Hacker News Reader

At University we had a question around this type of 'transfer'. I can't remember how it went exactly but we were to calculate the bandwidth of a jumbo plane carrying x amount of hard drives with y capacity to z destination. Given that the flight takes so many hours, what is the total transfer speed of data in seconds?

I saw a few students nearly have a breakdown over that one.

View on HN

Why? It's just x * y / time

Yes, to those who had studied it was fairly obvious what the solution was, but the phrasing was such that to those who were just trying to wing it failed miserably.

I can solve that problem and I dropped out of high school. Simple math is something that has to be studied for at the college level?

Yes - the first year of University was designed as a catch-up to those who hadn't previously had exposure to this sort of thing and weed out the coasters.

I must stress this was a single question on a single first-year exam. Not representative of the whole course in the slightest.

You just need to get the units to line up.

You want bytes/seconds (i.e. quantity of data per unit time).

You have:

- Distance per unit time (km/h)

- Payloads per unit distance (# of flights per km)

- Quantity of data per payload (bytes per flight)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com