Mb vs. MB (Re: NFS reads vs. writes)

[Eric A. Borisch]

On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 11:20 AM, Mikhail T. <mi+thun at aldan.algebra.com> wrote:
> On 05.01.2016 05:45, Matt Churchyard wrote:
>> You have a different book to most then.
>> I've always understood 'b' to mean bits, and 'B' to mean bytes. While everyone on here will understand what you were trying to say in context, given purely that number, I would expect most people to interpret it as 90+Mb/s = ~11+MB/s. That is not what you meant, hence why Bruce said be careful with the units.
> I've always found "megabit" to be a useless unit, owning its entire
> existence to marketing liars trying to make their wares have more
> impressive numbers. Unless the conversation is about information theory,
> or CPU-registers and bitfields, any mention of "bit" is useless and
> misleading.

To (hopefully) end this off-topic discussion, there is a standard, and
b == bits, and B == bytes (usually 8 * b).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1541-2002

[...]
bit (symbol 'b'), a binary digit;
byte (symbol 'B'), a set of adjacent bits (usually, but not
necessarily, eight) operated on as a group;
[...]

It is terribly important ( == not useless ) in digital communications,
where bits are the basic unit of transferred data, distinct from the
signaling rate (bd), but I digress...

 - Eric