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So Chuck Goolsbee, friend and geek, has a fun button to push. Tell him your network speed is fast or slow and watch him go all pedantic and explain the difference between network speed, (there's one: c, aka the speed of light), and network bandwidth is how much data you can shove down a given network pipe type. But from a modem to 10G over fiber, it all moves at c. The truth is, he's right. Network speed is unchanging, bandwidth is not, and regardless of common usage, the two terms are not interchangeable. 300 million people in agreement can be, and often are, wrong.
So I see people on Twitter talking about lens speed, when they mean aperture. The spirit of Chuck rises..."Um...light is moving through that lens at the same speed no matter what. That lens is neither fast nor slow, since it's not altering the speed of light, (yes, I know c is the speed of light in a vacuum, but I've yet to see a lens advertising itself with "we alter the speed of light for better pics!", although it would be a neat trick), and since the shutter mechanism is (normally) not in the lens, the lens cannot be fast or slow."
Oh holy fucking shit, you'd have think I pissed on the cross, helvetica, and vi all at once. People start throwing Wikipedia definitions of lens speed at me, blah, blah, blah. (Note: when the definition of a "fast" lens is:
A lens with a larger maximum aperture (that is, a smaller minimum f-number) is a fast lens because it delivers more light intensity (illuminance) to the focal plane, allowing a faster shutter speed.That's wikipedia saying "we call it speed, but really, it's the amount of light the lens allows in, which allows you to use a faster shutter speed, so even though we use "fast", the lens isn't doing fuck all faster, you just are using that word wrong." Aperture is analogous to bandwidth. All lenses work at the same "speed"...that of light. The amount of light coming in the lens changes, and greatly, but that's bandwidth. It's all moving at the speed of light.
300 million photographers are still wrong, even when they yell really loud.
Fuckin' Goolsbee.
Like I needed to be more pedantic.
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Chuck Goolsbee, Pendanticism, Speed is not bandwidth
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Posted by John C. Welch at 19:08 | Permalink
©2003-until I'm fucking dead and then some. you steal my shit, and I will fuck with you like you were a lonely shepherd's slowest sheep.
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