MB > Mb

Byte vs. Bit

Nice try, Korrh, but no.

mb != Mb

"mb" would actually a "millibit" or 1/100oth of a bit. So if we're going to be overly literal, he's actually saying that the patch is 6.9 bits in size... or less than a byte. Impressive, though, to be able to transmit a partial bit.

Mb wouldn't even make sense for this, as it would mean that the patch was still the better part of a GB in size.

He wrote "mb" and meant "KB". It's a ~7MB patch.

Most people don't know or care about the difference between bits and bytes. I do, and I show extra care when choosing my words. Notice that I used KB, MB, and GB because I know not to make these mistakes.

Even then, 6.9k mb would still be over 800 MB, which is still ridiculous. Besides, the post has since been corrected.

Choose who you're correcting wisely, lest you end up looking like the uneducated dick.

/r mensrea

I don't think you fully understand either. I've never heard of a "millibit" before because it does not exist. Maybe theoretically, but it just doesn't exist because a single bit is the smallest logical representation of digital data. When dealing with computers and data, you can only have bits and bytes, and further expansions on those. Maybe the metric system allows you to use milli, but data doesn't work that way. As far as I'm concerned, uppercase M and lowercase m don't differentiate anything, the point is to use uppercase B and lowercase b to refer to bits and bytes.

I defy you to prove otherwise.

You're right, most people don't care about the difference between MB or Mb, or mB or mb for the sake of your example. Though similar to you, I care. You made no mistake and I made no comment on a mistake other then the authors, you saw the same pre-edit mistake I did. I was merely commenting on the authors poor usage of abbreviation in your quote, I'll be more specific in the future : )

The uneducated dick part was rather silly though. Obviously you wouldn't expect 7GB or even an 800MB patch. I'll assume your questions toward the author was just you being nice and letting him know the typo was there instead of you being ignorant.

As for Mensrea, ttvp pretty much said it. A millibit does not exist in anything other than theory. Heh, Imagine trying to decompress something that small... That's a joke...

Mb would stand for Megabit. The problem I have with seeing something labeled "mb" when referring to something taking up space, is that "mb"(megabit) is more commonly used for transfer rates and networking, but even that is incorrect and is another topic in itself.

oh well, servers are back up anyways.

I understand bits and bytes perfectly well, actually.

But if you're going to take things literally and then criticize, you ought to make sure you get it right. A lower-case 'm' is improper because metric-system-style prefixes are case-sensitive.

Does a millibit exist? No, and that's precisely why the lower-case "m" is what makes the original post nonsense, not the bit/byte difference. That also happens to be the reason that everyone would read "mb" as "megabyte" because it is the only unit which really makes sense in context.

But yes, we all understand now. You're one of the true geniuses in the world who knows that b = bit and B = byte.

Good work.