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[Davidion]

Fuck the transfer rate. I can finally plug in USB shit in the dark now, blessed be.

 

[Walshicus]

You may see some places talking about kibibytes or mibibytes or some other crap denoted by KiB or Kib or etc. This is a bullshit made up term that a bunch of non scientists invented to deal with the confusion among the masses. ("Why is my 300 GB hard drive only 279 GB?!")

Scientists prefer base 2 to base 10? Hmm...

 

[Durante]

You may see some places talking about kibibytes or mibibytes or some other crap denoted by KiB or Kib or etc. This is a bullshit made up term that a bunch of non scientists invented to deal with the confusion among the masses. ("Why is my 300 GB hard drive only 279 GB?!")

I'm a computer scientist and I think the kibi etc. prefixes are a great idea. It makes no sense to use SI prefixes that already have a clearly defined meaning (kilo, mega, etc.) and arbitrarily give them a different meaning in one specific context -- sometimes. Having different identifiers for inherently different quantities is not just good for "the masses".

 

[biggersmaller]

No.
FireWire 800 = Mbps.
USB 3.0 = 4.8 Gbps = 600 MBps.

MB = megabyte.
Mb = megabit.

mB = megabyte. The use of a lower case m is incorrect.
mb = megabyte, but check your context. People usually use this form for bits because they don't want to capitalize things (the K, M, etc). Byte should be assumed when dealing with storage, and bit should be assumed when dealing with transport (buses, intertrons, and interconnects).

Well not really... in this case 4.8 Gbps = 4,800,000,000 bps. Damned marketing.

When you have a K, M, etc, you're talking about 1,000, 1,000,000, etc.
When you add a b or B (for bit or byte) you're talking about 1,024, 1,048,576, etc.

(1,024 is 2 to the power of 10, and is used in computer science because it plays nice in a binary system, where things like to be powers of 2.)

You may see some places talking about kibibytes or mibibytes or some other crap denoted by KiB or Kib or etc. This is a bullshit made up term that a bunch of non scientists invented to deal with the confusion among the masses. ("Why is my 300 GB hard drive only 279 GB?!")

Marketing people love to assume K, M, and G are the classical multiples of 1000, because when dealing with GB, you can advertise a 7.375% larger size than you actually have if you ignore the fact that 1024 is the magic number, not 1000.
This difference increases to nearly 10% when dealing with TB marketed sizes.
A drive marketed as being 1 TB in size really only has 931 GB. (931GB * ~1.1 = 1024GB, or 1TB)

1 megabit = 0.125 megabyte

1 gigabit = 0.125 gigabyte

etc.

So when you see commercials for 8 megbit download speeds for Comcast this is what you get. Damn marketing indeed.

 

[Diablohead]

Nice, now as well as charging up my mobile phone and handhealds I can jumpstart the car next the the battery goes flat, awesome!

 

[RiverBed]

where is my flying car?!

I saw a show about it a few years back. an Israeli company said that they already built them. they have the technology and everything figured out and it would be affordable and practical for mass consoption. the only thing holding them back is licensing. regulations and what not need to be created. and who will take charge of those things, aviation or trafic police? things like that.

as for USB 3.0, it has a single fiber optic line in it. they kept the current shape for backward compatibility reasons. you don't have to wait till it is out to buy a PC. that is just ridiculous. what you can do is upgrad your current PC with a USB 3.0 card, slot or something when they release. worse case scenario would be for you to simply upgrade your mobo. that is nothing compared to holding off a purchase of an entire PC setup for something as simple as a new USB port.