[G4] Broadband Speed Liar's Poker

[Doug McNutt]

At 06:33 -0500 12/29/03, sr ferenczy wrote:
>The distance from Stanford to Boston is 4320km.
>So: the hardware of the Internet can currently achieve within a factor of two of the speed of light.
>make any sense?

Sure does, but you missed a revealing extra credit question:

At 2 Mb / sec how many bits are in transit between Stanford and Boston?

At 00:32 -0500 12/29/03, James Asherman wrote:
>I know I get the k's and the M's and the capitals mixed up.

And it's more and more important these days to keep them straight. There are a bunch of poker liars in the disk storage world and what was consistent metric usage in 1950 is a mess in the computer world which, of all disciplines, ought to know better:

<http://www.physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html>
<http://www.physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html>



-- 
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