Internet Speed Test

I tested the Broadband speed in the site http://www.ip-details.com/internet-speed-test/ it shows the results(uploading speed,Downloading speed)In KBPS .But i want to check out it in MBPS where can i test that help me please??

Edited by piller1 (Tue 29-Sep-09 09:23:44)

This site!
Results are in both Kbps and Mbps http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest.html

In reply to a post by piller1:

I tested the Broadband speed in the site http://www.ip-details.com/internet-speed-test/ it shows the results(uploading speed,Downloading speed)In KBPS .But i want to check out it in MBPS where can i test that help me please??

Eh? Just divide by 1,000!

Maybe I've misunderstood your question but it seems equivalent to:

"This website measures distances in metres, I want one that measures in kilometres".

Which is verging on nonsensical

OTOH if you've found a site measuring in kiloBYTES per second (KBps) and want one that measures in megaBITS per second (Mbps) then divide by 1,000 and multiply by 8 (there's 8 bits in a byte). It's still telling you the same thing but I agree that bytes->bits is a more irritating conversion

In reply to a post by Andrue:

Eh? Just divide by 1,000!

Or is it 1024 !

Comms has always used K=1000 (eg. a 33.6K modem was really 33,600bps) - its use predates the use of computers to transmit data.

Where it gets slightly confusing (for the uninitiated, at least) is we routinely use K=1024 to refer to the *amount* of data transferred.

Edited by TonyHoyle (Tue 29-Sep-09 13:12:52)

I've read that. Looking at TBB's speedtester it looks like they've gone for 1024 though...

As mentioned elsewhere kilo = thousand, mega = million. How many thousand in a million? Yep 1,000, so divide the kbps figure by 1,000 and you're there.

That speed test is a pile of steaming inaccurate pap though, I just measured my service there at just over 5Mbps then elsewhere at nearly 50.

In reply to a post by b4dger:

In reply to a post by Andrue:

Eh? Just divide by 1,000!

Or is it 1024 !

1,000. Always 1,000

That old '1,024 is nearly 1,000' nonsense was never officially recognised. Speaking personally I stopped using it many years ago. There is an alternate, software specific, set of binary prefixes but hardly anyone uses them. They are the same as the SI ones but with an 'i' eg;

1kiB=1.024kB

In reply to a post by b4dger:

I've read that. Looking at TBB's speedtester it looks like they've gone for 1024 though...

Really? That's a bit odd. The TBB team are well aware of SI units because it's cropped up in the past. OTOH in practice it is tricky when you're presenting data to the user. So many people still remember the old 'powers of two' units :-/

When you're talking about line speeds then power of two has never been used, so there's nothing to remember. The ambiguty only comes up with hard disk sizes (thanks, HD manufacturers!) and consequently things like file sizes (depends on the OS you're using which gets used). Of course memory is always described in 1024 units...

If they've used 1024 for a speed tester that's slightly odd...

In reply to a post by Andrue:

That old '1,024 is nearly 1,000' nonsense was never officially recognised.

It's still used in the computer industry.

Memory and disk, and hence data, are measured with K = 1024, M = 1048576 and so on, because it is easier and more efficient to build and address memory devices in powers of 2. After all they are really binary digital computers.

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

In reply to a post by Andrue:

That old '1,024 is nearly 1,000' nonsense was never officially recognised.

It's still used in the computer industry.

Memory and disk, and hence data, are measured with K = 1024, M = 1048576 and so on, because it is easier and more efficient to build and address memory devices in powers of 2. After all they are really binary digital computers.

Nah. In this day and age powers of two are more trouble than they are worth outside of embedded systems. It's far easier to work in powers of ten as it is in most things and on your typical computer it really makes no odds. The efficiency saving of having an array with 8,192 elements instead of 10,000 is miniscule and far outwheighed by the benefits of me being able to quickly calculate how much storage I need for six of them.

With modern hardware software developers are no longer tied to the old constraints. We can express ideas in terms that are better suited to our brains and SI is a lot easier than 2^x

SI units are what proper engineers use. It isn't 'cool' be to different in this case - just silly and inconvenient

That's a terrible example - 8192 is a *much* better figure to use, as this is memory and is *always* expressed using powers of two (just try buying a 8.192MB memory stick and see how far it gets you). Multiplying 8*6 in your head isn't exactly hard.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

(there's 8 bits in a byte)

As we are having the other debate I thought it a good time to point out (again) that this is not universally true.

Especially if someone's had a nybble at them

Cool or not, it's the way computers work internally, that I'm talking about. You are free to design and program your applications using decimals, and it would be stupid not to do so.

You talk as if software has only recently been designed to cater for decimals; far from it

In your example a memory of 10000 elements/words/bytes would need an Address Bus 14 wide (each capable of carrying +/- current or 0/1 or Yes/No). Consequently 6384 of the possible values would be wasted; i.e values 10000 to 16383 go to waste when they could be usefully employed at no extra cost.

BTW: One of the 1st computer systems I worked on in the '60s was BCD (binary coded decimal) based. It a memory of exactly 10000 storage chars that could hold the digits 0-9. We soon dropped such architecture LOL!

In reply to a post by TonyHoyle:

That's a terrible example - 8192 is a *much* better figure to use, as this is memory and is *always* expressed using powers of two (just try buying a 8.192MB memory stick and see how far it gets you). Multiplying 8*6 in your head isn't exactly hard.

It's harder than 10*6. I reckon everyone reading this post can immediately work that out in their heads - it's so simple that it's automtic. 8*6 OTOH requires thought for most people - especially those that are the product of the education system of the last couple of decades.

I'd also guess you've never been in a real-world software development environment. Sadly most of them are poorly run and/or not given enough time to do their job properly. Most developers either through laziness or lack of time will not bother to reach for a calculator. They will do their arithmetic in their heads and often take a wild guess at the answer. Working with powers of ten reduces the chances of mistakes.

For most applications the hardware requirements are irrelevant. Very few programs stress a computer sufficiently to require the developer to give a damn. 8192kb or 10,000kb makes no odds. You use as much storage as suits your purposes and it either fits or it doesn't. If it doesn't fit (which is pretty damn' rare) it will be by such a magnitude of difference that a couple of mega bytes is neither here nor there.

Personally I try to protect my team from crazy managers and do my best to give them the time and resources they need. Unfortunately I have to acknowledge the real world and compromise in some areas - perfect software is often last to market and flops as a result. If I found any of my team wasting their time trying to fit everything into power of two 'magic numbers' I'd have a quiet word them about it. The gains just aren't there. They'd get more benefit using the time to suf the web - at least they'd get a break from work that way.

In reply to a post by gomezz:

In reply to a post by Andrue:

(there's 8 bits in a byte)

As we are having the other debate I thought it a good time to point out (again) that this is not universally true.

That's true but I bet that 95% of developers, applications, users and computers are operating in a world where 8 bits equals a byte

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

In your example a memory of 10000 elements/words/bytes would need an Address Bus 14 wide (each capable of carrying +/- current or 0/1 or Yes/No). Consequently 6384 of the possible values would be wasted; i.e values 10000 to 16383 go to waste when they could be usefully employed at no extra cost.

Very few developers these days know what an address bus is. There's actually not that many that know what a byte is. I worry sometimes about the younger generation

..but then again it's probably what the old-school people have always felt as time moved on. The younger generation are simlply being saved from the hassle and baggage of the binary system under their fingers. They are free to expend energy in more productive areas. It's called progress. The work my generation did has laid a foundation on which the younger guys can build without having to reinvent the wheel. Talking to my Dad who spent time at ICL shows that his generation knew about things that I didn't.

Actually some of that is just sad. When I first heard about virtual memory I thought it was a great idea that someone at Intel or Microsoft had invented. Then I discovered that it was actually used in the 1970s. On the plus side - whilst I understand how Virtual Memory works I have never had to program paging registers on a CPU and I don't try and make my structures multiples of 4kb in size

Edited by Andrue (Tue 29-Sep-09 18:14:01)

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

BTW: One of the 1st computer systems I worked on in the '60s was BCD (binary coded decimal) based. It a memory of exactly 10000 storage chars that could hold the digits 0-9. We soon dropped such architecture LOL!

English Electric Leo III worked in BCD and had a hardware register which enabled calculations in £sd or imperial weights to be carried out easily. You just set that register to cause carry-over at the required places, and of course these were standard settings so nothing to think about re the required values.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

had a hardware register which enabled calculations in £sd or imperial weights to be carried out easily.

Well it would do that, wouldn't it, in a computer designed for Joe Lyons' teashops and grocery emporiums! LOL

Exactly.
ICT 1900s with Cobol were like going back to the dark ages when I moved onto them.

Well, that's Cobol for you! Thankfully I never used it on 1900s

Someone had better tell Microsoft to stop using KB and MB the way they do then.

Look in explorer and see how many bytes they have to a kilobyte - you'll find it is 1024. I don't have an apple to check but suspect it is the same.

It has been the case for at least the 20 years I've been working in IT. File sizes are always done in factors of 1024. Memory always has been (as mentioned above). When hard disks came out they were usually done in factors of 1024. Then some bright spark decided that their hard disks would look bigger if they went over to using 1000 and confused everything as it became difficult to tell which was used (plus you would buy a 100MB hard disk and windows would report its unformatted size as 80MB - then you'd wonder where the other 20MB had gone - had someone stolen it?

It is not as cut and dried as you think and KB being 1024Bytes is still well used in the industry even if you feel it is uncool.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

For most applications the hardware requirements are irrelevant. Very few programs stress a computer sufficiently to require the developer to give a damn. 8192kb or 10,000kb makes no odds. You use as much storage as suits your purposes and it either fits or it doesn't. If it doesn't fit (which is pretty damn' rare) it will be by such a magnitude of difference that a couple of mega bytes is neither here nor there.

Where I worked we spent a good deal of our time carving up application code and data areas into banks of memory that would fit into the addressing limits and still have the rights areas visible at the time each machine code in each of 50 odd threads was executed. Every last word of memory counted and debugging non-visibility problems was all part of the game where the trusty octalator was very much an essential tool as you pored over stacks of binary dumps with highlighter pen and strips of post-its to mark them up.

Edited by gomezz (Wed 30-Sep-09 09:11:23)

In reply to a post by ian72:

Someone had better tell Microsoft to stop using KB and MB the way they do then.

Why? Do you still regard Microsoft as the gold standard in the computer industry?

It has been the case for at least the 20 years I've been working in IT.

So what? Times change. 20 years ago software development was a fledgling industry. These days we're trying to be recognised as part of the wider engineering community and that means accepting more rigorous rules and adhering to the internationally agreed standards.

It is not as cut and dried as you think and KB being 1024Bytes is still well used in the industry even if you feel it is uncool.

I never said it was cut and dried and I certainly never implied it was 'uncool'.

Then some bright spark decided that their hard disks would look bigger if they went over to using 1000 and confused everything

Wrong.

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

"Hard disk drive manufacturers state capacity in decimal units. Unlike computer memory chips, disk drives have no addressing restrictions to force sector capacities to powers of two. This usage has a long tradition, even predating the SI system of decimal prefixes adopted in 1960, as follows"

The 'cool' factor is coming from people who think it's 'cool' to be different to everyone else. More sensible people can see that converting from powers of 2 values to those used everywhere else is a PITA that confuses people and impedes progress.

In reply to a post by gomezz:

In reply to a post by Andrue:

For most applications the hardware requirements are irrelevant. Very few programs stress a computer sufficiently to require the developer to give a damn. 8192kb or 10,000kb makes no odds. You use as much storage as suits your purposes and it either fits or it doesn't. If it doesn't fit (which is pretty damn' rare) it will be by such a magnitude of difference that a couple of mega bytes is neither here nor there.

Where I worked we spent a good deal of our time carving up application code and data areas into banks of memory that would fit into the addressing limits and still have the rights areas visible at the time each machine code in each of 50 odd threads was executed. Every last word of memory counted and debugging non-visibility problems was all part of the game where the trusty octalator was very much an essential tool as you pored over stacks of binary dumps with highlighter pen and strips of post-its to mark them up.

Oh aye, in the past. I remember doing that myself back in the late 90s. People developing software for embedded controllers likely still do.

But for most developers on most systems these days it's just a none-issue. Even if it were an issue most things simply don't fit into that scheme. It would be hugely wasteful to round everything up so that a power of two size was used. All it takes is for one item not to follow that rule and everything higher up memory is on a 'nuisance' boundary.

In fact with managed languages like Java and the .NET family the concept of a 'memory address' barely exists. Back when I was new to C# I tripped over that several times. Just because you have:

SomeClass sc=new SomeClass();

does not mean that 'sc' is a fixed numerical value. It can and likely will change without you knowing about it (objects get moved around over time as the garbage collector does its stuff). Anyone that has passed a 'pointer' from managed to unmanaged code will find that out the hardway. Even function pointers will change which is where I first fell into the trap. I passed the address of a static function into unmanaged code and when it tried to call it back it sometimes crashed. Turns out the static function wasn't always where I'd left it

In C++:

int f=(int)sc;

Is valid and only moderately stupid (mainly because of the loss of typing information). If you reverse that later and know what you're doing it's quite safe.

In C# it won't compile and is meaningless and very dangerous. Reversing it would result in undefined behaviour no matter when you did it.

Tempres fugit, I guess :-/

Where does OCTAL figure in all this then, I thought that apart from binary, on, off, computers were constrained by octal?

Edited by TrevorSP (Wed 30-Sep-09 14:21:19)

Octal notation was simply used as a shorthand way of writing down the value of 3 consecutive bits in computer memory, e.g (0)10110101 = 265 in octal. Octal might still be used in some UNIX systems.

With the advent of the 8-bit byte, hexadecimal notation became the norm, a "hex" digit (0-9, A-F) representing 4 bits, e.g 10110101 = B5 in hex.

Interesting, been in the game since 76 and learn something every day

Whereas on a machine which uses six bit and nine bit bytes octal representation is more convenient. And 1332 to anyone who disagrees with that.

In reply to a post by TrevorSP:

Interesting, been in the game since 76 and learn something every day

Heh true - although sometimes I question whether it's worth the bother. Some changes appear to be change for change's sake or just fixes to things that weren't thought out properly in the first place. Right now it seems to be going through a period where everything is being made complicated and inter-dependant on other things. It's all very well building on previous technology but it helps if the previous technology is working properly and stable :-/

Edited by Andrue (Wed 30-Sep-09 17:13:24)

Oh yes, and we all remember those famous words years later, that "64kb of Ram should be more than enough for any application" ! ! ! !

Ahhh the days of the 8080............... That's when I thought these things might actually take off big time and decided to stay in IT !

In reply to a post by TrevorSP:

Oh yes, and we all remember those famous words years later, that "64kb of Ram should be more than enough for any application" ! ! ! !

Ahhh the days of the 8080............... That's when I thought these things might actually take off big time and decided to stay in IT !

Ooh, slightly before my time - but only just. I 'grew up' on the Z80. First a Spectrum then an Amstrad CPC. I remember reading gory details about how the programmers squeezed their games into the memory and wrung the bits out of the CPU to get them to run at a half way decent speed.

Now you can do a Google search and find half a dozen Java based emulators most of which are probably having to be slowed down in order to be useable.

..I mean, tell me, is this wrong or what:

http://www.twinbee.org/hob/play.php?snap=elite

Then again the modern equivalent:

http://www.eveonline.com/

Tempus fugit indeed

Edited by Andrue (Wed 30-Sep-09 20:39:03)

I still remember writing a mainframe IPL routine on 5 punched cards - the beastie had to be loaded via cards. Those were the days

Programming the Jacquard loom on punch cards. *Those* were the days!

Jacquard looms are still in use. Saw one in a factory in the US that was producing thosuands of American Flags. A sight to stir a patriotic soul.

My first week's training in the computer industry at ICT was on plug-board tabulators, sorters and suchlike. I then went on to real computers, which were in principle no different from modern ones only bigger in physical size, smaller in capacity and less powerful, and never used this knowledge of plug-board kit. .