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Snail Mail Still Winning The Bandwidth War
LR_none writes "Today's New York Times has this short piece suggesting snail mail is the leading broadband technology, at least for video movies on demand. The article states that the 8 to 9 gigs of data on a DVD would take two weeks to download at 56kb, making Netflix' three-day distribution by mail seem speedy. (Since they can send three or more movies at once, Netflix compares favorably with DSL download speeds, too.) The author estimates Netflix alone distributes 1,500 terabytes a day, which is impressive considering the Internet carries 2,000TB a day (by estimates cited in the article). The 'immediate gratification' aspect of Internet consumerism has given a huge boost to companies like FedEx and UPS, but it's surprising to think of the post office as being the leading infrastructure provider for digital entertainment, in terms of market share and efficiency, for the forseeable future. (Disclaimer: I don't work for Netflix or the post office.)"
Lag's a bitch though.
;)
Not millisecond.
Not second.
Not minute.
Not hour.
Lag measured in DAYS.
Hell, even carrier pidgeon is probably faster
TODO: Something witty here...
The MPAA claims that the internet has creates significant consequences and risks -- citing to supposedly a kazillion feature films being pirated daily. This simple piece of arithmetic is a useful hunk of rebuttal.
What's the fastest way to move 1GB of data nightly from LA to San Fran?
Fed-Ex
that I could send a couch via FedEx easier than I could over the internet? These people are just plain nuts.
Oh wait...
Nothing like snail mail to remedy my need for DVD's via my 28K line.
:-)
Of course, if you're using a 28K line, you're probably not instantly gratified that often anyways.
This space for rent.
I wish is was that fast. 1 gig takes 2-3 weeks over a dialup connection. Not that I'd ever know, since I'd *never* download anything that big, [cough]Episode1and2overKazaainAVI[cough]
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes" - SysAdmin humor
never underestimate the baud rate of a station wagon filled with backup tapes...
... hi bingo
Tried playing Quake by snail mail. Took forever before the letter saying I'd been fraged 10^5 times for just standing there to arive.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.
Internet2, then? Does Fed-Ex or UPS Overnights equal it? How many DVDs would you need to ship to equal optimal performance on Abilene?
Kinda sad I'm thinking about this...
Fortran programmer...oh yeah. Array math for life!
if you live on the East Coast, forget about it. Mail takes 5 business days, coming and going, making Netflix not all that cheap. If you get the basic service (3 movies at a time), if you watch the movies THE DAY you get them and send them back immediately, you still can't realistically get more than say, 6 movies a month. If Netflix opened a warehouse on the East Coast, shit, I'd get the best damn service they've got. If not for that huge mail lag for us on the East Coast, their service is fucking fantastic.
...snail mail is much more susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks.
"Herbivores eat well cause their food never, ever runs."
Yeah ... never heard that one before.
Where are the -1 redundent moderations when you need them?
Bandwidth vs. Latency is always a big tradeoff in CS technologies. Sure you can ship larger packets (err... packages) via snail mail, but latency is still a big issue. An equivalent to a ping in mail might take two weeks using letters.
Cost is also an issue, next-day mail is REALLY expensive... shooting bits across the net is really cheap, and in comparison almost free.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
High throughput... high latency :(
And delivery is only best-effort, you know
The United States Postal Service offers insurance for many items sent through it.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I still receive way more daily spam (in terms of data quantity) by snail-mail than by email. That alone is way more significative than the mythic "truckload of tapes".
Never underestimate the bandwith of a stationwagon full of backup tapes. (Or a 747 full of CD-ROMs)
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
Yes but if it takes that long to download it watching it streaming would have impossible delays for buffering, completely pointless.
Well Duh. of course you can ship huge amount of information faster by Mail then via Digital resorces. If you want I can transfer you 90 TerraBytes of information in one day via FexEx. Or lets say every molicule in a piece of paper is considered information there you have it I have sent more data. Mailing information is a 3d way of shiping and storage and in our 3d perceved world it is the best way to move data compared to the 1d Internet. Of course if you are shipping small amounts of information then Internet will win.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If I need it there Sometime Later This Week, I have no problem using the USPS for anything. They've never lost a piece of mail I was waiting for or sent out, and I have done a lot of business with patient buyers on eBay that were happy with the ship times and the handling with USPS. In fact, recently I have read about more issues with sending delicate equipment UPS/FedEx than with USPS Priority, for example.
Broadband just isn't a reality/necessity for enough people yet, and the size of applications and media in digital format is growing and is already too great for the Average Joe who has an affinity the Internet but doesn't know how to download 4 GB worth of video successfully (or patiently, for that matter).
- DDT
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
To wit, from everyone's favorite echoing news site: link. They should have them in Boston, NY, and DC.
Fortran programmer...oh yeah. Array math for life!
Yeah, it's hard to beat the bandwidth of a truckload of CD's or DVD's doing 70mph down the interstate... ...but the latency...
Look, it's trying to think - Albert Rosenfield
1 gig takes 2-3 weeks over a dialup connection.
One gigabyte, divided by 5 kilobytes per second (average effective downstream rate for "56K" dial-up given line noise and TCP overhead), equals 200,000 seconds, or just under 56 hours. At that rate, an online DVD store would have already shipped the package.
CheapBytes: the fastest way for dial-up users to get an OS distro.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Let's face it, my DSL is up 24 hours a day and I pay the same $35 whether i use it or not.
I don't own a DVD burner, or even a player for that matter, and sending a CD via snail mail sets me back around $7.
Thus, at a fixed cost of $35 dollars I can either send 5 CDs to someone per month, or download 5 CDs per day!
NetFlix alone helped justify the cost of
;-)
getting an HDTV for me - I find I spend
more hours per week watching Netflix-supplied content than anything else, and most DVD's are in widescreen
formats.
It works out to be cheaper than Blockbuster if you like watching lots of
movies, and is more flexible than the
pay channels.
I wish they had more content though, as
you can pretty quickly run through all the
movies you haven't seen already.
What about Satellite?
I have a 40gb PVR and it's filled all the time.
To get those exchanges upgraded if we want to beat them
How about digital cable w/ VOD service or DTV and other sat services? I think those are clearly delivering more digital content to a much wider audience than the post office. Any thoughts on this?
What about streaming video?
Have you ever seen streaming slideshows on a 56K? Not everybody can afford broadband.
You can't stream the mail.
I can't stream paper, but I can stream POP3 e-mail. I can begin filtering messages by body text before they have all downloaded. Heck, sometimes I actually finish reading all the legit mail before the Klez shit finishes downloading.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes."
Something like that. Think it was the sig line from someone's rec.humor posting in the early 90s.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
From a +3 comment this morning to the front page! Nice! :-)
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
I can pay Brown or FedEx shipping and handling on top of paying for the movie, or I can download it for free. I think that it's still worth the price of the movie and shipping to guarantee that I'm getting a good quality copy of the movie instead of crappy mislabled DivX porn.
I've never used a USPS network, but in addition to the high bandwidth, seems like it would have pretty decent security too...Out of the reach of M$ patches at the very least, and have had decades to work out the bugs on the current release. Too bad its protocol isn't compatibile with TCP/IP.
You've got a lot to learn before you can beat me. Try again, kiddo! (ha ha ha!)
Unless you have crappy DSL, mailing DVDs doesn't help you much.
I get 75KB/s on my DSL line. It would take me 125829 seconds to download 9G of data. That's 34 hours. Not bad compared to two-three days for mail. You can get DSL with twice that rate if you have a good phone line and slightly more money.
Mailing DVDs is also faster than telegraphing them, but telegraphing went out of style only slightly before 28K phone lines.
-Lars
Technically I could send ever Bond movie, the entire NFL Films library, and the collectors' edition DVD of UHF all at the same time via snail mail. But that's going to cost A LOT of money.
The article briefly mentioned cost, but it didn't necessarily say that mail 3 videos was the same cost as downloading them.
like. say... when I have a date with Pamla Handerson, or Rosy Palms, etc etc
*runs*
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Step 1: run your envelope through an industrial shreader.
Step 2: append 10 MAC shreads at the end of mail.
Step 3: permutate shread x with shread perm(x) where perm(x) is the chosen encryption algorithm.
Step 4: glue together
Step 5: shread, unencrypt, reglue.
voila.
Andrew Odlyzko, the director of the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota, says that the cost to the service provider of transmitting a data file the size of a typical DVD movie over the Internet could be nearly $20.
Sure, if you unicast it. Alternatively, you can use a satellite and distribute it to millions of people all at the same time...
The leading broadband technology? Television.
Nothing beats the bandwidth of the back seat of a buick filled with 9 track tapes.
...if you didn't have to share bandwidth with all those spammers.
6 of these so far. please god... make it stop
Isn't that really LOWER latency than spending 2 weeks to download it? First class mail will get most things to most places in 4-5 business days, meaning that the last bit of information I want gets to me a week earlier, or more.
And requesting the data initially by using the internet shaved off the 5 days it would have taken to send in my request by mail.
So isn't snail mail just acting like another network connection? Request sent to server, data returned from server, both done through fastest connections, both using unique send and return addresses.
Now if you really want to have fun, think about AOL sending out them CD's with AOL software to "everyone" as the worlds largest multicast message. ;)
paintball
A networks instructor once told me
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of an 18-wheeler full of CDs."
M@
Krispy Cream is people
Streaming snail mail doesn't work for DVDs, but you can get it to work for VHS.
The trick is to pull one end of the tape out of the cartridge, then glue it to a post card. Drop the postcard in the mail and leave the rest of the tape next to the mailbox.
Now, as the head end of the tape makes its way through the postal system, it automatically despools the rest of the tape which streams along behind it.
As soon as the head end of the tape arrives, the customer inserts it into in an empty cartridge and starts to play it . As the VCR plays, it sucks the remainder of the tape out of the postal system at the appropriate speed.
Send in the Hermit Crabs!!
The Crabs will kicks the snails ass!
Sorry, but someone had to say it
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
What about Time Warner's Movies on Demand? Even though they're only a 24 hr rental. You don't have to deal with DVD's or snail mail and you can have as many as you can pay for and watch in a day.
Okay. For the rest of you who get just a little ticked off when strung along for 80 comments only to be left hanging, the bandwidth of a station wagon full of quarter-inch tapes is approximately:
:-)
13 Petabytes per second.
For comparison purposes, this is equivalent to about 650 strands of perfectly saturated, single-mode fiber optic cable.
This figure will, of course, vary depending on a number of factors. In order to compensate for your own rate of travel and storage media, simply fill in the blanks below to get your tally! It's fun for kids of all ages!
BW = (( WV / (TW * TL * TH ) ) * TC * WS / WL) , where
BW = bandwidth in bytes / second
WV = the volume of your station wagon, in cubic meters
TW = the width of each individual quarter-inch tape, in meters
TL = the length of each individual quarter-inch tape, in meters
TH = the height of each individual quarter-inch tape, in meters
TC = the capacity of each individual quarter-inch tape, in bytes
WS = the speed of your station wagon, in meters/sec
WL = the length of your station wagon, in meters
This figure assumes average instantaneous bandwidth down the length of the wagon; in reality, I would assume that the bulk of the data transfer would occur in the region nearest the trunk.
To get my figure, simply plug in: WV = 2.72, TW = 0.054, TL = 0.073, TH = 0.0105, TC = 35.0 * 10 ^ 9, WS = 26.8, WL = 4.75. These numbers are meant to describe a stuffed 2001 Subaru Outback doing 60MPH using 35GiB tapes of this form factor.
I'm told that the term 'bandwidth' applies to a communications channel. As such, a station wagon hardly counts -- it'd be like asking for the bandwidth of an IP packet. It wouldn't make sense. Similarly, it's not so much the bandwidth of the wagon as the bandwidth of the channel along which the wagon travels. With this in mind, walk with me through the following justifications.
When it's said that a SCSI bus (for example) is sustaining 20 million bits per second ( for example), what's implied is that a) if one observes the output of the bus, during every second in time, 20 million valid bits appear, on average, and b) if one observes the input of the bus, every second 20 million valid bits are being shoved onto the bus. What's not being said is how long it takes for a given bit to go from being shoved into the bus inlet to being taken out of the bus outlet. This number's usually called latency, I'm told. Regardless, in this case, the bus (channel of interest) is sustaining a bandwidth of 20 million bits per second. On average. The length of the bus is irrelevant as far as bandwidth is concerned: doubling the length of the physical bus will not change the fact that 20 million bits per second are coming out of it / going into it (at steady state), it will merely double the time it takes for a given bit to go in and then come out the other end.
So, to be proper, it should be mentioned that by 'bandwidth of a station wagon' I have computed the 'bandwidth of a one-lane road of indefinite length packed bumper-to-bumper with station wagons, each carrying quarter-inch tapes'. After all, it's the road that is really the communications channel in question, the wagon is simply the data packet.
However, if you view the communications medium as 'a road of given length with exactly one station wagon on it, carrying quarter inch tapes', then it is vital to know the length of the road in order to compute the time-averaged throughput attainable on this communications medium. Some would say that this is closer to what is assumed by the original quote. I guess it depends on your perspective. What a great way to say we're both right
"Broadcast quality" video requires about 5Mb. A cable system that carries 70 channels should therefore have at least 300Mb/s raw bandwidth. That's enough to download a 9GB movie in four minutes. One third of that would be enough to download the top 120 movies once a day. 1/36 of that would be enough to download 8 hours of network programming for each of five networks, for on-demand viewing, still leaving more than half the total bandwidth unused.There's lots of bandwidth out there, but people are too busy worrying about intellectual property rights to take advantage of it. Until we have an approach that separates compensation to artists and producers from distribution, our distribution system will remain wildly irrational.
Hell, with disk space so inexpensive nowadays, you could REALLY tick off the MPAA/RIAA/SPCA... let p2p users deposit their files on a server with a high-bandwidth connection instead of downloading them over their 56k's and then just burn the data onto a CD/DVD for them once a week and send it out in the mail. Charge $5 a CD.
Or better yet, if you're Kinko's or Western Union or the post office or something else with lots of locations - what if you rented out a few gigs of IP-mapped "mailbox" at your locations, let people download to that location, and then come in and pick up their data?
No, wait, that's too intelligent of a business model for information distribution for the MPAA/RIAA/SPCA to ever let you get away with it.
paintball
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes.
If you're like me, then you live in Canada and were pissed to find out that Netflix didn't ship up here (even if they did, it'd end up being expensive given the CDN peso + whatever else).
DVDHype is a Canadian based service much like Netflix. Their website leaves something to be desired, but their service has been great and shipping fairly fast (4 days from east to left coast - they are based in Ontario I think and I am in BC).
PS. I don't work for them, or even use subscribe at the moment (damn school), but I like em.
This reminded me of the time I read Penises have higher bandwidth than cable modems.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a Corvette full of dvd-rw discs.
It's no wonder the bandwidth and latency of shipping DVDs is higher than the internet.
It's simpler to make a lower bits per packet protocol (like rs232 or SSA) than a higher bits per packet (uwSCSI).
you just make up for lower frequency with bigger packets.
the internet is an 8 data bit protocol compared to the (4.7GB * 8) data bit protocol of mailing DVDs.
my livejournal is interesting and worth reading - I swear. I know everyone thinks their blog is interesting. mine is.
Unfortunately, they seemed to have gotten rid of all their "mature" titles after they went mainstream.
Magnus.
and it's going to stay this way until the FCC gets off its butt and requires the RBOCs to replace the last mile with 100Mb+ fiber. Alternately, some brave foolhardy company could actually try to compete for control of the last mile. The RBOCs would, of course, crush them under a tide of litigation and regulation. Sigh.
Isn't it amazing that a country with such good engineers is run by lawyers?
a Buick Century full of tapes.
i hope nobody got Paid to compare these bushels
of apples and oranges.
of course they did. anyone can get paid for spewing
nonsense. even cmdrtaco and jonkatz get paid for
being useless.
god bless america.
Database guru Jim Gray
discusses what turned out to be the most reasonable solution to sending terabytes of data (the Sloan Digital Sky Survey) in a convenient form across the globe: sending complete servers with terabyte disk subsystems.
Very cool. I should've known better than to be an early adopter....
Now, the only question is how big of a membership I need!
WL should really be a reasonable (average) space between you and the next station wagon, or probably about 40 meters or more. That would drop your estimate to a more reasonable 1.3 Pbytes per second.
Rookie mistake. 8)
The cost of bandwidth has dropped by factors of 10 over the past 5 years, yet the cost of bandwidth to the home has increased.
The baby bells have seen to that, plus wiping out any investements you may have made based on Clinton's "broadband is our future". Seems to me the only folks that have gotten this right are the South Korens. Damn, and I'm an American living in the land of competition and freedom.....how did that happen:) Thanks for the great work Congress.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of cargo plane filled with ait-3 tapes. :-)
how much of the 2TB daily internet traffic is
1) spam
2) overhead
??
My life in the land of the rising sun.
to compute the bandwidth one need only add a travel time from source to destination.
BW = amount xmit'd / time to xmit
A USC Prof phrased the question in terms of a backup operation for a downtown LA bank to a data vault site in Ontario, CA (Cali, not Canada).
Of course the station wagon bandwidth is subject to network traffic and packet collisions IRL as in the metaverse.
The return address on the Neflix envelope sitting in front of me is
blog
you've got a 15GB/s (3 DVDs) line and some lag? stop complaining!
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
Posts below parent show parent is DIS-informative . . .
that's about 200,000 megabits per second, total internet bandwidth
I would like to use Net-Flix, but refuse to based on their use of Pop-Under ads. I get them all the time on my windows machine running IE.
I know this is semi off-topic, but I think it is important.
I refuse to buy anything from most pop-under advertisers, I suggest you do to.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Is there a Netflix-like service for pr0n DVDs?
Maybe called "Netfux"?
Try the new "Sledge" upgrade...
Same as it ever was.
never underestimate all your base in a beowulf cluster of hot grits down natalie portmans pants! ...
profit!
... hi bingo
... or perhaps that should read, amounts of astronomical data. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey participants often need to be able to replicate their database of astronomical objects. This is about a terabyte of data. One of their collaborators has a (ugh, Microsoft Word document) on why Tera-Scale Sneaker Net is the cheapest and fastest way to do it.
like amazon.ca, it would be great...
-- the cake is a lie
Or, if you're like me and you live in the US and need some adult DVDs (netflix stopped providing adult DVDs a while back, duh!), try SugarDVD.com. Their service has been great so far. I'd recommend giving them a shot.
While Netflix has tie-ins with lots of stores, that doesn't seem to keep them from using SPAM to get new subscribers.
**
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**
I've got dozens of these "Free DVD Rental" SPAM messages on their behalf. Complaining will only get something like "We didn't send it ourselves" or my favorite: "We didn't give them your email" ( Why would they give my susbscription email address to a spammer to attempt to sign me up as a new subscriber? )
I'd had Netflix for years, told them where to shove it when I got Netflix SPAM and they didn't seem care.
Best part of the article for me was the listing of other companies offering competing service. I'd like nothing more than to see Netflix go up in the same puff of smoke I wish on all the "Low Mortgage" and "Penis Enlarger" folks
Maybe Netflix distributes 1,500TB a day of movies, but that's using DVD's MPEG-2 compression. Encode 'em with DivX and you're gonna slash that figure by what... 80-90%?
internet is somehow a faucet of distribution with which material and physical distribution cannot meaningfully compete. It is arguably faster and more efficient to distribute DVD's using the mails -- thousands of terabytes per day can be distributed far more efficiently (and cost effectively) in this manner than upon the internet.
The threat to distribution is not that it exists at all (you can find pirated DVD's on most any city street), but whether it is significant compared to the principal modes of distribution available to legitimate parties.
Sincerely, Netflix PR
You just made me spit out my coffee!
If 1 out of every 10 high speed internet subscribers stopped using Netflix and started downloading full DVDs off some online version of Netflix do you really think your broadband provider's business model and infrastructure could survive?
Currently no. I don't think the internet as a whole(bandwidth, price for bandwidth, etc.) is ready for the huge(by current standards) transfers that would insue from an online Netflix that distributed FULL DVDs. Not those stripped down versions that fit on one or two CDs.
Maybe in the distant future.. say a year or two?
From "The Naked Computer"
"One data network that's for the birds. Lockheed Missile and Space Company needed to transmit lots of computer data from it's Sunnyvale, California, office to it's R&D facility high in the Santa Cruz mountains. The company used both telephone transmissions of computer-to-computer data (very expensive) and physical transport of printouts, an all-day mountain-road affair that wipes out shocks and springs. Finally the company experimented with a truly advanced network that cut costs to a tenth of what they were before.
Carrier pigeons now fly microfilm of the data between the mountains and Sunnyvale. One bird a day about does it."
I'd love to know A)If this is true, and B)How much data they were moving.
And you will suffer the loss of quality and the inability to play them on a real TV that goes along with it, no thanks. DivX sucks.
It seems like Slashcode should be modified to automatically post a copy of the parent under any thread involving technology... would save everyone on /. (trolls, mods, humorists) a lot of time :)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I joined Netflix, one of the first of the DVD rental mailer companies, a long time ago and like it a lot. I was interested, then, to read a rough calculation that, in terms of 190,000 MPEG-2 format DVDs, Netflix's daily bandwidth totals 1.5 TB. This is a sizable fraction of the current total estimated Internet daily bandwidth: somewhere between 2-4 TB. Of course, Peter Wayner's calculations do not allow for the online delivery of movies in more compression-efficient formats, such as the MPEG-4-derived DIVX, where a typical 4-7 GB DVD can be reduced to around 700 MB with minimal quality loss.
I guess the CD manufacturers also thought they were safe, when a typical CD occupied 700MB of data in an era of mainly dialup connections. Then along came MP3 with its one-tenth compression ratio and so much for that idea. Netflix's current success is a temporary artifact of our restricted bandwidth and lack of suitable MPEG-4 hardware players.
And I found out from some surfing that some Netflix competitors, such as CafeDVD, QwikFlicks, and DVD Avenue, are cheaper and offer porn, something Netflix avoids.
Da Blog
It's true, though. I once worked at a company
where it was faster to drive down to the colocation site to dump the latest DB than
transfer it over the wire. Before you say
"duh", consider that the drive was only about
30-40 mins, the database was not that huge,
and the company was just cheap and had only
a dialup connection shared among ~8 users.
Considered harmful.
Petrify Natalie Portman's pants, i.e.:
"Never underestimate all your base in a beowulf cluster of hot grits down Natalie Portman's petrified pants!"
Please forgive the correct capitalization and puctuation in the above, I'm just not feeling very "133t" today.
KFG
I'm suprised no one has looked at the 2000 terrabytes/day number.
I'm sorry, that seems just a bit low. 1 site pushing 1 Gb/s is 84 Terrabytes/day. That means only 23 sites have to use that much bandwitch for that 2000 number to be hit. As I know of at least one site that pushes (not counting incoming) 10 Gb/s, that number is just a little unreasonable.
I'd really like to know where people get these kinds of numbers. I have seen silly numbers like this one and the 7 billion pieces of e-mail per day numbers and have to wonder where they come from. Acording to some numbers I saw released at one point, Hotmail alone receives over 1 billion e-mail per day.
I really have to wonder if someone is just making this stuff up or if they are looking at a very small set of data and extrapolating from there. In either case, I think better methods need to be used to create these kinds of numbers.
"All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening."
- Alexandar Woolcot
Now, now, now, now, now, and I'm going to hold my breath until I get it!
*Thud*
In the words of Scotty, " I canna change the laws of physics Cap'n."
Honestly people, what sort of harm are you actually going to come to by having to wait to watch a movie until you receive it?
Hey, here's what I do. I walk to my library ( 5 minutes each way) and take out three videos. They already have more in stock than I can watch in what remains of my lifetime and the collection grows daily. If I do this early in the morning I can watch all three, return them, and take out three more, watch them and then repeat that one more time, making the last return the next morning when I return for three more to start my day. Repeat until death.
Pretty good "bandwith," and ecologically friendly too.
KFG
Yet more proof that an AI such as Eliza (or perhaps something involving markov chains, as seems more likely...) is posting to slashdot.
:)
How long before we replace the troll with software, as they just did to the sysadmin, according to slashdot?
DivX rules. a two cd (700MB each) rip of a movie is virualy indisgishable from the real thing, and thats with 5.1 chanel sound.
/. :)
- i know i can't spell, but thats why i'm on
Sorry, I'm sure someone has said it already, but I'm feeling a little reactionary.
end of story. they fucking rule, period.
I met a gentleman who worked at a large brokerage
house on Wall street, and it was in fact cheaper
and faster to send data tapes from the west coast
office every day via FedEx than to do it by wire.
This conversation took place several years ago
and the relative costs may have changed by now,
but the way he put it was:
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a fully
loaded 747 flying cross-country"
Daniel
Netflix opened an East coast distribution center about 5 months ago. I live in PA and all my dvd's come from baltimore.
A former CS professor of mine always used the "truckload of tapes" analogy for an example of maximum bandwidth... and it's been valid for many years, and will be valid in the forseeable future. You simply can't beat a large physical media shipment for transferring large amounts of data. The problem that networks were invented to solve is not mass data transfer... it's latency.
In keeping with the vernacular of today's pop-technology writers, I ask: How long would it take (and how much would it cost) to send a library of congress via the mail versus the Internet?
Yes you can. Think about it.
People's reaction to electronic mail is astounding. The combined effect of government repression of cryptography and statements of "no expectation of privacy" can not be underestimated. How is it that people who expect to go to jail for intercepting the post also expect people to intercept and read their email?
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
...of a Beowulf cluster of supertankers full of tapes!
And you can't demoronise your posts. (:
Anyway, Charles Dickens used to stream his novels over snail mail. So did all of his contemporaries. It's called serial publication, and there's no reason you can't do it with media today.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
Loss of quality? I'm afraid that's simply not true. There's no other way to put it; you're flat-out wrong. And you managed to get a mod point for it somehow :)
I realize you can't watch DivX-encoded movies on TV (not with a typical DVD player, anyways), but that wasn't my point. I was just trying to say that the 1,500TB Netflix distributes daily is just cuz it uses the inferior MPEG technology. DivX can look just as good as DVD, and with a whole lot less space. The reason I was making that point is cuz the story was noting how impressive 1,500TB was in relation to the Internet's proposed 2,000TB/day. But the fact is, if people were transferring these movies over the Internet after they'd been DivX-encoded, the bandwidth they would use would be about 80-90% less than that figure.
Nobody downloads video on a 56K dialup. The 8-9 Gig will take roughly 24 hours. It will be done long before the snail mail gets there. Get a clue.
However, send a truckload of video disks and somebody has a point. A boring, irrelevant point.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Is it just me or is Jon Katz posing as the normal story posters?
There seems to be an excess of "Imagine a beowulf..." type stories lately.
Mod how you wish, it's just Slashdot baby.
the inability to play them on a real TV
I had a video card with TV-out several years ago, and in fact most cards seem to come with it standard now.
And if you don't like DivX's artifacts (what few there are now, on a properly encoded movie playing in any decent system), you can always try SVCD. A full movie often fits on 2 CDs, and damned if I can tell the difference from DVD. Added bonus, my DVD player plays em, so I guess that's what you meant by a 'real TV'.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
wtf? that made no sense.
check out my hot girlfriend.
They used to brag about delivering Christmas packages, I wonder if they will be as diligent about Christmas packets ;-)
No, no, no. Firstly, even many of the original mpeg2 dvd has many quite disgusting artifacts BEFORE they are encoded with mpeg4. After the divxification they become even worse - and though you might not be able to tell the difference - many can.
Lossy Compression -> Lossy Compression = Even Lossier Compression.
Blah.
Arent periodicals/magazines "streaming" information to you? A chunk of bytes arrives today .. the next chunk a week later ... high latency, but still streaming. :)
one word comes to mind,
DUH!
Right, and 128Kbit MP3s are CD quality.</sarcasm>
If you are already going to use two cds, rip it to SVCD. The artifacts are far less noticeable, and you can play it on a standalone DVD player. I know you can't do 5.1, but most DVDs don't have 5.1 audio anyway.
You can only stream if you can cache enough of the content first before starting the movie. DVD's have a huge throughput that your average 512kbs connection would not handle. Just try and download a linux iso and repeat 10 times. Thats how long its gonna take to get your movie down.
/b
Oh and if you live in Australia then they are gonna charge you for going over your bandwidth limit. So you have 3 choices. Netflix and 3 day lag, Download and possible data charges, or forsake quality and and download divx versions of the movies.
[Please type your sig here.]
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html. faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2549.html
http://www
Lets check the math. Netflix - 3 DVDs at a time. 34 hours per DVD times 3 DVDs = 102 hours = 4 days 6 hours vs 2 to 3 days by USPS. Now, which one is faster? Remember, the post office allows for multiple simultaneous downloads at no loss of speed for each. 9 gigs or 900 - same latency and same total time.
Disclaimer: I DO work for the post office.
Profanity - The sign of a small mind trying to express itself.
I have 8M adsl here in Japan. I totally agree with you Lars Clausen
I think this whole discussion is rather sad for a supposedly international discussion list. Who keeps posting these small minded topics?
Whoever it is, take a holiday in the outside world.
No warranty of any kind is offered as to the quality of this post.
parent is funniest thing i've read on here today, cheers :D (to the guys going "Duh!"... Waffle Iron was _joking_).
:p
I hope
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
I have access to this incredible form of media, the outdoors! It is free, 3D, no copyright limits on images, incredible detail (right down to the subatomic level!), lifelike sound, complete sensory experience, virtually unlimited supply of new data, and 24 hours access. Try it!
quit When the quit statement is read, the bc processor
is terminated, regardless of where the quit state-
ment is found. For example, "if (0 == 1) quit"
will cause bc to terminate.
-- seen in the manpage for "bc". Note the "if" statement's logic
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Today, I discovered a new (to me) form of troll: the Last Post troll. As most of us should already know, Slashdot locks all discussions that are more than 14 days old. A Last Poster takes advantage of this: (s)he comes into a discussion that's about to end and writes either some inane top-level comment ("LA5T POST!!!1!1") or a flamebait/troll reply to an existing comment.
Not that I'm necessarily implying that the parent comment was such a troll.
Anyway:
Last post suckaz!
Will I retire or break 10K?