Slashdot Mirror
8.6 GB Internet?
prostoalex writes "Caltech computer scientists announced the protocol, capable of delivering 8,609 Mbps over the Internet, using 10 simultaneous flows of data. The research project was conducted in partnership with CERN, DataTAG, StarLight, Cisco, and Level 3. The practical applications, according to the press release, is ability 'to download a full-length DVD movie in less than five seconds'. There is a number of papers and scientific publications available."
While this is pretty cool theoretically, current hard drives don't even come close to handling this kind of bandwidth, so there isn't much use for this until we can actually manage to store the data fast enough to keep up with the connection.
The problem is, what sort of mass storage device can write at 8.6 gigabits/sec?
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
Geek: "I'm developing a program to download porn 1 million times faster."
Marge: "Does anyone need that much porn?"
Homer: "MMMmmm... one million times.... (gurgle noise)"
Okay, now to say something serious. Even with broadband, most files download painfully slow because no one can afford to constantly upgrade their servers to dish out large volume of data to the public. If you ask me, 8.6Gb ethernet would be a lot more useful. After all, huge file transfers on your ethernet are at least common place.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
Okay, todays RAM can top 8GB/s, so there is no problem generating data and sending it through this like that. However, hard drives can't even reach 1/100th of this speed, so don't expect your p2p programs to go much faster ;)
This can be great for sites that require a massive pipe and have fiber hard drives's or ISPs. Also be good defence against a slashdotting ;)
I imagine that there will be a day when you can get ANY movie regardless of popularity from Blockbuster, Best Buy or Circuit City easier than filling out a prescription. You just tell them what legacy movie or TV show episodes you want and 15 minutes later your burned DVD with professional looking label printed on it is ready for pick-up for $20-$30. It may even include a difficult to replicate vendor hologram on the label side of the DVD to help distingish it from non-approved burns.
why are we assuming base 10?
Because we're humans speaking English. The assumption when humans speak english is that all numbers are base 10 positive whole numbers, unless otherwise noted.
>Actually, it is precisely off by a factor of 8, as is always the difference between B versus b
Ah, but it isn't! More and more often, there is a direct 10x correlation. Serial ATA, Serial Attached SCSI, Fiber (Fibre) Channel all use 8b/10b encoding, so each 8 bit byte takes up 10 bits on the wire (or equivalent medium). Hence, on a 1Gbps link, the max transfer rate is 100MB/s.
Of course, if you have a trinary computer, the algorithms may have to be adjusted slightly...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
And I won't add the problem of hard drive speeds which can't handle it. Of course, big RAID arrays and the like can, but not consumer drives.
Of course, eventually, when we use a better quality encoding method for video/audio, the datarate may have to increase, but right now, it's useless.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
They are transmitting accross a public network, so in a sense many streams will be contended at one point or another. By splitting the data into 10 streams they are getting an advantage, as their data stream will in effect have a 10-fold priority over other internet traffic.
But what if this was done on a mass scale, and everyone used 10 streams to increase their transfer rate? I imagine the combined bandwidth would be as bad as a single stream was. Which I find questionable if its efficient, or a good thing for the Internet.