this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I wish we can all move to MB/s and get rid of the endless confusion on names

[–] thantik 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

We should change to mibibits! We need easily factored numbers of 10, not this old powers of 2 stuff! (/s if it wasn't obvious)

[–] Bassman1805 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sarcasm noted, but: mibi/gibi are the powers of 2 version.

We all say megabit or gigabit when talking about internet speeds, but in many cases under the hood it's actually measured in mibi/gibibits. Just means it's 2% more when converted into base 10 ;)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Good point on the first part. On the second... There's very little networking stuff that isn't pretty much handled in powers of 10 everywhere. I mean, eventually every number gets handled as binary at some point, but otherwise it's pretty rare for network values to get converted to some power-of-2 number.

Way more common is the stupid bits/bytes confusion.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I say we split the different and go for nibbles per fortnight.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The reason we don't is because the network does not care how the files you transfer are formatted.

It measure the amount of bits it can transfer.

Whether the file in question is for example a text document (8bit) or a HEIF (10bit)

[–] SpaceNoodle 1 points 1 year ago

Mbps, megabits per second, is the standard. No idea why this author opted to use the highly unusual millibit.