this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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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.
How about Mebinibbles?
Gibiwords
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.