Re: Excessive bandwidth use

[Shachar Shemesh <shachar@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Roger Dingledine wrote:
>   
>> So just so we make sure we're on the same page here, when the docs say
>> "K" you mean 1000, and when you say "M" you mean 1,000,000, right? Or
>> are you "one of those people" who count bytes in a little over the
>> metric meaning of the suffixes?
>>     
>
> K is 1<<10, and M is 1<<20.
>   
You tell that to the people manufacturing hard disks.
>   
>> All sarcasm aside, if the whole industry measures a quantity using a
>> certain unit, and one program measures it using another, I call that "a
>> usability bug".
>>     
>
> Right. Alas, I assure you there's a big community of people who'd be
> confused and upset if we went the other way too.
Taking my case as a usability test case, I did spot that deviation from
what I know when I read the docs. I just failed to remember it over
time. This brings to mind two possible solutions:
1. Have a global setting saying "bandwidth in bits"
2. Use a suffix (say - 1MB vs. 1Mb)

I think 1 is less confusing.
>  Most network things
> measure in bits, and most application things measure in bytes.
>   
Being as it is that there is no possible way to change the meaning now
without breaking stuff, it doesn't matter whether I agree with the above
statement or not :-)
>  most (Windows) users measure application bandwidth in bytes.
>   
I'll idly wonder what those admins do when they buy network equipment.
Like I said above - a moot point. I'm not suggesting we remove the byte
measurement at this stage.

Shachar