[G4] Broadband Speed Liar's Poker

[Doug McNutt]

At 15:36 -0600 12/13/03, Richard M. Kriss wrote:
>Maybe I am getting confused by Kbps (bits per second) vs KB (Bytes) per
>second.

 You aren't the only one.  We need a Truth in Speed law. Well, our US government will never get it right anyway, but we do need some conformity to dimensioning standards.

First of all K doesn't mean kilo or a factor of 1000. It is rather a measure of temperature, degrees Kelvin. k is the abbreviation for kilo meaning 1000 base 10. editors computer types have used K to mean a factor of 1024 but that's approved by no one but some editors and it's not clear how it applies to frequency anyway.

<http://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/cuu/Info/Units/>
<http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci825099,00.html>
<http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html>
<http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/prefixes.html>

And then there's the question of just how many bits there are in a byte.  It's usually 8 but if you're doing things like PPP or a 56 kb modem, it might be 10 to account for a start and a stop bit.

And then there's the baud concept. Baud is the frequency in symbols per second. The unknown is just how many bits are in a symbol.

You're right. Liars are the rule. Look at the size of disks as reported by the salesman (base 10) and by the the software formatters (base 1024).

The chances of getting a straight answer are the same as the chances that your senator will personally answer an e-mail message.


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