General Chat / Internet Speed

just wondering, but what does that 'ping' mean ?
because it seems to be higher when your load speed is lower..

Gotta love the upload
I don't have a modem as I'm directly plugged into the wall with an ethernet cable.
Thought when they said when my line was synchronous 10MB, they meant 10Mbit but it actually meant a max of 10MB/s Best part is that I pay very little for it.

HOO-OOO-OOOOLLLYYY SHIT

February 15, I finally have a fiber connection, yay

^ff aso hollands gaan doen, maar is dat zo'n glasvezel ?

(just asking what a fiber is in dutch, for all you english sneakers who are afraid for our dutch conspiracy theories.)

Very very fast
my school uses them and their very expensive

So this is something that's thrown me off countless times and still does. Please read.

When you use the internet, your speed is usually measured in kilobytes per second. You see this in any progress details of a download or upload. It is thus the speed measure you would intuitively adapt as your understanding of speed. When you ask for your connection's speed though, you're given "kilobit per second" or "megabit per second", which are something else. I can read about this on wikipedia nice and well and find a conversion tool with google, or memorise that I have to divide by 8, and yet I will never ever come across Mbit/s when using the internet, so it also won't sink into my head as an interpretable and meaningful measure. I find this confusing and frustrating.

Having said that, this test from speedtest.net is curious in how it displays results. My results above say 7.57 Mb/s. This I read as megabyte per second. Wikipedia also confirms me that this is the correct way to read "Mb/s":

However, when I download something from a reliably fast source that I know has always exceeded my connection's bandwidth in the past, I get a maximum of ~950kb/s, which corresponds to the test's 7.57/8 * 1000 = 946.25 ~= 950. Thus I assume what the test calls "Mb/s" correctly should be "Mbit/s"? This would make sense with my results and experience. Maybe, is "Mb/s" in fact an abbreviation for "Mbit/s", and i falsely concluded that "Mb/s" equals "MB/s" (megabyte per second)? If so, I am rather disappointed by how people can adapt a semantic system so prone to misstatement. Mixing up or not caring for lower or upper case is frequent, and paired with abbreviations that equal other measures, this is something I find goes totally against all rules of comprehensibility.

On a side note, I find this competitiveness about who can showcase the fastest connection primitive. When will you ever need high transfer rates as a private person legitimately? To illegaly download badly compressed and thus oversized copyrighted media files? I've recently met someone who does this excessively, and has made it his aim to build up an archive of pirate copies of entertainment media. He tries to pride himself with it, but really, what I saw was just a sad, desperate, socially unfulfilled human being, longing for distraction of his mental problems and using all his films and videos for it.

What I find more important about an internet connection is its responsiveness, and consequently everything influential on the time it will take before an action I've done on the computer will be realised. I loathe delay and lag. Do there exist any measures that manage to capture responsiveness? I assume the ping has to do with it? But isn't that just dependent on how far away I sit from the server? If so, moving position, which in itself is impossible, would be the only way to improve responsiveness?

EDIT: Adding to this, I have done the ping test.

...
On a side note, I find this competitiveness about who can showcase the fastest connection primitive. When will you ever need high transfer rates as a private person legitimately? To illegaly download badly compressed and thus oversized copyrighted media files? I've recently met someone who does this excessively, and has made it his aim to build up an archive of pirate copies of entertainment media. He tries to pride himself with it, but really, what I saw was just a sad, desperate, socially unfulfilled human being, longing for distraction of his mental problems and using all his films and videos for it.
...

Way to generalize. Most murderers live in houses or apartments. Should we stop using them to eradicate murder?

The real answer is that industries and the military demand faster connections and we, the private citizens, reap the benefits of that, too. That, and if you had the choice to do something quickly or painfully slow, which would you prefer?

I'm gonna play the dumb blonde card here and ask what Ping is.

What's Ping?

I think it's the time it takes for a client computer, i.e. one's own, to reach the server, where data comes from. So it's a measure of responsitivity. And I personally feel it makes a noticeable difference.

MA, I'm afraid I don't really understand what you're trying to say?

^ Ping makes a HELL of a difference if you're playing on MMOs or other games with servers.. 200 ping makes you laggy as fuck while 3 ping is smoooooth sailing. For forums? Not too big of a deal.

So the lower the ping the better?

yeah lower the ping the better.

MA, I'm afraid I don't really understand what you're trying to say?

You equated this topic to a giant penis showing contest and then claimed that the only people who need a fast connection are those that are using the internet to make up for a social deficit. I was simply pointing out the ridiculousness of both assumptions.

Ah ... it seems worthless to even reply when you're this bitchy all the time. But yeah, that's well paraphrased.