Strangling people who mix up K,M,GB/s and K,M,Gbps

[ljcool_17]

Has anyone ever felt like punching or strangling or running over people who mix B/s and bps transfer speeds like they interchange both units and cause a lot of confusion? I'm one of them. Hit this thread if you're fed up like me!

[Drunk_Klaus]

Same here, they should teach people this before they're allowed to use the Internet.

[Aytex]

Who doesn't lol 

I get mixed up all the time kek

[Oshino Shinobu]

I feel like hitting Microsoft (and other OS creators) for not using the correct acronyms, or not converting between binary and decimal units. 

[Curufinwe_wins]

Why does my router only give me 50 MBps on AC at like 3 feet? I thought it was supposed to be like 450 Mbps....

 

/s

[DioOmicida]

I think I hate it more when people don't use their blinker in traffic. 

[Atmos]

There are certainly things I hate more, because I do honestly understand why so many people get confused over it.

 

[Briggsy]

2 minutes ago, DioOmicida said:

I think I hate it more when people don't use their blinker in traffic. 

As someone who walks as much as possible, I concur. 

[Bouzoo]

I only feel like hitting something when I buy any type (amount) of storage just to end up not buying that amount of storage. 

[theninja35]

1 minute ago, Atmos said:

There are certainly things I hate more, because I do honestly understand why so many people get confused over it.

 

Because, unless we're discussing mathematics, letters often mean the same thing whether it is lowercase or not. This has become normal especially because of texting, where the use of capital letters is nil. 

 

So, when those kinds of people come to the internet, they become quickly confused when discussing Mb and MB (where M can be Mega, Kilo, Giga, etc.).

[vanished]

There's not really any excuse for mixing up bits and bytes, other than typos and/or laziness, but if we're talking the whole GB/GiB 1000/1024 thing, there's a very good reason I think why this is so often misused and so many people get it wrong.  You see, when it comes to file sizes, for the longest time iirc all OSes used base 1024, but these days Windows still does but Ubuntu, and I think Mac OS too has moved on to using 1000.  Now remember that the common terms like "MB" and "megabyte" actually refer to the 1000 base, and 1024 is supposed to be called "mebibyte" or "MiB".  But Windows uses the base 1024 system and labels them like the base 1000 system! So on Windows 1 GB = 1024 MB, etc.  Then you can start talking RAM capacities and this whole discussion just goes even further off the rails.

 

In short, I nevre fault people for mixing those up because frankly I don't think I've ever seen a single person (including myself) use it correctly, unless they were explaining the issue like this!  

[Atmos]

2 minutes ago, theninja35 said:

Because, unless we're discussing mathematics, letters often mean the same thing whether it is lowercase or not. This has become normal especially because of texting, where the use of capital letters is nil. 

 

So, when those kinds of people come to the internet, they become quickly confused when discussing Mb and MB (where M can be Mega, Kilo, Giga, etc.).

 Oh, no no no. In mathematics, especially higher up capitols make a MASSIVE difference. I do get the point though

I was more or less talking about how service providers love to use mb/s because it makes their speeds sound faster than they really are, but everything else uses MB/s for ease of use. Most people simply don't understand tech that well to know there's a difference.

[minibois]

No, I only get the urge to educate them.

[theninja35]

7 minutes ago, Atmos said:

 Oh, no no no. In mathematics, especially higher up capitols make a MASSIVE difference. I do get the point though

I was more or less talking about how service providers love to use mb/s because it makes their speeds sound faster than they really are, but everything else uses MB/s for ease of use. Most people simply don't understand tech that well to know there's a difference.

That's what I was saying, in mathematics the variable must be defined either capital or lowercase, because if you're dealing with an a and an A, then you don't want your answer to be in terms of a if it should be in terms of A. I was trying to say that outside of mathematics, the capitals or lowercases rarely matter.

 

I understand the part about the service providers, though. I was just trying to make a fancy description

[BingoFishy]

https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/34813-experiences-with-non-techies/

 

Brace yourself

Edited May 31, 2016 by BingoFishy
fixed link

[BrightCandle]

The problem is the standard has changed over the years and even GB/s is wrong now. 30 years ago we didn't use bits at all, they were obviously part of how we described bytes but they weren't a relevant measure since the days of really minimal computer hardware so everything was in byte/s, KB/s, MB/s.

 

Then what happened was networking became mainstream and for some reason it came in 10 mega bits per second, it didn't make any sense but I assume it was done for marketing reasons rather than anything else. Of course ethernet then evolved and became 100 mbit/s and finally 1 gbit/s as standards and the die was set.

 

Then we had the whole hard drive mess where originally they were defined in Mega bytes and Giga bytes but some hard drive companies decided that they didn't like the measure and wanted to make their drives sound bigger, so instead of basing it on 2^x they based it on 10^x standard measures instead. Now hard drives for a given capacity were actually about 12% smaller than you original thought, so a 120GB drive isn't, its a 10^x measure not a 2^x measure. Worse still is SSDs did the same thing despite being based on transistors and clearly tied to the 2^x growth pattern.

 

So because of all this the standards bodies added GiB/s to make it clear which we were talking about, but almost nobody knows what that means at all. But because all the respective advertising agencies around the world haven't dealt with the companies that were clearly trying to mislead you now have at least 3 different measures of the same thing out there all trying to make their thing sound bigger and faster and mislead their customers. You can blame people for that if you like but its really not their fault, its all our governments fault for not stopping the companies who tried and succeeded in misleading everyone on purpose.

[TetraSky]

Because it's confusing as hell, that's why people get them mixed up.

[WkdPaul]

1 hour ago, BrightCandle said:

*snip*

Network speeds were ALWAYS calculated in bits/seconds, always!

 

I remember 14k, 28k and 56k modems, that was in kbps ... there was also the cheapernet, or 10base2 network, crappy but that's what they had at the time. Early computers basic unit was bits, not bytes.

[sjoerd108]

I want to strangle the companies that misuse the fact that most people don't know the difference.