Clarification of terminology

[#1]

Hi
When I ckech my connection speed, I get the following readings for example
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Today, 07:32      4329 kbps (541kB/s)        944 kbps (118kB/s)

Can you please explain  - in lay terms please as I'm not too computer literate 
the difference between the kbps figure and the kB/s figure
THanhs

[#2]

basically B = byte  b = bits,  but the full reasoning takes a lot of reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte
1 Byte =8 bits
Mega can be 1000 or 1024
Confusing aint it

[#3]

Quote from: pierre_pierre

Mega can be 1000 or 1024

No it not 
kilo is 1000 or 1024
Mega is 1000k or 1024k

[#4]

Not strictly accurate
kilo is 1,000 mega is 1,000,000
It is only the IT geeks who corrupted it by using binary calculation

[#5]

Mebibyte is 1024KB.

[#6]

And to get really geeky
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte
or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28data%29

[#7]

and confusing

Quote

Mebibyte is not commonly used. Instead, megabyte is often used to mean 1000 x 1000, 1024 x 1024, and even 1000 x 1024 bytes. Such usage can be confusing and inconsistent. For example, Microsoft's Windows XP operating system shows a file of 220 bytes as "1.00 MB" in its file properties dialog, while showing a file of 106 (1000000) bytes as 976 KB; but Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 would report a 106 byte file as 1 MB

[#8]

Quote from: Oldjim

It is only the IT geeks who corrupted it by using binary calculation

No it's not, mathematicians will also use 1024 when dealing with base 2 numbers.

[#9]

But they won't use the kilo prefix - not if they are proper mathematicians