Bug 150320

Summary:	Speed units should be bits/s, not bytes/s (currently KB/s)
Product:	[Unmaintained] kio	Reporter:	Juha Tuomala <tuju>
Component:	general	Assignee:	David Faure <faure>
Status:	RESOLVED INTENTIONAL
Severity:	wishlist	CC:	nate
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Fedora RPMs
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Juha Tuomala 2007-09-29 11:58:44 UTC

Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.5.7)
Installed from:    Fedora RPMs

Speed units should be bits/s, not bytes/s

In telecommunication engineering, information transfer rates are indicated using bit/s (kbit/s) units, not bytes/s (kB/s). Byte is information storage unit.

That is the reason why every network interface (host interfaces, switches, routers, ADSL terminals, mobile terminals) show the units in bit/s prefixed with some SI multiplier. That's why your harddrive says giga *bytes*.

Bytes are fine for amount of transferred information or actual storage. Currently comparing your known connection speeds to progress dialog display, it's confusing and inaccurate if you do rough scaling in head (byte == 8bits, /10 --> 20% error).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kbit/s

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobyte

And once you've have it on plate, SI unit kilo symbol is small k, not K.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilo-

Comment 1 Juha Tuomala 2007-09-29 12:45:53 UTC

Related bug #150321

Comment 2 Maciej Pilichowski 2007-09-29 21:15:27 UTC

This report is reported for several apps -- it looks more like a doctrine thing, than real need. Sorry to interrupt, but it is better reporting useful stuff. And from when this kind of issue is a BUG?!

Comment 3 Juha Tuomala 2007-09-30 10:32:21 UTC

Yes, this issue affects to many apps. And actually it should be global setting in kcontrol like locale stuff is. The real need is that shown figures are unrelated to local 100Mbit/s LAN, 12Mbit/s ADSL and 34kbit/s GPRS link.

> And from when this kind of issue is a BUG?

You're right, this is not a bug, but wish item, my bad. But unfortunately I can't change it from this UI.

Related issue #150327

Comment 4 Nate Graham 2018-04-23 20:49:06 UTC

(In reply to Juha Tuomala from comment #0)
> Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.5.7)
> Installed from:    Fedora RPMs
> 
> Speed units should be bits/s, not bytes/s
> 
> In telecommunication engineering,

Ah, but most of us are not telecommuncations engineers. :) For average users, this offers no benefit whatsoever, and it would be terribly confusing for the units to differ between on-disk sizes and transferred sizes.

Same deal as Bug 150327.