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Re: transfer speed data

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On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 10:56:36AM +0100, Nicolas George wrote:
>Anyway, why would anybody honest want to use this kind of unit to
>measure an actual speed is beyond me. The only point to speak in
>kilo/mega/gigabits per second instead is to make the numbers seem larger
>to attract clueless customers.

No, network speeds are traditionally measured in bits because networks 
transferred data in bits and telcos dealt with bits, and they sold and 
billed bits. Computer internals were measured in bytes and words because 
they transferred data in bytes and words. Some people do now talk about 
network speeds for computers in byte units, but you're really just 
swapping one source of confusion for another when you do that. (There's 
an immense amount of existing tooling for network-related information 
that already uses bits, so everything that decides bytes are better for 
networking requires conversion when dealing with most other networking 
tools even if it eliminates conversion when dealing with filesystem or 
memory tools.) There isn't one "right answer" that magically simplifies 
communications. 

The most obvious improvement, as always, is to simply write out "bit" 
and "byte" and not abbreviate them because everybody forgets which is 
capitalized. "octet" was a term that was actually needed before bytes 
were standardized to 8 bits, but that usage confuses far more people 
than it helps these days.

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transfer speed data mick crane <mick.crane@gmail.com> - 2020-12-23 02:00 +0100
  Re: transfer speed data Bob Weber <bobrweber@gmail.com> - 2020-12-23 02:40 +0100
  Re: transfer speed data Georgi Naplatanov <gosho@oles.biz> - 2020-12-23 02:50 +0100
  Re: transfer speed data Jeremy Ardley <jeremy@ardley.org> - 2020-12-23 02:50 +0100
    Re: transfer speed data Jeremy Ardley <jeremy@ardley.org> - 2020-12-23 03:00 +0100
      Re: transfer speed data Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> - 2020-12-23 16:10 +0100
        Re: transfer speed data Jeremy Ardley <jeremy@ardley.org> - 2020-12-23 16:40 +0100
          Re: transfer speed data Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> - 2020-12-23 17:00 +0100
            Re: transfer speed data Jeremy Ardley <jeremy@ardley.org> - 2020-12-23 17:20 +0100
              Re: transfer speed data Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> - 2020-12-23 18:40 +0100
  Re: transfer speed data Andy Smith <andy@strugglers.net> - 2020-12-23 05:00 +0100
    Re: transfer speed data Nicolas George <george@nsup.org> - 2020-12-23 11:00 +0100
      Re: transfer speed data Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> - 2020-12-23 15:50 +0100
        Re: transfer speed data Nicolas George <george@nsup.org> - 2020-12-23 17:10 +0100
        Re: transfer speed data David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2020-12-23 18:50 +0100
          Re: transfer speed data Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> - 2020-12-23 19:20 +0100
            Re: transfer speed data David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2020-12-24 02:30 +0100
              Re: transfer speed data Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> - 2020-12-24 10:10 +0100
                Re: transfer speed data Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> - 2020-12-24 17:10 +0100
      Re: transfer speed data Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> - 2020-12-23 16:20 +0100
        Re: transfer speed data Nicolas George <george@nsup.org> - 2020-12-23 17:20 +0100
          Re: transfer speed data Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> - 2020-12-24 17:10 +0100
    Re: transfer speed data deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> - 2020-12-23 12:20 +0100
  Re: transfer speed data George Shuklin <george.shuklin@gmail.com> - 2020-12-23 23:00 +0100

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