On: Denial of Service Attacks

[crashandburn4]

Am I the only person that gets slightly annoyed whenever I read "an order of magnitude" and the article doesn't mention whether it's binary or decimal. What do you people think they're talking about, I'm guessing decimal order of magnitude?

[jebus989 → crashandburn4]

A good heuristic: if in doubt, assume the counting system we all use for everything, all the time.

[danvideo → jebus989]

a common sense suggestion, thank you.

[valarauca1 → crashandburn4]

A binary order of magnitude is only doubling, which doubling traffic isn't exactly a DDoS just a busy day and likely within the spec of their current network to handle.

A decimal order of magnitude is a factor of 10. And would likely represent a problem.

Really not hard, you don't use the term 'order of magnitude' in binary. Instead opting for 'bit shift', or doubling.

[vacri → crashandburn4]

You're not annoyed that they don't mention octal or hexadecimal? Base 6? Base 60?

[neurobro → crashandburn4]

For binary I would expect them to just say "double".

[pessimizer → crashandburn4]

Doesn't matter to me, 2^X and 10^X are close enough to each other for pretty small to large values of X. When I say it, I usually mean something between x5 and x15.

I think avoiding the temptation to false precision is more important. Inconsistent units and the retention of insignificant digits in order to make numbers look bigger (or smaller) drive me up the wall, though.

[marcosdumay → pessimizer]

2^10 = 1000 10^10 = 10000000000

Not that close, if you ask me.

If you mean something between 5 and 15, you are using base 10. *16 are 4 orders of magnitude in binary, but 1 in decimal.

That said, everybody asking that same question, please, do not use binary orders of magnitude. Our language suffers every time somebody does that.

[valarauca1 → marcosdumay]

3-5 orders of magnitude is a decent margin of error for things like astrophysics.

[stcredzero → pessimizer]

I said something like that to a hot redhead geologist once, and she laughed in my face.

[mobiplayer → crashandburn4]

Most probably :)

I'd be surprised to hear someone using binary to talk about bandwidth... Or pretty much anything else.