Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello everybody,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Poulette
Speaker 1: and I'm an editor here at how stuff works dot Com,
Speaker 1: sitting in crusted me as usual as senior writer Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: Hey there, Crispy, How are you? I'm fine? Thanks, How
Speaker 1: are you good? I have some listener mail? All right? Then,
Speaker 1: this listener mail comes from Ja, and Jay says, Hey, guys,
Speaker 1: I was listening to the USB versus FireWire episode and
Speaker 1: thought of a great podcast idea. Will be the judge
Speaker 1: of that, Jay, You guys should cover the data transfer
Speaker 1: rates megabits, storage capacity gigabytes, and processor speeds giga hurts,
Speaker 1: and naturally all the other variations of those instances. I'm
Speaker 1: pretty computer savvy, and even I couldn't tell you the
Speaker 1: differences on the fly, only that bigger is better. I'm
Speaker 1: sure lots of listeners would appreciate this info. Keep up
Speaker 1: the great work, Jay. Thanks Jay. We're calling this episode
Speaker 1: mega mega Mega short, but it's actually megabits, megabytes and
Speaker 1: mega hurts just because it was easy to do that terminology.
Speaker 1: Then it sounds more fun. Yeah, it sounds kind of like,
Speaker 1: you know, the Monster truck rallies Mega Mega Mega. So
Speaker 1: let's start off by talking about bits. Yes, I thought
Speaker 1: that was a good place to start at the beginning. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the start at the very beginning a very good
Speaker 1: place to start. So a bit, yes, is it is
Speaker 1: a very very tiny chunk of information. Yes, it's a
Speaker 1: binary digit. Yes, that's what bit is short for. And uh.
Speaker 1: Basically it is a one war zero or the memory
Speaker 1: space used to store that one or zero um. And
Speaker 1: you can think of it's sort of like a if
Speaker 1: you will, a digital ad um. It's basically the smallest
Speaker 1: I mean, there are pieces that are actually technically smaller
Speaker 1: I think than a bit, but it's just like there's
Speaker 1: just like that are pieces that are smaller than an ADAM.
Speaker 1: But I think ADAM is the kind of a basic
Speaker 1: building block for information. Yes, and uh. And you can
Speaker 1: also think of them kind of as a switch as
Speaker 1: either being on or off or a or b or
Speaker 1: whatever two one, zero, one or zero. That would be
Speaker 1: one or zero. That's the on or off. And so
Speaker 1: eight of these bits packaged together have a special name. Steve. No,
Speaker 1: that's the guy who runs Apple. Yeah, you're right, No,
Speaker 1: it's bite, B Y T E can make up a byte.
Speaker 1: So um uh. Depending on who you talked to, you
Speaker 1: can find out different reasons for why eight bits are
Speaker 1: a byte, but in general it represents the the maximum
Speaker 1: amount of information that early early computers could send at
Speaker 1: one time. Yeah, it's really the smallest amount of information
Speaker 1: that is readable. Yeah, I mean a bit is readable,
Speaker 1: but not a bite actually says something like I might
Speaker 1: say a letter, or it could create a character exactly. Um.
Speaker 1: So that's you know, it's big enough to you know,
Speaker 1: have a range of values and you can use it for,
Speaker 1: you know, to represent different things. Okay, so eight bits
Speaker 1: equals one byte. We got that right, So let's move on.
Speaker 1: Let's say that you have a kilo byte. The prefix
Speaker 1: kilo usually means what, So a killer byte must be
Speaker 1: a thousand bytes? Right, Um, not exactly? Shut your mouth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'd like to take eight seconds here, maybe a bite
Speaker 1: worth of seconds, and point out that this is not
Speaker 1: very metric. If you're looking for nice even tens, you're
Speaker 1: not going to get it here. It's because the entire
Speaker 1: world of computer Uh, information really is based off of
Speaker 1: a concept of twos, as in zero and one, So
Speaker 1: you've got, you know, this whole binary mindset, same sort
Speaker 1: of thing here. Um, the kilobyte actually represents two to
Speaker 1: the tenth power number of bites, which does not equal
Speaker 1: one thousand. It equals one thousand. But because one twenty
Speaker 1: four is awfully close to a thousand, computer engineer said, hey,
Speaker 1: why don't we just call it killo. That's that's what
Speaker 1: this number of bites represents. A kilo bite. It's thousand,
Speaker 1: twenty four bytes, because that makes sense because computer engineers
Speaker 1: are sadists. You know, there are other people who don't
Speaker 1: agree with that. Should I take this opportunity to my
Speaker 1: verbal sidebar? They call them kimi bytes k i b
Speaker 1: I bites instead of kilo bites because kilo is misleading. Yes,
Speaker 1: I had not heard of the kimbi byte faction. Yes
Speaker 1: they're there. It goes all the way up. Do they
Speaker 1: does bytes and and gimby bytes? And yes, I I'm
Speaker 1: having trouble processing this information. Perhaps you need a faster processor. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: uh so kilobyte is one thousand, twenty four bytes, so
Speaker 1: a megabyte would be one thousand, twenty four kilobytes technically
Speaker 1: one million, forty thousand, six bites. Oh wow, awesome, yes,
Speaker 1: uh so how many bits would that be? Did you
Speaker 1: work that out? Ha? Ha, eight million, three thousand, six
Speaker 1: hundred eight bits. Suck it, pillette. Um. So yeah, So
Speaker 1: you remember if you have if you have anything that's
Speaker 1: in byte form, you have to multiply it by eight
Speaker 1: in order to find out how many bits there are
Speaker 1: that will become important in a little bit, so a
Speaker 1: little bit, a little bit, so a gigabyte, gigabyte would
Speaker 1: be one thousand, twenty four megabytes or I don't even know.
Speaker 1: I'm not even gonna go there. I was gonna try
Speaker 1: and say how many bites it is? But it's a lot.
Speaker 1: It's a lot of bytes. Um and uh it's over
Speaker 1: a billion obviously because it would have to be since
Speaker 1: you're talking about thousand, twenty four times a thousand, twenty
Speaker 1: four times a thousand. So that's where the you know,
Speaker 1: if you're talking about bites, that's that's the numbers were
Speaker 1: chatting about. That. It gets really confusing if you're talking
Speaker 1: about I have a hundred twenty megabyte hard drive, Uh,
Speaker 1: does that mean it has a hundred twenty million bites. No,
Speaker 1: it doesn't because you have to multiply that thousand twenty
Speaker 1: four in there. Plus hard drives are never exactly the
Speaker 1: same size as as advertised on the right. That's also
Speaker 1: another element is that you know you'll you'll get a
Speaker 1: capacity that's listed on the box, but in reality there's, uh,
Speaker 1: you're never gonna have that exact amount of space available.
Speaker 1: You could not actually pack as many bites into it
Speaker 1: as it says you can. Yeah. I love it when
Speaker 1: you open the box that says gigabyte hard drive and
Speaker 1: you put you know, attached at your computer and says, yes,
Speaker 1: it's four gigabytes. You're okay, where's my other four gigs?
Speaker 1: I want back? I guess that must have fallen out
Speaker 1: in the box and shipping or something. I don't know.
Speaker 1: It's a hole in the hard drive and they escaped
Speaker 1: are leaking out. Damn it. Ah, there goes that screenplay.
Speaker 1: So so that's going over to two megabits as in
Speaker 1: as in, uh, what you had a little more about bites,
Speaker 1: I had a little bit more for a lot bit
Speaker 1: more if you will, yes, um, you know actually you
Speaker 1: go past gigabytes, yes, that's true. Yes, you can go
Speaker 1: further just because it's it's cool and and you never
Speaker 1: hear about it. But it's the kind of thing that
Speaker 1: you will hear about because hard drive is nothing. Now
Speaker 1: you can get a terabyte hard drive for a reasonable price. Now,
Speaker 1: Producer Tyler was just talking about that's the only kind
Speaker 1: of drive he'll he'll buy because you know, screw those
Speaker 1: smaller drives. Um, he's snorting at us right now, he's
Speaker 1: gonna spit in our in our audio. Now you sound
Speaker 1: like chipmunks. Um, totally from you. Okay, So, so terabyte
Speaker 1: is next bite or tippy bite if you will. Um,
Speaker 1: it's the next step up from from gigabytes. But you know,
Speaker 1: this is where they start to become vague because people
Speaker 1: just don't talk about these petta bytes or pivvy bites.
Speaker 1: And then you lost YadA bites YadA, that's right, YadA, YadA,
Speaker 1: YadA yea y O t t A bites. And if
Speaker 1: you really want to know, YadA bites are two to
Speaker 1: the power bits or one million trillion megabytes, which is
Speaker 1: in my terms a lot. My wife picks on me
Speaker 1: because she asked me what kind of dog we just
Speaker 1: saw it? And go, yeah, it's medium. Right, so you
Speaker 1: know in my in my terms, that is a lot.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of bites. Okay, So that's that's what
Speaker 1: I have for bites. That covers the bites. So when
Speaker 1: we're talking about bites, we're really talking about you know,
Speaker 1: either storage space or file size, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: We're talking about space. So the final frontier, if we're
Speaker 1: talking about megabits or even gigabits or whatever, you're talking
Speaker 1: more about transfer speed, data transfer speed. Yes, so uh like, uh,
Speaker 1: let's say that you have an Internet connection and it's
Speaker 1: a five megabit per second connection. Okay, so that means
Speaker 1: you can get in one second you can transfer five
Speaker 1: megabits worth of information. Now this is megabits, not megabytes.
Speaker 1: It's a thousand four bits. No, no, no megabits, it's
Speaker 1: five megabits. Would be five million bits, five million, yes,
Speaker 1: I can't believe I had that so terribly terribly kill
Speaker 1: a five kill a bits would be five thousand, Okay,
Speaker 1: but you don't do the twenty four that thousand, twenty four.
Speaker 1: You're not talking about bytes, you're just talking about bits.
Speaker 1: So now the mega means what it normally means. I
Speaker 1: was trying to go metric there. That's the thing is
Speaker 1: that it gets confusing because megabyte megabyte you have to
Speaker 1: multiply the one thousand, twenty four times the kilobytes are
Speaker 1: you know, but megabit is totally different. So five million
Speaker 1: that means you could do five million bits in a
Speaker 1: second um And then you start to think, okay, well
Speaker 1: what does this mean in practical terms? Like if I
Speaker 1: wanted to download a large file, how long would it
Speaker 1: take me using that speed? And of course we're just
Speaker 1: using five megabits as an example. That's not too uncommon,
Speaker 1: I guess, and cable connections, connections. But assuming that you
Speaker 1: are getting the advertised download speed, which very much like
Speaker 1: hard drive capacity, is very rarely what they claim it
Speaker 1: to be. But let's say you're getting a five megabits
Speaker 1: down connection, so you're able to download it five megabits
Speaker 1: per second. Uh, And let's say that you want to
Speaker 1: download a file that's a hundred and twenty megabytes in size. Now,
Speaker 1: how would you figure out how long that's gonna take
Speaker 1: you to download? Besides the fact of just sitting download
Speaker 1: and watching, because that's how I do it. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: how any normal six seven minutes. What is it going up?
Speaker 1: Moving on, let me get this back under control, pie um.
Speaker 1: So you multiply that by the radius that they bandwidth, Yes, exactly,
Speaker 1: so a hundred twenty megabytes. First you have to figure out,
Speaker 1: all right, well, how many bytes is a hundred twenty megabytes?
Speaker 1: So remember a megabyte is one million, forty eight thousand,
Speaker 1: five d six bites. So you multiply that by a
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty and you come up with a hundred
Speaker 1: five million, eight hundred nine thousand, one twenty bytes. Now
Speaker 1: you need to figure out how many bits that is?
Speaker 1: So how many bits to a bite? Eight? That means
Speaker 1: you have to multiply a hundred million, hundred twenty nine thousand,
Speaker 1: one d twenty bytes times eight, which comes out to
Speaker 1: one billion, six million, six thirty two thousand, nine hundred
Speaker 1: sixty bits. Okay, so you have a five megabit per
Speaker 1: second connection. That means you download at five million bits
Speaker 1: per second. So you divide the one billion, six million,
Speaker 1: six hundred nine hundred sixty bits by five million, and
Speaker 1: you come up with two hundred and one point three.
Speaker 1: With some other numbers that I dropped off, that's how
Speaker 1: many seconds it takes to download a hundred twenty megabyte
Speaker 1: file with a five megabit per second connection two hundred
Speaker 1: and one seconds or three point three six minutes, so
Speaker 1: just under three and a half minutes. Your mileage may vary.
Speaker 1: Some restrictions apply, but that's if you ever wanted to
Speaker 1: figure it out. That's how you do it. Now, if
Speaker 1: it's a gigabyte, well that just means you gotta multiply
Speaker 1: by bigger numbers. Gonna need a bigger calculator. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: remember megabytes, we're talking about file sizes, hard drive space.
Speaker 1: We're talking about space, megabits, we're talking about speeds. So
Speaker 1: mega hurts it's speed, but of a different variety. Yep.
Speaker 1: And again mega hurts that's just the term we picked.
Speaker 1: But I mean, processors now are out in the giga
Speaker 1: hurts range, so we're really mega hurts. Were is a
Speaker 1: throwback to old school? Really at this point, well depends
Speaker 1: on what you're talking about, right, I guess it does. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because there are some processors and you know, all kinds
Speaker 1: of things. Actually, there are processors in virtually everything, that's true,
Speaker 1: and some of them don't require giga hurts. And you're
Speaker 1: in your average computer that you would purchase today we're
Speaker 1: talking about giga hurts easily. So now we're talking about cycles,
Speaker 1: all right, so cc yes, clock cycles, clock ticks or
Speaker 1: clock cycles. Now, this can be a little tricky to
Speaker 1: get your mind around if you're if you're not familiar
Speaker 1: with the way computers work. But the cycle is a
Speaker 1: very is the basic unit of computational time, all right,
Speaker 1: And it's uh essentially how much time it takes to
Speaker 1: perform a single instruction. And you can have multiple cycles
Speaker 1: per second. Um, so it's really you're telling. It's telling
Speaker 1: about how long it takes you to do a certain
Speaker 1: task to perform a very basic instruction. Um, it doesn't
Speaker 1: and so it's variable. A cycle is not like you
Speaker 1: can't say a cycle is one one thousandth of a
Speaker 1: second or something like that, because depending on the speed
Speaker 1: of your of your processor, you can fit in more
Speaker 1: in the same amount of time. So it's a variable
Speaker 1: time things. You can also fool your computer into more,
Speaker 1: you can over clock, but we'll get into that. So
Speaker 1: we're talking about hurts. Hurts is the cycle per second,
Speaker 1: So one hurts would be one cycle per second, which
Speaker 1: would be a monumentally slow computer. Um. If you're talking
Speaker 1: about mega hurts. You're talking about millions of cycles per second.
Speaker 1: So your your process is able to perform um millions
Speaker 1: of sets of instructions per second that passes um. Some
Speaker 1: commands requires several cycles to complete. It's not necessarily a
Speaker 1: one it's not one command per cycle. That's not the
Speaker 1: way it necessarily breaks out. But in general, the more
Speaker 1: mega hurts or giga hurts, your processor has, the more
Speaker 1: information that can it can process within a second. Now
Speaker 1: that's only half of the equation. Because if you're computer
Speaker 1: processor is able to to uh handle all these instructions,
Speaker 1: that's great, but it also has to pull data to
Speaker 1: perform instructions upon. Now, in that case, it needs to
Speaker 1: have a pretty wide uh essentially like a data avenue.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be able to pull on as enough data.
Speaker 1: Because the way I think of it is that imagine
Speaker 1: that you are capable of, say wrapping a box. Um,
Speaker 1: you could you could do maybe five a minute. Let's say,
Speaker 1: all right, so you're standing at a conveyor Seriously, it's
Speaker 1: a little little box. Are you doing this twisting a
Speaker 1: little thing? You can do five a minute, but the
Speaker 1: conveyor belt that you're working on is only spitting out
Speaker 1: boxes like, you know, one a minute, so you're able
Speaker 1: to do five a minute, but you're only getting one box,
Speaker 1: so you're you're you've got all this power that's going
Speaker 1: to waste. The same thing would happen if you had
Speaker 1: a processor that had a monumentally high giga hurts capacity,
Speaker 1: but you didn't have a very wide avenue for data
Speaker 1: to get in. Uh, it would have be able to
Speaker 1: perform lots and lots of instructions, but it wouldn't have
Speaker 1: enough information to really be a great processor. So you've
Speaker 1: got to have that second half in there, which is
Speaker 1: really going back to the whole megabits gigabits thing. How
Speaker 1: much data can you pull through transfer into the processor
Speaker 1: so that you can run these instructions that that it's
Speaker 1: capable of doing. So when we're talking about the mega
Speaker 1: hurts or giga hurts or whatever, we're talking about the
Speaker 1: speed at which you're microprocessor can perform calculations. And the
Speaker 1: microprocessor could be a CPU, it could be a graphics
Speaker 1: processing unit. There are a lot of different things, and
Speaker 1: of course it doesn't even have to be in a computer,
Speaker 1: as you were pointing out, true, true, And then there's
Speaker 1: another measurement of computing power that I just thought of,
Speaker 1: and I looked up to make sure I could actually
Speaker 1: talk about it. FLOPSY, which is short for floating point operations,
Speaker 1: also describes some actors. I know, yes, that's true, that's true,
Speaker 1: but you would explain the flop sweat um. But it
Speaker 1: was a floating point operation, a floating point operations basically
Speaker 1: a mathematical calculation and operation UM that that a processor
Speaker 1: can run. And you know, you hear people talk in
Speaker 1: this it's they're using the same the same prefixes mega, giga, terra, peter,
Speaker 1: And basically a mega flop is, according to what is
Speaker 1: dot com, a million floating point operations per second UM.
Speaker 1: So that's you know, a fair number of of operations,
Speaker 1: certainly more than I can do per second. It's definitely
Speaker 1: tiny compared to what you see supercomputers capable of doing,
Speaker 1: since those are all on the pida or higher range UM.
Speaker 1: We're talking about operations, you know, really complex operations that
Speaker 1: are designed for things like like cerns large Hadron Collider
Speaker 1: if it ever goes online, it's going to need those
Speaker 1: kind of computers to to process the data that comes
Speaker 1: out of those experiments. Yeah, because those can turn out
Speaker 1: quite a bit of information in a very short time, right,
Speaker 1: but if you need it to you know, you don't
Speaker 1: need necessarily a computer that has that capability if you
Speaker 1: want to run Doom, because I can run Doom on
Speaker 1: my Android phone, I'm pretty sure it doesn't have the
Speaker 1: pedophal up, not at all. Well, uh, I think that's
Speaker 1: a good roundup of bits, bites, hurts. I mean I
Speaker 1: hurt my all my bits and bites are hurting right now.
Speaker 1: So yeah, hopefully that clears that up or anyone who
Speaker 1: was unfamiliar with those terms or in a well, there
Speaker 1: there were points where I mean I fall victim to
Speaker 1: it all the time when I'm thinking, oh, five megabits
Speaker 1: for a second, that means it's gonna take me blah
Speaker 1: blah blah to download this file. And then I remember, ah, wait, no,
Speaker 1: that's bits, not bites. And you know, you have you
Speaker 1: have a whole you have to I forget the multiply
Speaker 1: by eight um. And then of course, if you forget
Speaker 1: the whole one thousand four thing, that means that you're
Speaker 1: not really thinking accurately about the size of a file,
Speaker 1: and it just gets really kind of complicated. If you
Speaker 1: are not of the computer science world, and since I'm
Speaker 1: of the liberal arts arts world, Yeah, I get confused
Speaker 1: pretty quickly. But uh, I guess does that do you
Speaker 1: have anything to add? Well, then I suppose that brings
Speaker 1: us to a listener mail, And this listener mail comes
Speaker 1: from Josh. Hey, guys, I was just wondering if Lennox
Speaker 1: has a vulnerability to viruses. I know that one of
Speaker 1: the reasons Mac is mostly virus free is because there
Speaker 1: is a much smaller population relatively speaking of Mac os users.
Speaker 1: Does this mean that Linux users also do not need
Speaker 1: to fear viral attacks from a oil listener Josh, Josh, Uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're telling you about the whole security through obscurity concept
Speaker 1: here about. You know, if you're if not a lot
Speaker 1: of people are using it, then there's not a big
Speaker 1: target and therefore there it's not worth writing any uh,
Speaker 1: any kind of mount malicious software for people who use
Speaker 1: that just because you're not gonna hit that many people.
Speaker 1: Uh No, No, Linux is not automatically immune to viruses. Um.
Speaker 1: In fact, the day that we're recording this podcast, there
Speaker 1: was a critical vulnerability found in the Linux kernel dating
Speaker 1: back several years, which has since been patched. But the uh,
Speaker 1: you know, that's the thing is that any kind of software,
Speaker 1: there are chances for her abilities to exist, and if
Speaker 1: a vulnerability exists, you can bet someone out there is
Speaker 1: trying to figure out a way to exploit it. UM. Now,
Speaker 1: does this mean that Linux users are likely to encounter
Speaker 1: a virus? Probably not, But that doesn't mean that they
Speaker 1: can just assume that they are, you know, untouchable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's um. UM. I booted up my Linux system yesterday
Speaker 1: and it was offering me some patches for critical updates. UM.
Speaker 1: So you can bet that the Linux community is already
Speaker 1: on top of it. Um. You know, as soon as
Speaker 1: they figure out that there's something going on. UM. The
Speaker 1: thing is, you know, security through obscurity. There are so
Speaker 1: many fewer people using the Linux operating system than there
Speaker 1: are Windows that you know people are. It's sort of
Speaker 1: like other criminals. I mean basically, Uh, somebody who's looking
Speaker 1: to mug somebody for their wallet isn't gonna hang out,
Speaker 1: you know, in a place where no one is. They're
Speaker 1: not gonna hang out in the middle of a pasture
Speaker 1: because you know, unless they want to. Good cow. So
Speaker 1: this explains why my misspent youth wasn't that misspent exactly?
Speaker 1: They're hanging out in the pasture waiting for somebody to
Speaker 1: combined around. There are a lot of cows who want
Speaker 1: to have some words with me. Yeah, okay, you actually
Speaker 1: that's not true. I grew up in chicken country. Anyway,
Speaker 1: this is great, Um, but yeah, I mean it's it's
Speaker 1: a case of I mean, just because you use you know,
Speaker 1: any particular operating system or other programs. I mean there
Speaker 1: there have been some things going on for Adobe Acrobat
Speaker 1: in the not too distant past, um where or you know,
Speaker 1: some of the web browsers, and those things are cross
Speaker 1: platform vulnerabilities. UM. So you know, you just need to
Speaker 1: make sure that you keep everything patched up and and
Speaker 1: you know, an eye on what's going on, just to
Speaker 1: make sure that you are, um, you know, keeping yourself safe.
Speaker 1: And it's always good to practice uh safe interneting skills.
Speaker 1: You're watching where you're getting, watching with which links you
Speaker 1: click on and uh you and keeping an eye out
Speaker 1: for fishing. You know, fishing doesn't require an operating system,
Speaker 1: that's true, um, and that is certainly a vulnerability. So well,
Speaker 1: thanks a lot for writing in, Josh, Hope that answered
Speaker 1: your question. If any of you have any questions you'd
Speaker 1: like to ask us, you can write us our email
Speaker 1: addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com. And
Speaker 1: of course we've got tons of articles on the site
Speaker 1: all about computers and processing and all that sort of
Speaker 1: fun stuff that's at how stuff works dot com. Crispy
Speaker 1: and I will talk to you again really soon for
Speaker 1: moralness and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff
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