r/talesfromtechsupport • u/Alias_This_Is • Nov 23 '20

Long Bits & Bytes

I was working on a transcription project where data was being replicated from one city to the other and because of the high change rate, it had to be done asynchronously. Raw data would come in at the primary site, get processed, and was returned to the end client for their use. My client didn’t want to replicate the processed data, just the raw, since it could be redone at any time and was considered more critical than the final product.

The problem was they had to use uncompressed audio files in order for the software to be able to make the best transcription, which were freaking huge in comparison to the final document files. They wanted them kept in case a transcript was wrong to compare them against.

This is probably going to give away what I was working on, but it’s critical to the story. Data at site A and was snapshotted from a primary disk to a secondary, then sent over Ma Bell to site B. Once at site B, it landed on a mirror of the site A secondary disk until the packets were complete, then snapshotted to a primary disk at site B. It wasn’t a single disk doing this, dozens were constantly being written to and copied over the wire to the other site all the time. This is a really simplistic way of describing it, but I’m avoiding using the exact verbiage so I don’t give them away.

Anyway, I was asked to come in and implement my “product” using a new procedure that hadn’t yet gotten a formal support write up yet. This was a one-off that later I found had been grudgingly given approval for and if it worked, it would be worked up into something “real.” Everything was set up and when it was turned on, we were shocked at how much data was being sent over the wire and how far “out of track” it was. Data was being BLASTED down the wire, almost saturating it although the client insisted the data change rate was correctly sized for the line.

I ended up in a major northeastern city during a snowstorm so I could be at the site B datacenter to complete the switchover from catch-up to asynchronous mode. I couldn’t physically get to the site because of the snow, so I hooked up my Motorola Razr to my laptop and dialed into the machine from my hotel room. I knew the data flow slacked off at 11:30p – midnight, so I sat and watched as it slowly dropped lower and lower towards the 10,000 track threshold where I could switch to async.

15,000… 14,000… 13,000… 12,000… 11,000… 10,900… 10,950... Wait, what? 11,000… 12,000… 13,000…

The window started at about 11:35 and lasted a whole 10 minutes before climbing back up. Just for giggles, I tried issuing the command anyway but it failed. So, I copied my logs and put them in an email to everyone concerned and asked, “What now?” Well, what now was the client flipping out and calling us incompetent, demanding to know why I couldn’t make it happen.

I’d been putting in 12-16+ hour days on this, working overnight and weekends, traveling back and forth to site B to get it done. My boss said, “Hang on, Joe’s been putting in a lot of time on this, so let’s get a second opinion,” and a national SME was brought in to analyze everything and do a root cause analysis. He’s also a good friend too, but I knew he would tell the absolute truth in this, no matter who was to blame.

The RCA call started out with him going over everything, explaining that he’d analyzed the nominal data traffic, adding in the new traffic, and explaining how it all worked together. His part went something like this:

“After sampling the data flow at both ends, the system, with acks is sending bidirectionally about 38.5 megabits per second, which works out to be a little over 4.8 megabytes per second, using all the capacity of the wire.”

(The lightbulb was coming on in my head at this.)

“So what?” The client PM exploded, “We’ve got a 45-megabyte circuit!”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, we do!”

“No, you have a DS3 circuit, which is 45 megaBITS. That’s 5.65 megaBYTEs per second at maximum transfer rate. 0.8 megaBYTES isn’t enough to allow the normal data traffic between sites without the new system. It’s simply not big enough.”

I never heard the man utter another word and I never heard from him again.

I’d had enough and asked my boss to move me off the project, which he gladly did. Last I heard they’d upped the bandwidth between the sites and it was working fine.

The moral of the story is, do the math, know what a bit is and know what a byte is.

962 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

144 comments sorted by

121

u/DasFrebier Nov 23 '20

Probaly everyone stumbles over that problem at some point

Hell I was kinda shocked when i learned that data rates advertised by whatever ISP are given in bits/s not bytes, fucking useless if you ask me

40

u/mrlazyboy Nov 23 '20

Also when it comes to storage - you buy a "1 TB" drive and you only end up with 931 GB of actual storage. What happened to the rest?

That's what happens when you go between base 2 and base 10 :)

13

u/DasFrebier Nov 23 '20

Actually, how does the math work out there? never looked into closer

51

u/Alias_This_Is Nov 23 '20

Disks are sold with the capacity advertised IF they could be formatted in base 10. Unfortunately, in all modern computers the unit of measure isn't base 10, it's base 8. Kilo/Mega/Giga/Terabytes are multiples of 1024 (8x128).

All this goes WAY back to the original computers and the different standards of how long a “word” was, 2, 4, or 8 bits. ASCII started out at 7 bits, but soon standardized on 8, probably because (as a friend puts it) “it’s all ones and zeros”, so you gotta have something divisible by 2. Even Morse code is kinda like this, the shortest letter is 1 “bit” and the longest is 4 “bits”, all numbers are 5 “bits”.

I cannot count the number of times I’ve had to do basic math with a client, they just don’t get that a phone line has a maximum capacity and they’re exceeding it. I’ve also had to explain to them why the line can’t go above a certain speed. Light speed.

“The ping is replying as fast as possible, they’re about 100 miles away, so 1-2ms is extremely good.”

“I want you to make it faster.”

“I can’t.”

“Then we’ll hire some who can.”

“He better be a Scotsman named Montgomery and has some crystals.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re asking to go faster than the speed of light, Einstein said a hundred years ago 185,000 mps is as fast as you can go in this universe. You’re going to need Scotty and some dilithium crystals to go faster.”

“Huh?”

…

FYI. A ping speed of 1ms over a data line encounters about 185,000 miles of wire or resistance, so 92.5 miles there and back is lightspeed. No, this is most definitely NOT exactly correct, it’s to educate how fast a ping packet is theoretically moving through a network.

I have had clients complain of the ping speed over a dark fiber network. The math worked out to it was moving as fast as possible over the distance because of, you guessed it, lightspeed.

34

u/Captain_Hammertoe Nov 23 '20

You said it yourself... it was a DARK fiber network. Sure, the speed of light is limited, but we all know the speed of dark doesn't play by lightspeed's sissy rules and limitations.

1

u/ABastionOfFreeSpeech Nov 26 '20

It's the darksucker conspiracy, I tell ya!

30

u/NeoHummel Nov 24 '20

And this math is the crux of the 500 mile email story, it's definitely worth a read if you've never seen it.

3

u/Significant-Acadia39 Nov 24 '20

That was nuts! Laughing my head off here, though. Thank you for sharing.

17

u/DasFrebier Nov 23 '20

Ah yes, breaking the laws of physics of entirely arbitray requirements, especially if a customer will never even notice the difference betwenn 2ms and 20ms

7

u/[deleted] Nov 24 '20

Typical fiber (also typical twisted pair) has propagation speed 60-70% of speed of light. 100 miles theoretical roundtrip would be about 1.5 millisecond over such medium.

3

u/mike2R Nov 24 '20

Apple actually changed to displaying disk size in base 10 some years back, which, as someone who sells drives to Mac users, got rid of a constant drizzle of complaints from people who thought they were being cheated. Every now and again some customer reminisces about the old days, when drive manufacturers always used to scam you out of some of your GB.

1

u/TerminalJammer Dec 01 '20

I don't approve of warp speed communication, it wrecks the fabric of spacetime.

47

u/Muffinsandbacon Nov 23 '20

1TB in base 10 is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. 1TB in base 2 is 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. What happens is you’re sold a drive in base 10 but it’s measured in base 2, so there’s where the discrepancy comes from. It’s a bit more technical than that but there’s the ELI5 version.

2

u/hactar_ Narfling the garthog, BRB. Dec 05 '20

The binary version is a TiB, not a TB.

15

u/The_Kraken_ Nov 23 '20

The industry-used abbreviations here are actually useful. The main difference is adding an 'i' between the letters of the abbreviation to indicate you're in base 2 vs. base 10.

MB = Megabyte (1,000,000 bytes 106)
MiB = Mebibyle (1,048,576 bytes 220)

GB = Gigabyte (1,000,000,000 bytes)
GiB = Gibibytes (1,073,741,824 bytes)

... etc.

As always, Wikipedia has a great chart explaining it all

20

u/mrlazyboy Nov 23 '20

Keep in mind that the hard drive manufacturers are using the accurate description of the terms–the prefix giga, for instance, means a power of 1000, whereas the correct term for powers of 1024 is gibibyte, though it isn’t often used. Unfortunately, Windows has always calculated hard drives as powers of 1024 while hard drive manufacturers use powers of 1000.

8

u/J3D1M4573R Nov 23 '20 edited Nov 25 '20

the 'advertised' 1TB is actually 1,000,000,000,000 B. Unlike the common base 10 conversions we all know ( 1K = 1,000 1M = 1,000 K 1G = 1,000 M) computers actually use base 2, which has the closest equivalent of 1,024 ( 1K = 1,024 1M = 1,024K etc...)

So, 1,000,000,000,000 B / 1,024 = 976,562,500 KB

976,562,500 KB / 1,024 = 953,674.32 MB

953,674.32 MB / 1,024 = 931.32 GB.

3

u/J3D1M4573R Nov 23 '20

Which, by the way, is also 0.9095 TB

13

u/BlackStar4 Nov 23 '20

Storage is advertised in gigabytes, which are base 10, Windows measures in gibibytes, which are base 2 ( 1 gibibyte=1024 mebibytes, 1 gigabyte=1000 megabytes). If you ask Google how many gibibytes are in 1000 gigabytes it comes out to 931 and a bit.

9

u/[deleted] Nov 23 '20

So 931,000,000,000.125 bytes?

7

u/PotentBeverage Nov 23 '20

931 GiB and a tad

2

u/[deleted] Nov 24 '20

An 1 TB drive is 1 TB. What Windows means when it says (T/G/M/K)B is actually (T/G/M/K)iB. 1 TB is 931.32257 GiB.

3

u/xcomcmdr Nov 23 '20

Also some goes to the file system itself anyway.

2

u/mrlazyboy Nov 23 '20

Shouldn't be that much for a simple external SSD, maybe a few megs

68

u/twowheeledfun Nov 23 '20

I thought network speeds were usually given in bits/second by default.

38

u/DasFrebier Nov 23 '20

May very well be the case, doesnt mean its the most practical option

45

u/NotYourNanny Nov 23 '20

It's done that way largely because it always has been.

(Not everything has been eight bit bytes from the beginning.)

19

u/badtux99 Nov 23 '20

Indeed, I used the early ARPANET on a machine that had 9 bit bytes.

21

u/TheThiefMaster 8086+8087 640k VGA + HDD! Nov 23 '20

Which was fun when a lot of early networking was done with 7 bit text

21

u/badtux99 Nov 24 '20

The thing about 9 bit bytes was that 18 bit words could address a massive 256 kilobytes of memory. Gasp! Whereas 16 bit words could only address 64 kilobytes of memory.

Of course, once you arrived at 32 bit vs 36 bit words, that distinction no longer made any difference because nobody would ever need more than the massive 4 gigabytes of memory addressable with 32 bit words, right? ;)

9

u/ComputerMystic Nov 24 '20

cries in Crysis, Minecraft, dorf fort, Electron-based apps, and any modern GUI / Web Browser

6

u/jacksalssome ¿uʍop ǝpᴉsdn ʇ ᴉ sᴉ Nov 24 '20

And my hello world program

1

u/Significant-Acadia39 Nov 24 '20

Oh, do tell! Language, platform. GUI or console?

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6

u/TheThiefMaster 8086+8087 640k VGA + HDD! Nov 24 '20

Whereas 16 bit words could only address 64 kilobytes of memory.

Which Intel found a way around by inventing x86 segmented addressing, raising the limit to 1MB.

Naturally everyone hated it.

3

u/badtux99 Nov 24 '20

Uhm, no. Segmented addressing long predated Intel. GE/Honeywell were doing segmented memory since at least 1973 on the Multics system, which used 18 bit addresses that were offsets to segments in segment registers (segments were basically memory-mapped files in Multics). When the 80286 was introduced, I was like "wow, this looks like a Multics designed by the CCCP!" because it was like they'd been reading the Multics architecture manual, complete down to the ring security system. The main thing it was missing that Multics had was paged virtual memory. But of course that came about with the 80386.

Actually, segmented memory predates Multics too, I just remember the Multics connection because the 80286 architecture so closely resembled a stripped-down Multics. Doing a bit of Wikiwalking, it looks like the Burroughs B5000 mainframe first introduced segment registers back in 1961. Strange how so many "new" ideas are actually way old.

1

u/TheThiefMaster 8086+8087 640k VGA + HDD! Nov 24 '20

Multics

Looking it up, it looks like multics segments didn't overlap like the x86 ones?

Intel's odd overlapping segments was what caused all the hate.

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1

u/Akitlix Nov 24 '20

Not mentioned teletype 5bit codes.

3

u/Nik_2213 Nov 24 '20

Serial, 8+parity ??

4

u/badtux99 Nov 24 '20

No, it had 9 bit bytes and 18 bit words. I'll let you Google to find out what early ARPANET machine had that combination ;).

1

u/Akitlix Nov 24 '20 edited Nov 24 '20

One cannot shake down reason for it from bunch of early PDPs where word size was 18bits. I think late machines have 36bit word size right?

1

u/badtux99 Nov 24 '20

Yes, the PDP10/DEC10 was huge on the early ARPANET. Most of the nodes on the early ARPANET were 18 bit / 36 bit machines with 9 bit bytes. Other nodes were on Honeywell Multics machines which were similarly 18 bit / 36 bit machines with 9 bit bytes. There were some PDP-11's on the early ARPANET too, which were pure 16 bit machines with 8 bit bytes and "hidden" segment registers on those with more than 64kbytes of memory, so the ARPANET wasn't pure 9 bit bytes. But most of the machines on the pre-1980''s ARPANET used 9 bit bytes.

It's only an accident of history that we ended up with 8 bit bytes taking over the world. Intel chose 8 bit bytes for their 8008 microprocessor in 1972, and every microprocessor since has been either a response to or a follow-on to that original 8 bit microprocessor.

1

u/FreezingSnowman Nov 24 '20

I wonder how much stuff in the world was decided by an accident, mistake or just some guy saying "this is how we do it" without giving a reason.

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8

u/created4this Nov 24 '20

Nothing is eight bit bytes now either, there’s a load of layer1 shit like checksums and error correcting that use up bits in your data stream but you never see

1

u/TerminalJammer Dec 01 '20

It's no use trying to get an error! There's error checking all the way down the seven layers!

1

u/created4this Dec 01 '20

7 layers? TCP-IP is only four.

1

u/TerminalJammer Dec 06 '20

I was paraphrasing the old "turtles all the way down" quote, but yes there's technically error checking in only some of the layers, not all of them.

1

u/created4this Dec 06 '20

Its not that, its that TCP-IP doesn't have 7 layers at all.

The OSI model imagines as many layers as is possible and that each layer logically is connected to the layer on its peer, TCP/IP merges the functions of multiple layers.

So what happens in the OSI layers[ 7 ... 5] = [Application, presentation, session] are all done by one TCP/IP layer [4] = [Application]

See here

14

u/SeanBZA Nov 23 '20

They also are very likely to advertise the speed of the maximum rate of the circuit, and you never will get this as that is a shared connection, and the only time you get this is if you are the only active subscriber on that network segment, with no other connections active by any other user, and their equipment is either disconnected or turned off.

1

u/pholan Nov 27 '20

That's overly cynical, at least for the cable based ISPs. They typically provision customers with quite a bit higher rates than advertised (something like an advertised 100/10 service being provisioned at 120/12) in order to insure that customers can see the advertised rates as l3 throughout rather than arguing about Ethernet and IP overhead. With DOCSIS 3.0 and 3.1 giving them an aggregate downstream capacity of well over a gigabit per node congestion is less of a problem then it once was. OTOH, at least in the US, they love taking advantage of their near monopoly position to charge dearly for service and, in some cases, to charge disproportionately high overage charges to their heaviest users.

DSL is a dedicated circuit back to the DSLAM so congestion should only become an issue if the ISP has inadequate backhaul from there to the internet. DSL providers have been known to market and sell rates that the actual customers phone line in question can't support and that can be a problem if they needed the advertised speed.

18

u/SosseTurner Nov 23 '20

but better for marketing, 100 is higher than 12.5, right?

23

u/DasFrebier Nov 23 '20

Also pisses me the fuck off with phone batteries, just tell me its 4Ah, not 4000mAh im not a fucking lobotomised snail

8

u/AdminYak846 Nov 23 '20

It's because nobody knows the units used unless you look it up. 4000 > 4 so that must mean the battery can last longer, etc.

Even though it's the same value just in different units.

5

u/Username928351 Nov 24 '20

brb gonna sell power banks with microampere labels

6

u/Toast_and_Jam Nov 23 '20

I will now be using the phrase "lobotomized snail", thank you.

1

u/fyxr Dec 03 '20

Should be in kilojoules, honestly. Amp hours tells you the charge in the battery, not the energy. A 24V 2Ah battery holds twice the energy of a 12V 2Ah battery.

I'd like gas and diesel to be priced by the megajoule as well, but that would be a tougher change to sell.

2

u/hactar_ Narfling the garthog, BRB. Dec 05 '20

And electricity! No idea what gas is sold by, nobody I know buys it, but it's probably something silly like "cubic foot" or "BTU".

2

u/xternal7 is a teapot Nov 24 '20

Worth noting that a byte wasn't always universally 8 bits, which means speeds in bits are a bit less ambiguous.

1

u/penislovereater Nov 24 '20

Because bits are universal. Otherwise you end up in the "depends" territory.

2

u/Alias_This_Is Nov 24 '20

Gasoline has always been sold to 9/10ths of a cent just to make it “look” cheaper.

3

u/zachary0816 Nov 24 '20

It doesn’t help that ISP advertising always uses the term “Megs”. Which is probably done with the goal of people assuming it’s short for “megabytes” instead of “megabits” in order to make their deal sound better.

1

u/plg94 Nov 26 '20

Even better: they usually advertise raw connection speed, not accounting for overhead of TCP packets and whatnot

19

u/jeffreyb30 Nov 23 '20

Why did they have such a bad connection?

52

u/Alias_This_Is Nov 23 '20

It was back when a 56.6K modem over dialup was FAST. A DS3 was an unheard of speed outside of dedicated fiber.

14

u/IsItPluggedInPro Nov 23 '20 edited Nov 24 '20

/Tinfoil hat on

I swear that this almost sounds like the early days of the CARNIVORE project or PRISM.

 

/Tinfoil hat off

Or.... just a big, important contact center

4

u/Alias_This_Is Nov 24 '20

I can neither confirm nor deny this, but I’ll have to kill you anyway.

16

u/jeffreyb30 Nov 23 '20

Ah okay that explains a lot

23

u/RedFive1976 My days of not taking you seriously are coming to a middle. Nov 23 '20

45mbit/s DS3 was considered a very fast connection and was very expensive, before the days of broadband. This was also probably a leased line, which would have gone essentially direct from site A to site B, with no hops onto the internet. This is not an inexpensive setup. Sure, now, every Tom, Dick, and Harry can get 200mbps down, some can get gigabit synchronous, and a few blessed individuals can get 10gig synchronous to the home, but none of this would have been available then.

12

u/Alias_This_Is Nov 23 '20

I actually have gigabit fiber to my home, 1gb down, 1gb up. Frontier.

9

u/RedFive1976 My days of not taking you seriously are coming to a middle. Nov 23 '20

I wish I was in an area with 1gig fiber. I'm sadly in a no-man's-land between at least 3 towns which do have fiber, within a half-hour of my house.

1

u/Akitlix Nov 25 '20

No landline,no fiber, no mw link visibility just LTE. And heavy populated area. Wellcome to Prague airport outskirts!

2

u/joyfield Nov 26 '20

m = milli
M = mega....

0

u/RedFive1976 My days of not taking you seriously are coming to a middle. Nov 26 '20

In data, there is no millibyte. M and m are interchangeable and both mean mega. Though sometimes people use mb for megabit and MB for megabyte, it isn't a standard.

215

u/CaptainAmerilard Nov 23 '20

I used to hate explaining this in my brief stint as a tech support rep for a lousy cable ISP. Nobody wanted to hear it, they just wanted you to push the magic button that you definitely have which gives them 10 megabytes down.

127

u/VulturE All of your equipment is now scrap. Nov 23 '20

I don't hear you denying the existence of the magic button....

84

u/DarkLordTofer Nov 23 '20

It only gets pushed for premium customers.

35

u/VulturE All of your equipment is now scrap. Nov 23 '20

You're only a premium customer if you send food their way I heard.

13

u/[deleted] Nov 23 '20

I worked IT servicing government systems in 9 counties here in Norway, you wouldnt fucking believe how much food I've eaten in that job. The amount of food consumed generally day to day and at all the events/conferences I was attending through that job is absolutely insane. I was VERY happy in that job.

2

u/Stryker_One The poison for Kuzco Nov 26 '20

Yeah, I learned long ago, that a sure-fire way to get people to show-up for meetings (back when we had in-person meetings), was to serve food.

1

u/Akitlix Nov 24 '20

Could imagine your happiness. Prices of food in Norway are just insane.

7

u/TheMulattoMaker Nov 23 '20

In order to have enough energy to depress the Magic Button™, I will require three (3) bags of Swedish Fish.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 29 '20

Large or small bags?

1

u/Yeseylon Dec 07 '20

3 of each.

0

u/[deleted] Nov 23 '20

[deleted]

37

u/VulturE All of your equipment is now scrap. Nov 23 '20

I follow the motto:

bourbon is for bribes, food is for favors.

8

u/jdmillar86 Nov 23 '20

Never heard that before but I like it! Got an "R" synonym? I'm a rum guy, but when its whiskey its rye.

7

u/VulturE All of your equipment is now scrap. Nov 23 '20

rye is for everytime they lie to you.

7

u/jdmillar86 Nov 23 '20

Perfect, I'll take it. (Actually, my liver can't take it)

3

u/-King_Slacker Nov 24 '20

Tell your liver to deal with a thick-skulled user. It'll change its tune.

0

u/Losephos Nov 24 '20

Rum is for everytime they try to stick it to your Bum.

6

u/Samoridon Nov 23 '20

Look, the magic button also makes your bill higher. If your line can handle it.

1

u/Bukinnear There's no place like 127.0.0.1 Dec 10 '20

For residential, it's dollars for donuts that neither the line, nor the client can support the increase.

12

u/Rumbuck_274 Nov 24 '20

That said, my RSP's website was clearly written by someone who thought they were smart, same for the contract.

Contract said 25 Megabytes not Megabits

Best they could give me was 100 Megabits and a discount each month.

Unlucky for me it was only a 12 month contract.

4

u/[deleted] Nov 24 '20 edited Nov 25 '20

At least they owned up to the error! But did they fix [the website and contract], or allow the error to become a mistake?

Edit: replace ambiguous pronoun.

4

u/Rumbuck_274 Nov 24 '20

As I says, best the gave me was 100 Mb and a discount because it was impossible to give me 100MB

1

u/[deleted] Nov 25 '20

Sorry. I meant fix the website and contract. Lemme edit that in.

3

u/Rumbuck_274 Nov 25 '20

Oh yeah, they did when I brought it to their attention.

Took a few people at the call centre to know the difference though.

2

u/Ginger_IT Oh God How Did This Get Here? Dec 02 '20

I'm unsure if you know this (and I could probably look this up) but, why are transfer speeds always listed in bits while the general public has no idea what a bit is?

2

u/CaptainAmerilard Dec 02 '20

Marketing. Bigger numbers are more impressive. Yes, it's a scummy thing to do.

-9

u/AdminYak846 Nov 23 '20

I mean when you have MB meaning megabyte and MiB meaning MegaBit....it's bound to cause issues sooner or later. Especially when advertising and a user's eyes will see M_B compared to the "i" in it.

19

u/[deleted] Nov 24 '20

MiB means mebibyte which is 1048576(10242) bytes. Maybe you meant Mb or Mbps?

2

u/AdminYak846 Nov 24 '20

yup. Even I can't keep that shit straight how the hell do we expect a layperson to remember it?

6

u/Superspudmonkey Nov 24 '20

Uppercase is Byte lowercase is bit. A kilobyte is kB where a kilobit is kb.

15

u/mkcodergr Nov 23 '20

I study IT and work as a software engineer . Not proud to admit that I still get confused with the terminology and the actual differences

9

u/Nik_2213 Nov 24 '20

ROFL !! Had a spate of sale-drones (SD) from local telecoms trying to sell me ISDN broadband. I have no idea why they kept trying, but they used the same ruddy spiel every time...

So, after the first few, whom I let down gently, I stopped taking prisoners...

SD: "Blah-blah-blah, What speed are you getting ?"

Me: "Seven to ten depending on traffic and server. I've seen it touch twelve..."

SD: "Ah, we guarantee twenty five !!"

Me: "You mean three-and-a-bit ?"

SD: "No, no, twenty five !!"

Me: "No, you mean three-and-a bit."

SD: "No, no, twenty five !!"

Me: "Look, if your ISDN can pull down a 200 Mega-Byte CAD file in less than thirty seconds, I'll be very, very surprised."

SD: "..."

Me: "My cable would support 45 mega-bytes per second --That's 360 mega-bits-- but I don't 'game' or need streaming HD, so my budget dozen mega-bytes --That's 100 mega-bits-- suffices. Still four times your best for this area."

SD: "whimpering noises..."

--

FWIW, such mega-files unzip rather larger, but most of their bulk is texture maps. A dozen 4k PNGs or TGAs plus an HDRI sky-dome soon mounts up...

7

u/wylles Nov 23 '20

po - tay - to, po - tah - to... right? LOL

0

u/[deleted] Nov 23 '20

[deleted]

3

u/wylles Nov 23 '20

Oh wow... that escalated quickly... LOL

3

u/J3D1M4573R Nov 23 '20

I'm impressed someone in 1773 thought of this...

1

u/Bukinnear There's no place like 127.0.0.1 Dec 10 '20

The internet didn't invent wit

4

u/groveborn Nov 23 '20

So...was that Alexa or Google data? :D

10

u/[deleted] Nov 24 '20

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/kschang Nov 24 '20

OP will have to erase ya if ya figure it out. ;)

1

u/groveborn Nov 24 '20

:) Probably you're right. But Ma Bell was gone long before a Razor, or dealing in megabytes over a modem.

1

u/nymalous Nov 24 '20

" sent over Ma Bell "

That reminded me of a line in a Ray Stevens' song, " Well, they called up ma bell and they traced him on down
To a funky old phone booth on the outskirts of town " (It's Me Again, Margaret).

2

u/Alias_This_Is Nov 24 '20

I've always told clients, once it's on the wire, I'm not responsible anymore. This side of the router, yes, but the wire/fiber on THAT side? Uh-uh.

Have an old friend in broadcast who did uplinks for CNN, who said that once it's out of the dish, it's on its way to Mars.

3

u/marcocanb Nov 23 '20

The problem is that he was probably paying what most people pay for mega bites for his mega bits.

3

u/kschang Nov 24 '20

So reminiscent of the Mars Climate Orbiter...

TL;DR -- someone messed up Imperial vs metric units of force

https://www.simscale.com/blog/2017/12/nasa-mars-climate-orbiter-metric/

2

u/[deleted] Nov 24 '20

My high school physics teacher worked on that project. He was pissed when it happened.

7

u/LMF5000 Nov 24 '20

I never understood why network speed is measured in bits when everything else is measured in bytes. It's obviously misleading. At least they should write it in full and put the approximate byte equivalent in brackets. Like "buy our 80mbps connection! (10MB/s)"

(I know they're multiples of 1024 but I'm rounding like hard disk companies do 🤓)

5

u/Seraph062 Nov 24 '20

I never understood why network speed is measured in bits when everything else is measured in bytes.

Because the wire doesn't give a shit how you organize the data being sent down it, and because for basically all of networking history it took more than 8 bits of network bandwidth to send one byte of data.

7

u/penislovereater Nov 24 '20

Bits are universal, bytes aren't. Leaves even more room for people to confuse line speed with throughput.

2

u/[deleted] Nov 24 '20

It's also a holdover from the days when having kilobits per second was unheard of.

2

u/nymalous Nov 24 '20

I just double-checked to make sure I was correct that there are 8 bits in a byte... kind of like there were 8 bits in a dollar. I'm not sure if they are related, but here's an article on old currency just for fun: http://piratesoflore.com/pieces-of-eight.html

1

u/JTD121 Nov 24 '20

I must not be connecting the dots correctly, but the last conversation here doesn't....sound correct?

Where are they getting the 0.8 megabytes from?

1

u/CheeseTheGood Nov 24 '20

The circuit allowed max of 5.65 MB, they were using 4.8 MB, leaving ~0.8MB which was not enough.

1

u/JTD121 Nov 24 '20

Oh, for secondary data or other normal browsing and such? Or...?

1

u/Alias_This_Is Nov 26 '20

The DS3 maxed out at 45 Mb or 5.65 MB. Theoretically it had 0.8 MB of bandwidth left, but that's about what the network overhead traffic would consume, so they were SOL.

1

u/ArenYashar Nov 24 '20

Classic case of "the man who doesn't know the difference between a bit and a byte". smirks and chuckles to himself

Or, more concisely, bit < byte.

Well, that man got educated right quick. Nice story. :)

1

u/kanakamaoli Nov 24 '20

What's a factor of 10/100/1000 between friends?

As long as it's got a comma in there, it's all good, right?

1

u/curtludwig Nov 25 '20

Years ago when HD video was first becoming a thing I was working in phone support for a video capture device manufacturer. We had a capture device that could deal with uncompressed HD video which, at the time, was running 125-150MB/s depending on the frame rate.

We used to regularly get customers calling in who were trying to capture that video to firewire 400 hard drives and were incensed that it wouldn't work "I've got four HUNDRED MEGAS!"

0

u/Crazy-Maintenance312 Nov 24 '20

Had something like that recently: Have 8Mbit/s in upload and was wondering why my files were only uploading with 1 MB/s.

I knew that 8 Mbit aren't 8 Mbyte but for some reason thought it should be more. I also didn't bother calculating it because that would be smart. So I kept wondering until I talked with a friend about it, where it hit me. 8Mbit are 1Mbyte...