EU takes a dump on others. Net neutrality is law: no roaming charges

[hey]

It's not just ISPs though. Hardware manufacturers too.

If they just one day decided to change from bytes to bits, then sure, i'd agree. But they are just going with the standard that everyone else uses. A standard which has existed since before a byte was always 8 bits.

And for hdd sizes, they get it right, while windows gets it wrong. Idk what to tell you, use a better os that doesn't lie about units.

[Blubbartron]

It's not just ISPs though. Hardware manufacturers too.

If they just one day decided to change from bytes to bits, then sure, i'd agree. But they are just going with the standard that everyone else uses. A standard which has existed since before a byte was always 8 bits.

And for hdd sizes, they get it right, while windows gets it wrong. Idk what to tell you, use a better os that doesn't lie about units.

You need a history lesson. The concept of SI units for binary didn't exist until 1998. Prior to that, when people said MB, they meant 1024 KB, not 1000 KB. They created this distinct SI unit for binary because HD and digital media container manufacturers fucked up the labeling. They measured KB as 1024 bytes, but then decided MB is 1000 KB. If you think they opted to call their floppy disks 1.44 MB instead of 1.41 MB for any reason other than marketing bigger numbers, then again I say that you shouldn't be so naive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte

[Meresgi]

And for hdd sizes, they get it right, while windows gets it wrong. Idk what to tell you, use a better os that doesn't lie about units.

How do they get it right? They market them in base 10, but computers use base 2. Your OS isn't going to change that. I mean sure you can partition your system fdisk or cfdisk to get a more accurate idea of total bytes but that doesn't change that when Seagate says "This is 1TB, that's 1000GB!" it's bullshit in a sense but people have an easier time reading decimal then binary too.

[Kryssan]

Except everything that is actually monitoring active data transfer on your computer. Steam, Windows Resource Monitor, any given download monitor for browsers, etc etc.

Only ISPs use bits for data transfer, and yes it's intentionally deceptive, just like the people who decided to market HDD sizes as "a GB is 1000 MB, TB is 1000 GB" etc. Don't be naive.

HDDs are definitely deceptive; they didn't used to be that way. My first computer had a 1024kb hard drive in it. I'm not sure when the base10 numbering started, but it has definitely been around for a long time and now it's just meh so it'll probably never change. I think the network load thing though is just a difference of how people use it. Bits are the primary talking code, Bytes is what we ( consumers ) are more familiar with because we think in terms of our files / media ( measured in *bytes ) and not in terms of our network traffic ( generally measured in bits - Windows Resource Monitor for me in 8.1 is measuring bits not bytes ).

I use NTOP for monitoring and yeah - it reports out in bits and packets for load and throughput, not bytes.

[notorious bum]

The average consumer is being deceived by much more important shit anyways. Most know they'll be getting a raw deal on anything electronic that they purchase. Those who don't are probably happily living by the highest price=highest quality motto, YOLO and all that swag shit.

[hey]

How do they get it right? They market them in base 10, but computers use base 2. Your OS isn't going to change that. I mean sure you can partition your system fdisk or cfdisk to get a more accurate idea of total bytes but that doesn't change that when Seagate says "This is 1TB, that's 1000GB!" it's bullshit in a sense but people have an easier time reading decimal then binary too.

Because they say gigabytes, which are 1,000,000,000 bytes. They often even specifically say that 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes on the package, just to make it clear to people who don't know the difference.

Your OS doesn't change the size, but it can change the way it is displayed. Where windows says something is 1 megabyte, it really means it's 1,048,576 bytes, ie 1 mebibyte. Certain other OSs will list 1048576 bytes as either 1 mebibyte, or as 1.05 megabytes.

Lets not pretend that no one other than hdd manufacturers use SI units, because that's just not true.

[Meresgi]

Difference between the two rises exponentially, so when you're talking massive amounts of storage there is a big difference between the two. It doesn't fucking matter either way though because the people who care, know the difference and the rest don't give a flying shit because they buy electronics to play Angry Birds and Facebookz on and use MS Word.

[Blubbartron]

HDDs are definitely deceptive; they didn't used to be that way. My first computer had a 1024kb hard drive in it. I'm not sure when the base10 numbering started, but it has definitely been around for a long time and now it's just meh so it'll probably never change. I think the network load thing though is just a difference of how people use it. Bits are the primary talking code, Bytes is what we ( consumers ) are more familiar with because we think in terms of our files / media ( measured in *bytes ) and not in terms of our network traffic ( generally measured in bits - Windows Resource Monitor for me in 8.1 is measuring bits not bytes ).

I use NTOP for monitoring and yeah - it reports out in bits and packets for load and throughput, not bytes.

The resource monitor was perhaps a bad example, as it seems to be internally inconsistent (I didn't notice before). The only place it shows bits/sec is in the overview for network traffic. If you expand it, the columns are all bytes. The resource monitor is the same in 8.1 as it is in 7 for me, based on observations of 8.1 from a youtube video I found.

That said, I disagree with the premise that bits are the "primary talking code." Both IP and TCP are defined in octal segments or larger. Within a single byte chunk individual bits may have relevance (flag bits), but the entirety of the packet is going to be measurable in bytes, not bits. I haven't been able to find any evidence that it's possible (or used to be possible) to have packets that aren't byte-based.

[hey]

Bits are used for the transfers, bytes for the data.

Networking on non-8 bit byte chips is impossible as far as i know (of course DSPs are probably the only things left still in use that use something other than 8 bits for a byte, so it hardly matters), and has been for a long time. But in the distant past, it was obviously possible.

[Blubbartron]

Bits are used for the transfers, bytes for the data.

Networking on non-8 bit byte chips is impossible as far as i know (of course DSPs are probably the only things left still in use that use something other than 8 bits for a byte, so it hardly matters), and has been for a long time. But in the distant past, it was obviously possible.

Yeah, I'm going to need an example if you're claiming that there were ever network packets that weren't byte-based. Maybe pre-internet it was possible, because the Internet Protocol hadn't been established. But local network transfers would've likely used TCP (byte-based). Even UDP is formally byte-based (even the data chunk is sent as octets, not individual bits). Seriously, I need evidence that there was ever a logical reason to measure data transfer in bits instead of bytes, because the entire history of CS as I know it suggests that it was completely illogical to ever measure in bits.

UDP official standard for reference: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc768

[Meresgi]

http://searchunifiedcommunications.t...-transfer-rate

The data transfer rate (DTR) is the amount ofdigital data that is moved from one place to another in a given time. The data transfer rate can be viewed as the speed of travel of a given amount of data from one place to another. In general, the greater the bandwidth of a given path, the higher the data transfer rate.

In telecommunications, data transfer is usually measured in bits per second. For example, a typical low-speed connection to the Internet may be 33.6 kilobits per second (Kbps). On Ethernet local area networks, data transfer can be as fast as 10 megabits per second. Network switches are planned that will transfer data in the terabit range. In earlier telecommunication systems, data transfer was sometimes measured in characters or blocks (of a certain size) per second. Data transfer time between the microprocessor or RAM and devices such as the hard disk and CD-ROM player is usually measured in milliseconds.

In computers, data transfer is often measured in bytes per second. The highest data transfer rate to date is 14 terabits per second over a single optical fiber, reported by Japan's Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT DoComo) in 2006.

[hey]

Yeah, way before the internet. Everything has been 8 bit bytes since what? The early 70s at the latest?

Google doesn't seem to want to give me any information about 50 year old network protocols. idk, maybe i'm wrong and it was never possible to network with systems that didn't use 8 bits per byte.

[Blubbartron]

http://searchunifiedcommunications.t...-transfer-rate

All this says is "ISPs measure in bits because they have always measured in bits." The thing that's interesting to me is the part about earlier telecommunication systems - why were earlier systems using the logical measurement of blocks (of some size) per second as opposed to this ridiculous bit/sec measurement? What prompted the change? As I've speculated the entire thread, it was probably a marketing decision, and once one ISP got clever enough to do it, all of them followed suit to stay competitive in the face of ignorant/dumbass consumers.

[hey]

and once one ISP got clever enough to do it, all of them followed suit to stay competitive in the face of ignorant/dumbass consumers.

There was no such thing as ISPs. The internet didn't exist.

[Kryssan]

The resource monitor was perhaps a bad example, as it seems to be internally inconsistent (I didn't notice before). The only place it shows bits/sec is in the overview for network traffic. If you expand it, the columns are all bytes. The resource monitor is the same in 8.1 as it is in 7 for me, based on observations of 8.1 from a youtube video I found.

Task Manager and Resource Monitor use bits for everything 'network' related except the detail / laid out columns in Resource Monitor which uses Bytes. All disk use is measured in Bytes, and never Bits, from what I've looked through. I tend to refer to TM for RM now since TM does everything RM does in terms of graphs in 8.1 - RM is only for really detailed needs.

That said, I disagree with the premise that bits are the "primary talking code." Both IP and TCP are defined in octal segments or larger. Within a single byte chunk individual bits may have relevance (flag bits), but the entirety of the packet is going to be measurable in bytes, not bits. I haven't been able to find any evidence that it's possible (or used to be possible) to have packets that aren't byte-based.

Outside of believing that they're only doing it to get big numbers ( which I highly doubt we'll ever find written down somewhere ), the bits / bytes thing I don't really have anything for in terms of why networking tools are usually bits and disk tools are usually bytes.

AFAIK, bytes have been in use since very near the beginning, due to the difficulty of humans handling information in bits. Some really old computers technically used nibbles instead of bytes when processing information, and technically networking still refers to them in use given arrangement of hexadecimal with the octet but nobody really talks about nibbles except a passing mention in a classroom.

However, the prefix conversation is a different animal altogether. The binary prefixes ( mebi, gibi, etc ) were supposed to be standardised by the IEC's action in '98, but it didn't really work out that way because noone swapped over and we continue to inappropriately use SI ( although they were derived from SI ) units to talk about something that isn't measured in base10. ( link )

Edit: Spoilered this in for people who don't wanna click the link

Spoiler: show

Historical context*

Once upon a time, computer professionals noticed that 2^10 was very nearly equal to 1000 and started using the SI prefix "kilo" to mean 1024. That worked well enough for a decade or two because everybody who talked kilobytes knew that the term implied 1024 bytes. But, almost overnight a much more numerous "everybody" bought computers, and the trade computer professionals needed to talk to physicists and engineers and even to ordinary people, most of whom know that a kilometer is 1000 meters and a kilogram is 1000 grams.

Then data storage for gigabytes, and even terabytes, became practical, and the storage devices were not constructed on binary trees, which meant that, for many practical purposes, binary arithmetic was less convenient than decimal arithmetic. The result is that today "everybody" does not "know" what a megabyte is. When discussing computer memory, most manufacturers use megabyte to mean 2^20 = 1 048 576 bytes, but the manufacturers of computer storage devices usually use the term to mean 1 000 000 bytes. Some designers of local area networks have used megabit per second to mean 1 048 576 bit/s, but all telecommunications engineers use it to mean 10^6 bit/s. And if two definitions of the megabyte are not enough, a third megabyte of 1 024 000 bytes is the megabyte used to format the familiar 90 mm (3 1/2 inch), "1.44 MB" diskette. The confusion is real, as is the potential for incompatibility in standards and in implemented systems.

Faced with this reality, the IEEE Standards Board decided that IEEE standards will use the conventional, internationally adopted, definitions of the SI prefixes. Mega will mean 1 000 000, except that the base-two definition may be used (if such usage is explicitly pointed out on a case-by-case basis) until such time that prefixes for binary multiples are adopted by an appropriate standards body.

IE once upon a time people got sloppy and since everyone "knows" this we'll keep using it until someone else comes along with enough authority and says alright, fix it.

This is apparently why I can remember having hard drives measured in base 2 instead of today's base 10 - from an engineering standpoint, the manufacturer was not wrong. It certainly helped marketing, but they were correct in their methods - if you call something by SI, then you're talking base10 and should use a base10 syntax. The reason they actually mark the packaging is because people have tried to bring suit for this before.

The best example of this is K/k - k is an SI unit abbreviation, hence when you talk about kilo- anything you use small k. Small k should never be used as a binary prefix, because doing so would cause more confusion when abbreviated; thus, kibibits and kibibytes are always Kb and KB, never kb / kB unless the SI is the desired form. Of course, most people don't give enough shits to actually practice this, so yeah.



Generally speaking I agree noone is going to want to measure file size metrics in terms of bits unless they want to confuse someone and make something seem like something it is not. That said, using the SI system to denote a base2 system is not correct from a science / engineering standpoint, so we ought to use the binary conventions and stop using the SI ones if when we say "kilobyte" we want it to mean 1024 bytes because "kilo" can't mean anything but 1000 by standard. But caring.

[Meresgi]

http://bgr.com/2014/02/19/why-is-net...treaming-slow/

Have your Netflix streams been much more laggy or choppy in recent months? If so then you’re not alone. As The Wall Street Journal shows, Netflix streaming quality has tanked at multiple major ISPs since this past October and much of it stems from behind-the-scenes wrangling over who will pick up the tab for all the added traffic demand Netflix’s services are generating.

According to one of the Journal’s sources, “within the past four to six months, Netflix traffic through Cogent’s connections to one major broadband provider has at least quadrupled” in good part because Netflix has expanded its Super HD streaming service to all of its customers. This has led ISPs to demand some extra cash from Netflix that will be used to help ISPs speed up their networks to meet traffic demand. Netflix, meanwhile, “wants broadband companies to hook up to its new video-distribution network without paying them fees for carrying its traffic,” the Journal writes.

[djzombie]

“wants broadband companies to hook up to its new video-distribution network without paying them fees for carrying its traffic,”

whoever said that deserves to get throat punched. i guess netflix does not pay for internet connectivity, i guess their servers sit in a dark windowless room without ethernet connections or wifi signals, and never get used. clearly they pay someone, you're just pissed they don't have to pay you too you greedy cocksucker.

article seems like it was written by the ceo of comcast.

[Meresgi]

"This has led ISPs to demand some extra cash from Netflix that will be used to help ISPs speed up their networks to meet traffic demand"

I'm sure it will go towards improving the network connections totally!

[kuronosan]

Meet traffic demand? Traffic demand was fine before this. It's not like people said "HEY, THEY'RE GOING TO START THROTTLING MY NETFLIX... I BETTER WATCH MORE NETFLIX!"

God fucking damn it people who run companies are retarded as shit.

[Deadgye]

No it hasn't. A byte has probably been, at some point i time, almost every number of bits between 1 and 32. Of course, we're talking decades ago.

Meh, technically you're sort of right. A byte was ambiguous in the early days of computing. However as early as the late 50s or early 60s should be when 8bits became the unofficial standard.

Using bits/s instead of bytes/s for internet speeds is either because of pure stubbornness or because of telecommunication influence (we were going through the phone line after all). Even if there exists technical reasons for measuring it in bits/s, data transfer speeds should be advertised in bytes/s-- especially after we moved on from dial up.

And yeah windows doesn't tell size wrong. You really shouldn't use SI units for data storage. The whole thing is a clusterfuck due to people using incorrect terminology for so long that it became correct. Megabyte is now accepted to mean 1024 Kilobytes, and Kilobyte to mean 1024 bytes, because of how long people incorrectly used Megabyte when they meant Mebibyte. (JEDEC standard 100B.01)