MB/sec = megabytes per second. There is NO "MBps"!
How come...?
I think because it's simply a bad abbreviation, too often confused because people don't pay close enough attention to the cases. Additionally, a lot of publishing software, during their "clean up" operations, damage double capitalized abbreviations like "MBps" turning them into "Mbps" (a normal capitalized word). Not good. Makes for magnitudes of errors...
"bit" is an acronym for "binary digit". It is *binary*, ie base 2, never decimal! IOW, the "multiplier" is a power of 2, not 10. 1024 not 1000. Repeat the mantra of your grade school teacher: NEVER MIX BASES.
1024 bytes per kilobyte.
I think "kilo" is one thousand based on dictionary definition,
I never heard the definition of "kilo" being "the closest to 1000 in the respective base.
"thousand" technically means 10 by 100 *IN BASE 10*. When doing binary, we "say" thousand and use the metric prefixes simply as a convenience.
This was decided back in the early days of computing. With such a tiny base, n**3 results in a tiny value -- so you end up having to invent more metric unit names. :( 1000 base 10 converted to binary is a nasty thing; hard to remember etc. By moving up the next even base, you can a clean number - very easy to remember.
2**10 = 10000000000 in base 2 = 1024 in base 10.
And then there's octal and hexidecimal... :)
oiy. What's gonna happen if these guys at MIT get the trinary gates to work well? Then we'll be working in base three!
- Dan.
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