Bits and Bytes

A common area of confusion among computer users is dealing with the prefixes we use to relate file sizes. Here is the easiest way I’ve seen to conceptualize these measurements.

Bit: the smallest unit of measure for data and space that holds it on your computer. This is the level at which all data is either a 1 or a 0.

Byte: made up of eight bits. A byte is equivalent to a character (“a”, “b” etc.). The order and combination of the eight ones and zeros (bits) defines a character. eg. 00000001 etc.



Kilobyte: (K or KB ) equals: 1024 bytes

Megabyte: (MB, or M. or meg) equals 1024 kilobytes

Gigabyte: (GB, G or gig) equals 1024 Megabytes

How many bytes do we have in a gigabyte? 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 1,073,741,824 bytes — slightly over a billion.

That’s a lot of one’s and zero’s that you have on your hard drive. Have you backed them up latley?

Cyberterror and Professional Paranoiacs

By Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com– During an appearance on Thursday to ask a House panel for a fatter 2004 budget, (Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge) claimed that cyberterrorists were just as dangerous as physical ones. Ridge said his department would “monitor the Internet for signs of a potential terrorist attack, cyberterrorism, hacking, and state-sponsored information warfare.”

“We will not distinguish between physical and cyber in this new unit,” Ridge said. “We will pay as much attention to the Internet as we do physical.”

What is this guy thinking?

Last I checked, it was physical terrorists who bombed the Marine barracks in Lebanon, who attacked the U.S.S. Cole, who took out the Oklahoma City federal building, and who suicide-bombed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Wily-fingered hackers had nothing to do with it.

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