this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
1330 points (99.6% liked)
Technology
59596 readers
5292 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
100 mbps? That's 100 millibits per second, or 0.1 bits per second. I'd certainly hope for better bandwidth than one bit every ten seconds; that's slower than smoke signals.
I wish we can all move to MB/s and get rid of the endless confusion on names
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)
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 ;)
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.
I say we split the different and go for nibbles per fortnight.
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)
Mbps, megabits per second, is the standard. No idea why this author opted to use the highly unusual millibit.
👆 Pedant.
👆 Humorless git.
Debate pervert 👆
You're right, I'm horny for words.
I tried to get it to point to my username (but it's cool if you want to argue)
No, you didnt
I almost replied saying you had no idea you were talking about, but then I realized.... Lol
Except that’s like dividing by zero. A millibit is undefined. A bit is the smallest indivisible unit of digital information.
But capitalization is important to distinguish between b for bit and B for Byte.
No, that's like dividing by 1,000.
Anyway, computer scientists split the bit back in 1969, which is how we're able to make smaller and smaller computers: the bits are all smaller, so we can pack more into a single potato chip.
Lol thanks for the chuckle
Good catch but not quite. bps is a rate so it is allowed to be an abstract expression.
How many chickens per hour cross the road?
And more importantly, why.
Information entropy is measured in bits, and the bits are almost always fractional.
If you had really slow Internet, like smoke signals or semaphores across a nation, you could characterize it as millibit:
1 bit over 1000 seconds = 1 millibit/s.
But yeah, it's basically meaningless in today's age for Internet speeds.
The title used the wrong abbreviation and you didn’t read the linked press release. The previous standard was 25/3 Mbps so there’s no reason to downgrade; had you bothered to read the link you’re supposedly commenting on you’d see the new standard is 100/20 Mbps. That’s also laughably low for a regular household with a modicum of modern usage but we can’t really expect much from agencies under regulatory capture.
They were making a joke about units and the use of a lowercase m instead of an uppercase M for Megabits per second.....