[CLUE-Tech] Ricochet is in Denver

[Jed S. Baer]

On 03 Sep 2002 11:04:47 -0600
Jeremiah Stanley <lists at miah.org> wrote:



> One thing to keep in mind is that there is a difference between Kbps and
> Kb. This is a marketing discrimination that distorts what they are
> advertising. A Kb is a 1024 bits per second, while a Kpbs is one eigth
> that size or 0.125 Kb. This explains why modems are 56k but pull about
> 6-7k/sec.

> /* this was how it was explained to me. Post if you have a better
> explanation for how modems work for different services. */

Uh, sounds like marketing-droid-speak to me. I suspect that whoever
uttered this jumble meant to distinquish between Bps (that's Bytes, with a
captial b) and bps (bits -- lowercase b). I've never encountered any data
rate statistics which weren't in bits/sec (except for the old baudot
specification -- well, in that case, the wave transition did, in fact,
signal a data bit, but I digress). Yeah, the status-bar thingies on many
modern software packages do, in fact, display Bytes/sec, often using
"kilo" units. I never pay any attention to them.

Note that 7KB/sec = 64,512 bps (9 bits per byte -- don't forget the stop
bit).

jed
-- 
We're frogs who are getting boiled in a pot full of single-character
morphemes, and we don't notice. - Larry Wall; Perl6, Apocalypse 5