size of the information. It is difficult to measure information in bits and even bytes, because the volume of information is much larger.

What are kilobyte, megabyte and gigabyte. How to convert kilobytes to megabytes and gigabytes to megabytes.

In decimal, we use prefixes to denote a large number. For example: the prefix kilo- means that the indicated number must be multiplied by a thousand. 1 kilogram = 1000 grams. But a kilobyte is not a thousand bytes, and 2 to the power of 10, that is, 1024 bytes, which is not entirely correct. It is difficult to get used to it at first, there is even such an anecdote:

What is the difference between a programmer and an ordinary person?

- A programmer thinks that a kilogram of sausage is 1024 grams, and an ordinary person thinks that a kilobyte is 1000 bytes.

The prefix mega suggests a million, but megabyte is again 1024 kilobytes or 1048576 bytes. As you can see, a megabyte is larger than a kilobyte. A gigabyte is 1024 megabytes= 1048576 kilobytes = 1073741824 bytes. A terabyte is 1024 gigabytes respectively.

Name	Designation	How much would be in decimal	In binary
				1
Kilobyte				1024
Megabyte		10 6 = 1 000 000		1 048 576
gigabyte		10 9 = 1 000 000 000		1 073 741 824
Terabyte		10 12 = 1 000 000 000 000		1 099 511 627 776
Petabyte				1 125 899 906 842 624

Here are the most common units for measuring the amount of information. To convert kilobytes to megabytes, you need to divide them by 1024, and in order to convert gigabytes to megabytes you need to multiply them by 1024. It was proposed to eliminate confusion by using “bi” for binary prefixes, but kibibyte and mebibyte do not sound very pleasant and unusual, so they have not yet taken root.

In order to understand what will be the thing familiar to us in in electronic format(in terms of volume), I will give approximate numbers:

• The content of the printed sheet A4 - 100 kilobytes

• 1.5 hours of film in low (for modern standards) quality - 1.5 gigabytes. In high it can be 40 gigabytes.

• Medium quality photo - 1-1.5 megabytes

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If you are interested in how many megabytes are in one gigabyte, see the table below. Next, we will discuss how these units of measurement are formed, and on what basis it is necessary to translate the conversion.

Information is data in various forms that can be perceived by people or special devices as a reflection of the material world that occurs in the process of communication. For many, it will be strange that information can be measured. Indeed, this is how we will try to figure out how bits differ from bytes and what is generally what.

The first thing to say is that for the most part people use the decimal system, which has been familiar since school. But in the case of information, a binary system will be used, which is represented as 0 and 1. Most often, this mechanism is used precisely in working with computer technology, as a rule, we are talking about the volume of hard drives or random access memory.

Why is the actual and advertised capacity of hard drives different?

Many hard drive manufacturers often use this confusion. The declared capacity of the hard drive that the user purchased is, say, 500 gigabytes. But in fact, when it has already been installed and prepared for work, it turns out that its total volume fluctuates in the range of 450-460 gigabytes.

And the trick is that, as mentioned at the beginning of the article, the amount of RAM, like all its other types, uses a binary calculation system. And manufacturers use decimal. This gives them the opportunity to allegedly "increase" the memory, somewhere by 10 percent. Although in fact, buyers are simply misled.

Let's talk about number systems

The smallest unit of information will be a bit, which is the amount of information contained in a message, halving the uncertainty of knowledge about any subject. It is followed by a byte, which is considered the main unit of measure. By the way, it should be noted here that the speed of information transfer is measured in bits. We are talking about kilobits, megabits and so on. Many, by the way, confuse megabits and megabytes. Contrary to popular belief, these are completely different concepts and meanings. The speed will be measured exactly in bits transmitted per second, but not in bytes.

The binary system of calculation, as already mentioned above, is presented in the form of zeros and ones. A piece of information is a bit and can take the value of either zero or one and nothing else. That's what the beat will be. A byte, again, as mentioned, will consist of eight bits, if we talk specifically about the binary number system. Moreover, each will be written as 2 to a certain extent from 0 to 7. If you try to show it easier, then it will look like: 11101001.

This is a clear example of 256 combinations, which are encoded in a byte. But for users it is difficult, because they are used to seeing everything through the prism of the decimal system. So let's translate this, for which you just need to add all the powers of two where we have units. To do this, we need to take 2 to the power of 0 + 2 to the power of 3 + 2 to the power of 5 + 2 to the power of 6 + 2 to the power of 7.

Another important point is the nibble, or as it is called nibble. This is half a byte, that is, 4 bits. As a rule, any number from 0 to 15 can be encoded in it.

Mismatches in bits and bytes

As mentioned above, the information transfer rate is measured in bits. But lately the measurement is even in famous programs carried out in bytes. Although this is not entirely true, it is still possible. The translation in this case will be quite simple:

• 1 byte = 8 bits;
• 1 kilobyte = 8 kilobits;
• 1 megabyte = 8 megabits.

If the user needs to make a reverse translation, then you just need to divide the desired number by 8.

Another problem will be that the byte system itself has a number of inconsistencies that cause users problems with transfers to mega, giga, terabytes, and so on. The point here is that from the very beginning of its appearance, in order to designate units of information that are larger than bytes, terms are used that refer to the decimal system, and not to binary. For example, the prefix "tera" means multiplying by 10 to the power of 12, giga - by 10 to 9, mega - by 10 to 6, and so on.

It is for this reason that confusion arises. It would be logical to assume that 1 kilobyte is equal to 1000 bytes, but this is not so. It will have 1024 bytes.

In general, as you can see, there are certain difficulties, but if you understand them, it will quickly become clear that there is nothing difficult in this.