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Mailing Disks is Faster than Uploading Data
CowboyRobot writes "Who would ever, in this time of the greatest interconnectivity in human history, go back to shipping bytes around via snail mail as a preferred means of data transfer? Jim Gray would do it, that's who. And we're not just talking about Zip disks, no sir. We're talking about shipping entire hard drives, or even complete computer systems, packed full of disks.
David Patterson (one of the developers of both RISC and RAID) interviews ACM Turing Award winner Jim Gray." Back in school we always had a saying, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with backup tapes." Seems like that still holds true.
This reminds me of how data is collected for SETI@Home:
After the data is recorded onto tapes at Arecibo, they are shipped back to the SETI@home lab in Berkeley, California. The data are then broken up into workunits, which are sent out to the client screensaver program for candidate signal detection. So far, SETI@home has generated 189,598,882 workunits from the data received from Arecibo. SETI@home has split 1,139 tapes, meaning that the average tape yields 166,709 workunits. This is somewhat lower than the optimal yield of roughly 200,000 workunits per tape because of radio frequency interference, gaps in recording, problems with the recording equipment, etc.
I think a work unit is 65,536 bytes. Even if it takes a week to ship one tape, you can't beat that throughput! But the latency is the worst.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Storage grows probably more quickly than bandwidth.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with backup tapes."
"Hurtling station wagon", "8-track tapes".
Darn you people! How the heck am I supposed to get a proper astrophysical mental image if you consistently refuse to put things in terms of multiples of VW bugs (the old ones, not the faux ones).
-theGreater
the BBS I worked for used to ship out tapes archives of the file libraries. Used to take hours to store upto 160 megs of files.
Netflix has made a business out of shipping data via snail mail, since the bandwidth isn't really there yet to do it over the internet.
Vote for Pedro
I believe that the station wagon quote really belongs to Andrew Tannenbaum.
"If you're driving a station wagon around you ain't doin' too well with the ladies"
Of course playing Quake would be out of the question I would think
I wear pants.
First of all, when downloading, you have the benefit of instantly recieving the file that you need, as opposed to waiting at least a day for your shipment to arrive.
Secondly, remember that bandwidth is probably cheaper than postage. Shipping a carton with a few hard disks and proper insulation would cost at least $30 to overnight it.
Really, the title of the article comes upon the conclusion way too quickily. You must consider much bandwidth the sender and the reciever have. If both have a several gigabit OC line, then perhaps uploading it would be faster.
PING privaria.org (64.33.49.48) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from privaria.org (64.33.49.48): icmp_seq=2 ttl=242 time=2 days, 7 hrs, 37 min
64 bytes from privaria.org (64.33.49.48): icmp_seq=1 ttl=242 time=2 days, 17 hrs, 14 min
64 bytes from privaria.org (64.33.49.48): icmp_seq=3 ttl=242 time=3 days, 2 hrs, 41 min
Of course, we could put the Library of Congress holdings on it or 10,000 movies
10,000 movies? The MPAA would like to have a word with him..
Trolling is a art,
The ping on a station wagon sucks and don't even get me started on the routes...
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
Yep, :: good, cheap, easy to post and reusable.
Hard disks
Especially if your unable to get real bandwidth.
My Paintball Pics
The figures, but does the cost of the bandwidth exceed the price of gas?
Eh. Guess it doesn't matter anyway. Its still cooler to be seen driving down the street w/ lots of tapes.
... on how access bandwidth has grown during the same period. I accept that that bandwidth and storage are out of step but am conscious that I can access a lot more today over the bandwidth that I have than I could several years ago.
Maybe if we had enough data on the growth of each technology we would be able to work out an intersection point, or just accept that they'll never meet.
This is how ArsDigita University distributes its course material: http://aduni.org/drives/
It's one thing to complain about the lack of growth in bandwidth of current storage (and there is quite a bit of complaining in this article about it), but to think that there is something wrong with having all this data that is theoretically impossible to access because the bandwidth is insufficient is clearly false.
Whether data is ever used or not, it is important to have it. I have tax records from the last 7 years that I never plan on opening. They are stored in a couple shoeboxes in the back of the garage next to the reindeer prods. There may be no reason to hold onto them as I doubt I'd ever get audited, but it's important to know that they are back there.
Data itself is important to have for archive purposes, regardless of whether anyone ever looks at it again.
Back in school we always had a saying, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with backup tapes."
unless you went to school in the late '60s or early '70s, you copied it from someone else.
i know you're younger than me, and I went to college in the mid-nineties. We didn't say that.
We said "never underestimate the power of magnetism of a beach house and three kegs."
Overnighting a big hard drive can be a heckuva lot cheaper than paying for a fat pipe to let you transfer 100G in three days.
Yes, but what's the bandwidth of a minivan full of CDROMs? I get 235 Mb/sec. Enjoy.
This week: You can make a trade-off between latency and throughput!
Next week: Cars that can haul less can be more fuel-effiecent!
The week after: Algorithms that use more memory, but are faster to execute!
Wonders never cease!
This must be a real slow news day.
Error 407 - No creative sig found
Physical transfer of data storage devices will conceivably always be the preferred method of transferring enormous amounts of data in a relatively short timeframe. The throughput for mailing a gross of full DLT tapes overnight is probably a long way from obsolescence, yet there will always be promise in low-latency via a highly specific networking design... trunk a few gigabit ethernet connections together and you can have high bandwidth high throughput low latency transfer of many terabytes of information.
Fnord.sig
BS! You just read that out of the back of the Hacker's Dictionary. You fraud.
Kick off transfer, go to sleep. If it takes three more hours, who cares? You aren't burning wet cycles yourself.
And, befitting my moniker, it's better for the environment.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030324/030324-7.html
0 207/
/. too I believe.
also here:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/slac/media-info/2003
It was discussed on
Think of an SUV, only flater, longer and suckier. Sometimes with faux wood paneling. (In prehistoric times some actually had real wood, and probably stone wheels.)
I never though of this. Interesting survay. I wish I had an account. Wow! You send a station wagon from Utah to New York, loaded with hard disks, and you achieve a bitrate of 1000 GBps.
On our Distributed Systems final, we had a question about using an airplane full of CDs being used to replace our school's internet connection. The point was the even though the plane offered 10,000 times more bandwitdh, the 80 minute latency meant it wasn't a viable replacement.
Jason
ProfQuotes
carrier pidgeon...sure, it doesn't get there as quick, but it's great fun attaching hard drives to the feet of pidgeons and dropping them out the window.
Half the price of a SUV, anyways.
Chips have gotten faster. Ram is bigger faster and less expensive. Disk space is dirt cheap.
But the telecom industry is just crawling in comparison. I use the same phone line for dial up now as I did 10 years ago, and things like ISDN, DSL, and Cable Modems get you better performance, but nothing stellar. I don't think a T-1 has really changed in cost for a very long time.
Funny, when the bubble was expanding all the talk was about the bandwidth we were suppored to have access to, but it never made it to my house.
Eschew Obfuscation
Eschew Obfuscation
CowboyNeal writes:
That `saying' is from Andrew S. Tannenbaum's notoriously well written textbook titled simply: "Computer Networks".
It was certainly in the 2nd edition, the one I used, and might have even been in the 1st edition. I is still in the latest edition. (One of the young-uns in the office has the 4th edition on his shelf.)
A famous line if ever there was one in the geek world, although perhaps not as humourous as Chairman Bill's:
"640K ought to be enough for anyone [ paraphrased ]".
Can anyone imagine the bandwidth that AOL is "sending out" with all their worthless CDs. I mean I'm getting about 600megs a day from them. Deliver a batch to Office Depot with a good 1000 CDs and that's some really massive bandwidth.
faux is the word of the day -- peewee style
So when will those come back in style again, since we're reverting back a century? Hell, when will the 8" floppies be what's "in"?
Complete Dell System with 8, count 'em, 8 inches of floppy disk space for your secondary storage needs!
.unsigged
The intra-office version of the "bandwidth of a station wagon" analogy I believe is the Sneaker net. I worked with this ex-navy guy who used to say that every once in a while, and I was hearing that phrase for almost a year before I snapped to and asked...what is this "sneaker" net?
The guy just looks down at my feet.
Does anyone know where the "sneaker" net phrase originated? I'm guessing military/DoD...
At college we still use diskettes to transfer data from college to home. Mainly because in this information age, my college network is completely shielded, proxied and protected up to a ridiculous level. (Though still pretty much ineffective) So we cant make outgoing FTP connections to upload stuff to our home computers (if anyone else is crazy enough to run a server at home to start with) and VPN from home to college is most likely out of the question as well since they still use Windows aNTique Server over there.
USB pendrives/keydrives/whatever are slowly becoming more common though; and for a good reason. More sturdy and shock-proof then diskettes, far larger capacity, faster then diskettes as well, doesn't require a burner or any software/drivers in a modern OS... Really neat things, also fastest way to transfer larger amount of data and those nifty little things have a novelty value... :)
Hate me!
The fact is that data collection places out in the middle of now where don't often have the bandwidth to transfer large ammounts of data so a car is your easiest way to transfer data.
Free Instant Site Inclusion
Why does everyone only count bandwidth as the time to do the transport? The same comparison has been made of Netflick. Retrieving from storage and placing it back into a usable format takes time too.
Example: station wagon full of backup tapes. Presumably, you are going to store your data at both locations (onsite and offsite copies). Now count the time mounting each tape and it's target, doing the copy, and returning the original to the car. Yes, even at 15MB/s (LTO drives) it's good, but it's still a long time. Then you need to drive back.
The comparison is useless unless you account for:
Of course, no one said that the data needed to arrive within a specific time as well. If the data is useless 3 hours after it was collected, then all these analogies are useless.
What about giving each car a portion of the data each, and having each of them carry parity information in case one of the cars fails?
Honestly, there is never a substitute for remote archives and such in case of a fire or something.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
There was an article on /. on the maximum physical speed possible for CD's and DVD's,
seems appropriate here...
Ah...here it is:
exploding cd's
Yeah, but the latency will kill you!
...when the modems were scarce and phone bills high. Every more or less respectable demoscene group had a member whose function was listed as "swapper".
:)
;) which said a girl wants to swap, everyone welcome etc. This was bringing a good deal of free floppies, often with some quite funny stuff on them.
:)
Swappers would get in contact with swappers from other groups, and exchange floppies full of newest stuff, productions, news, and everything of any interest (plus some exotic stuff other than floppies - a chicken bone, The Party membership ID, misprinted train tickets, and whatever interesting that caught the eye and filled the envelope up to (but not above) another price-weight treshold.)
One of the most specific swapper activities was "faking stamps". With 80 and more contacts, at least one letter a month exchanged with each of them, you had to cut on stamp prices, so you smeared the stamp with water-washable glue and wrote in the letter "stamps back", so your contact ripped your stamps off the envelope and sent you in his reply letter together with floppies. Then some washing and stamps could be reused - one set of stamps could go the same way 5-6 times before they needed to be replaced because they started looking suspect. And if it was found - you never put return address on the envelope and nobody in the post office could ever read an Amiga floppy
Another practice was making the floppies sent pretty. You almost never sent back the same floppies - they were in constant flow. Adding a marker signature was the default. Often some sticker or a drawing was common. But there were true masterpieces: A floppy painted gold, with the metal part (and under it) painted silver, the metal part without the spring but removable and attached with a thin chain to the write-protect hole, so you removed it before inserting and it was hanging from your floppy drive while the floppy was inside.
And finally all the "disk hunt" methods. Famous swappers were rarely replying to newbies who were asking for contact - you had to gain some fame on the scene with your group's productions - or get a recommendation from another swapper. So - the unanswered letters were a good supply of floppies. Sometimes they would even put an ad in some zine (spread by swapp of course
Well, Internet was what put end to it. Plus average data size - sending 6-8 floppies in one letter wasn't cheap or easy anymore, and with A1200 getting more common, high-level languages, multi-disk demos and mpeg movies, it became necessity...
Nowadays still throwing a CD across a computer lab is way faster than transferring the data over the net
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Shipping disc by air or boat is quickly way to go between two countries, but inside country bandwidth is good enough to not need to send discs. In China (an example) we install software on school PCs from central location (Ministry of Information in capital city) but do over the internet. It's fast because we have fibre-optic links country wide for data distributions.
Obviously, this is bad idea if want to send gigabites to America or Europe because of the bad connects you have with China, but inside country, internal network is much faster than sending disc, unless you want to send 1000s of hard disc at a time!
-- Dr. Fu Ling-Yu, Internal Technology Consult; Tongji University, People Republic of China.
Don't be too quick to dis' Sneakernet. Sometimes it is the only viable choice!
I have personally experienced this, on a much more minor scale. Just because one has a high speed connection does not mean that you have a point-to-point high speed throughput.
I was trying to download the redhat distro, and due to the server throttling the throughput, it was going to take 48 hours to download all of the ISOs. I made an economic decision that driving 10 minutes to Best Buy to spend $40 on the boxed set to get it immediately was 'cheaper' in terms of overall cost.
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!
you needed an entire article to figure this one
out?
you people are a pack of ass-ramming assholes
as always - choke on your own vomit, please
If they're in the garage, frequently exposed to the un-nicest of temperatures and humidities, perhaps they're back there, but worthless.
;-)
Might wanna bring 'em indoors, bro.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
If you RTA, it sounds like based on current advances, in 10 years we'll be at the point where disks are so large 920 TB each) that access will have to become sequential (making them like tape today, access speeds not increasing as fast).
That would leave room for RAM to essentially become used for random access in the way the disks are used today and perhaps current cache on the CPU to be used more like RAM is today?
A lot of wire-speed net devices are starting to look like this, with their info stored in a non-volatile storage device, but loaded into RAM on startup and all "work" done in ram.
It's easy to image a whole chain reaction of purposes for devices slipping into other functions as a result of varying levels of technological advancement in them.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
As it says in the article, anything more than say a terabyte will take longer to download at internet speeds that one-day air. You could start the download at the same time your friend sent you the computer, and you would have the computer before the d/l was done.
Secondly, remember that bandwidth is probably cheaper than postage. Shipping a carton with a few hard disks and proper insulation would cost at least $30 to overnight it.
Again, quoting from the article:
JG It's cheaper to send the machine. The phone bill, at the rate Microsoft pays, is about $1 per gigabyte sent and about $1 per gigabyte received--about $2,000 per terabyte. It's the same hassle for me whether I send it via the Internet or an overnight package with a computer. I have to copy the files to a server in any case. The extra step is putting the SneakerNet in a cardboard box and slapping a UPS label on it. I have gotten fairly good at that.
So, not only is shipping cheaper, buying your friend a computer is cheaper.
If both have a several gigabit OC line, then perhaps uploading it would be faster.
Which might be possible if they're in the same building. But then you could unplug the machine and walk it over in 5 minutes, which would be much faster.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
At least if you live in Australia...
Downloading 8gigs from Perth to Sydney with everyones favourite isp (Telstra) is more expensive than buying return ticket to Perth (about the same distance as LA to NY)
"How can mailing be faster than uploading? My mail server is uploading.. oh, now I get it."
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
This article points out that fact that we do not get very good bandwith today for what we pay for, and also, that we pay far too much for what bandwitdh that we do get.......
"even complete computer systems, packed full of disks"
Umm.. why would you pack a computer full of disks? hows that gonna help anything?
MABASPLOOM!
Actually the ping will never traverse the same network. The data will go over the postal network and a single ACK will come back over the telephone network. Data loss will occur at unacceptable rates due to the medium (postal service) and ACK loss will be high too (Telco)
New proposed RFC 5433 for postal ACK format:
"Yup, I received your package"
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
they also fail to mention the possibility of these hard disks getting lost or stolen. Or better yet the station wagon getting stolen by some idiot...
What a great example you picked! Cable TV companies are pumping dozens of digital movies accross their system at once, live. Yet they crimp your upload speed to DSL rates or lower, 30KB/s, because they are afraid of people "stealing" movies. This is not a technological problem, it a social one. Big publishers and telcos are afraid of competition and are doing everything in their power to keep you from enjoying technology that's already in place. It's the same old fight Ma Bell used to wage back when they would not alow you to so much as plug a modem into your phoneline.
How long are people here in the US going to put up with this monkey business?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
if i send a million 1 megabyte files out, those one million files are instantly read at the destination(s) ... (i won't even get into the fact that, that one word SHOULD be pluralized). anyway, if you load up a caravan with cds, don't forget to add the time of burning all the cds, and reading all the cds.
why was this even a story? unless you do hard drives, this is pointless.
the bigger problem is, people need a more efficent way of storing files.
if you're sending terabytes of info, how much of that info is duplicated on every transfer?
Runnin' On Empty
You may find RFC 1149 useful:
"A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers}
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled brimful of DVD-R discs."
Hmm, anyone know the usable volume of a 747 and the volume of a DVD-R disc?
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
uucp to Australia used to be done by uploading a spool dir somewhere in the US to a tape and airfraighting it to Oz, then doing the same at the other end. You'd post something to usenet and get a reply 2 weeks later
Every city now has a monopoly on internet access so you wont be seeing anything new in cable modem or dsl speeds. Go slow and SOAK the public than Invest, it's smarter that way since their is no competition.
http://www.dslreports.com/ has a lot info on municipal broadband which the cable and phone companies fear.
We are living in the past and the public still doesn't get it. The phone and cable companies are profitting so why should they change.
Did anyone else see that the disks will have IPv6 or IPv9 addresses. You could give every disk an IPv6 subnet and still be able to address every byte on the disk within that subnet.
I can only imagine the address space of IPv9!!! Anyone have the specs, or was that just humor?
More than enough BS
Not only does a stationwagon full of harddrives have a respectable sustained throughput rate, the contents don't get screened by the firewall. Ditto for the hardrives in a briefcase, or those USB drives on a keychain.
Exploding capacities of storage drives have implications on attempts to keep data within boundaries, as well as attempts to getting it from point A to point B.
we have a scanning department that scans millions of docs/month for other companies.... we checked out various delivery methods, from uploading to burning CDs and shipping... we found for almost every job the most efficient in cost/time is by using USB hard drives... we have like 10 of them... 120gigs a piece, at 250$ per device. we just bring these to a customers site, upload the data to their network, and take it back. quick and painless.
I work in the mapping industry. Currently I'm in the process of burning 232 DVDs because the client doesn't have a DLT or an SDLT. Even if we AND our client had T-1's, how long would it take to transfer over a terabyte of scanned imagery? (Yes, I'm too lazy to do the math.....) And how would I deliver to the next client while the current client is tying up our bandwidth?
Adherence to the truth is a form of disloyalty.
Is there a completely new set of nerds coming of age every week? Why does this site constantly go over the same geek meme over and over as if it was a totally new concept. Nerd out over something new for a change.
Next Week:
New "Beowulf" clusters may allow high powered computing for a fraction of the cost.
pigeon business. Anyone worth their salt knows that swallows are much better at carrying around heavy objects.
Make sure they are the African variety though.
traceroute privaria.org
1 privaria.org-package.ready 50000ms
2 Picked-up-USPS 900000ms
3 Transfer-to-USPS-depot 300000000ms
4 (unknown)
5 (unknown)
6 (unknown)
Packet Loss 100%
Blockwars: multiplayer and it's free.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
One of the major thoughts in the whole interview is that our storage has increased to such a point that we can't access it all in a reasonable fashion. For my uses (which are far from industrial level) I find that I can only watch one movie or listen to one song at a time. On my 200 gigs of hard disk I've got 60 gigs of music (and growing daily) and at least 100 gigs of movies.
Don't judge me on the legalities of the situation, but note that this isn't uncommon...I have some very drastic media needs and the media that I like is pretty intensive, but I don't very often need to stream any of it en masse to another location. It suits it's purposes fine exactly where it is, and I haven't had any problem acquiring any of it or accessing it.
I suppose my rambled-to point is that for my needs I'd rather there was more storage at this point than have higher access speeds as I can get all that I need as fast as I need it. Perhaps our usage of the medium dictates how it develops.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
I am a mainframe console operator at a large computer datacenter, with several state government agencies outsourcing their mainframe processing to our center. We have every day, UPS and Fedex shipments of 3480- and 3490-format tapes (look like 8-track audio tapes) to load into the mainframe, even some old ass 3420 tapes (the big magnetic reel tapes)
some of the files on these tapes are litereally only a few kilobytes large.. (!)
certainly is NOT faster than ftp'ing the data over, considering the agencies main offices have dedicated T1's and T3's going into the mainframes. but due to the beaurocracy, and fear of changing ANYTHING mindset these agencies have, they still mail these tapes back and forth
granted, some of the sites have started mailing floppy disks or burned cd's instead (laugh)
If you are trying to figure out the best way to transfer data you have to look at a few things.
The first is if you are moving data that just needs to be stored or if you are going to use it. Shipping 10,000 DVDs of data in a car across the state would be easier than the Internet of course. But if you need to put a few hundred gigs of data on another computer across the state then you have to factor in the time of putting in the disc and moving it to a hard drive.
It would be very interesting to see a study of how best to transfer 10gigs, 1000 gigs, and 10,000 gigs of data from computer to computer, across the state, and across the world.
With human factors (installing of hd drive, hd to hd transfer, hd to dvd recorder transfer, etc) being factored in. It may actually be useful for businesses to research this instead of just using normal business protocals. It could save days of employee time when moving data.
This story is so sad, but true..
:(
Using my companies bandwidth (1.5Mb/s through 1Gb/s), it's usually a quick matter to just use our bandwidth to move data around.. We'll sync up 100GB of data rather frequently.. But, for the home consumers it's pathethic.. On Charter Cable, with their "Platinum" package (768k down, 128k up) if you come close to 128K up, your suddenly throttled down to about 100K down and up.. If you are downloading, it'll cap off at 768Kb/s during low-usage times (like 4am), but it'll slow down to about 128Kb/s to 256Kb/s during the day.
Time Warner cable is worse, but I don't have statistics to back it up.. I just know if you try doing anything during home peak time (after work, but before midnight), expect most pages to crawl and don't try to download big files. I forgot how bad it was, til I went to a friends place with Time Warner and was in pain trying to download files...
Maybe if the cable companies loosen up on their throttles, it won't feel like your on a 56k modem during peak times. Or maybe their infrastructure just sucks that bad.
I live close to my office, so if I work on a big project, I'll either copy it onto my laptop or burn it to CD to bring to work. It can take hours to upload 20Mb of data. Don't even think about uploading a 660Mb file.. I do big files, like images of server OS installs (Linux, of course), on a regular basis.. Their logic is that users don't upload, unless their using P2P software, so who needs upload bandwidth. {sigh}
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Try "instantly recieving" 200 GB file over a 56K modem or even a DSL.
This is *exactly* why mp3 trading will *never* stop.
Even after you shut down the p2p networks (if you can).
there's no place like ~
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station-wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway"
When shipping HDs, dropped packets has a whole new meaning.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
This will always be true.
:-) In the end, the _STAT_WAG will almost always be faster when data_to_transfer == "really big".
#define _STAT_WAG N
#define _COMM_LINE M
#define infinity "really big"
int main()
{
int bandwidth=0;
int disk_capacity=0;
int data_to_transfer=infinity;
int t=0;
int min_time=infinity;
for(t; t<=infinity; t++)
{
bandwith++;
disk_capacity++;
data_to_transfer++;
}
min_time = (data_to_transfer == infinity)?/
_STAT_WAG:_COMM_LINE;
return min_time;
}
or something along those lines
Don't become a regular here, you will become retarded. -- Yoda the Retard
Well the other poster has addressed one flaw with your argument. Here's the others.
"Yet they crimp your upload speed to DSL rates or lower, 30KB/s, because they are afraid of people "stealing" movies. This is not a technological problem, it a social one. Big publishers and telcos are afraid of competition and are doing everything in their power to keep you from enjoying technology that's already in place."
1-"stealing" movies isn't competition in the traditional sense, no more than the chop shop down the street is competition with the ford dealership up the road.
2-Funny you should be looking at only one end of the social stick. It takes two to tango, and it takes the same to make a social problem. So what's on the opposite end of yours?
3-"He who writes the code makes the rules". He who pays for the technology determines it's use (within the legal framework). Don't like it? Write your own code.
This reminds me of a true story I've heard about a city in the US in the 1800's (Kansas City I believe).. well they wanted to build a Bank, but of course it was way to expensive to have the bricks shipped ($3/pound), so they checked out the rates of the US post office, and low and belhold, they were lower.. ($2/pound) but there was a limit, so every person in the town got 70 pounds of bricks delivered to thier house, and everyone helped build the bank (in a way)..
This just continues to empasize how cheap the US post office is.. I could get over 120 GB mailed somewhere overnight for $15, while the bandwidth charges would be used to get that much transfered that fast..
just my $0.02
Kenny
The essence of the article is snail mail has higher bandwidth than electronic means (or something to that extent). This ignores the fact that most programs/data transmitted today are huge. gigabytes. A one-sided DVD is 4.7gigs. Even if it took, for the sake of argument, 2 days to transfer that DVD electronically and 2 days to ship the DVD across the country priority mail, the cost of badwidth vs. postage has to be taken into account. Postage for a disc is a little less than $3 for priority mail (and less than a dollar for regular 1st class). Is having one's bandwidth tied up (slowing down everything else on the network) worth $3? $1? No, of course not. And as data gets bigger and bigger (it always does), mail will still cost less ... at least for a long time. CDROMs and DVDs are small and light--perfect for sending cheaply in the mail. So, to say mail is faster than uploading data is a shitpoor comparison. And while it sounds fascinatingly shocking, that's only because it's ignoring some pretty big factors.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Conclusion? Public transit is faster than dial-up.
Yqy...K ecp'v dgnkgxg aqw cevwcnna vqqm vjg vkog vq vtcpuncvg oa uki. Kh aqw vjkpm vjku ku tkfkewnqwu, tgcf oa dkq.
The people I currently work for deal with large (10s of GBs) financial databases. They used to ship the database out (to their clients) on a stack of CDs, until the database got too large for that to be practical. Now they just ship the database on a Firewire hard drive. After the client has loaded the data into their database server, they ship the hard drive back.
"The ping on a station wagon sucks and don't even get me started on the routes..."
That's what happens when you let CowboyNeal drive.
I just recently moved halfway across the US from my hometown. A buddy of mine who had a ton of MP3s (mostly legal BTW) had just suffered a HDD crash and his SO's car had been broken into meaning that TONS of music had been lost/toasted. Before I left, I'd copied his whole collection to my drive. Shipping him a drive with the whole contents (60 GB) of my music collection took a hell of a lot less time than letting him download it (at 20 Kb per second (Ghod I hate SBC!)) or worse yet, take the time to pick through it at human speeds, and was far cheaper unless you figure that the cost incured by me sending it overnight was in addition to my regular bills.
Dok
"You can't screw the system, but you can give it a good fondling." -- Too lazy to look it up
First of all, how could you drive into a garage at 60 miles an hour, stop, unload, and get back out before the next truck, only four inches behind you comes in? In your system the trucks would crash into eachother, and you'd get no effective bandwidth.
In actuality, you need to figure how long it takes to unload all the tapes from the truck at least. Assuming about 10 seconds a tape (ones in the back take longer) on average and that's 1.16gb/second.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
you are reciving all the channels at once, it's just that you're only decoding one at once. Lots of people decode more then one at once, such as using the TiVO or a VCR, or using picture in picture.
If you wanted too, you could record all of them at once, quite easily.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This isn't the same Jim Gray from ESPN/ABC is it? The same guy who gave Pete Rose the business at the all-star game in Boston? Wow, that guy IS a dick.
It doesn't mean that bandwidth is bad -- it means that storage capacity is GOOD.
I suggest you read Slashdot
"Yet they crimp your upload speed to DSL rates or lower, 30KB/s, because they are afraid of people "stealing" movies. This is not a technological problem, it a social one."
Actually, it IS a technical limitation. You obviously aren't aware that each channel requires a specified amount of the RF spectrum, and cableTV was built to be primarily downstream since there were no such things as cable modems for decades. The upstream range used on most cable systems is limited by the condition of the decades old primarily downstream cable plant, and that's why they are throttled down. As cable plants get better the upstreams will increase.
Well one tape = 166709 units * 64 (k) / 1024 / 1024 = ~10.175GB
About one second on an OC-192 fiber.
That figure is per tape, the actual shipment has 1,139 tapes, I think. 10.175GB * 1,139 = ~11.6TB. That *is* impressive bandwith.
Call it 20 minutes. Or 1:20 on a measly OC-48.
Sorry, but now that I'm working with fibers I'm just no longer impressed by the bandwidth of a busload, planeload, or even a cruise-missile load of backup tapes. Even an ICBM-load is barely in the running.
That's progress for you. Time to switch to CDs or DVDs if you want to keep the move-the-medium approach ahead of the communication infrastructure. Even that may not last.
Now what WILL impress me is being able to afford to have a SONET ring bundle running through (and terminating in a router at) my house.
(Although my previous house WAS adjacent to just about the only street in the bay area where BOTH of Pac Bell's rings ran down the same set of manholes. So I came within maybe 50 feet. B-) )
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Is this news? I work for a gov't lab that does computational astrophysics, and our physics-heads generate huge multi-terabyte data files all the time. We are actually under contract from NASA at the moment to develop a large, distributed disk array for the storage of these files.
;)
But what did the proposal we wrote to NASA say? You guessed it: even in our official documents we recognized the fact that it's much cheaper to ship even bulky, heavy hard drives than try and transfer the data over the wire. In fact, if I can dig up the concrete numbers we came up with I'll respond with them, it's quite interesting.
Moral of the story? Duh, we already knew this
Read the fucking article. The first page and half talks specifically about storage growth versus access growth.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
... "sneakernet" back in our uni/college days.
Of course, then we did it with floppies; now we do it with DVDs. Latency indeed doth suck, but the bandwidth is pretty fantastic...
Is that why you posted the exact same joke as someone else 4 minutes late?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
We had one in our second year of CompSci, where we should compare "Bernie the Bernhadiner" who can carry one DAT tape (8GB) with 10km/h and a modem on a ISDN line with 64000 bit/sec. It was quite interesting to see that the phone line is slower
for distances up to around 2777km (assuming Bernie does not need to sleep or pause).
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
But they could also take 50 different routs to get there. There are all different kinds of ways to rejigger the figures, but were talking about what's practically possible. Employing enough people to man those 40,678 loading docs full time (what you would need to offload 1 truck/ 0.28 seconds), would be at least 5.55*40,672*24 is about $1,083,667 dollars per day, or almost $400 million a year. For that kind of money you could probably afford to lay down multiple parallel multifrequency optical cables.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I knew they were onto something when CPIP was announced. Now we just need to find enough pigeons...
The killer is that the movies the cable and sat companies pump out "digital" most often are of LOWER visual quality than the DIVX stuff in the newsgroups and IRC channels. I actually gave up my directivo because the quality I was getting was no longer worth recording - or watching, IMO.
Believe it or not, I think a network can actually scale better then sending stuff, at least if you look at cost. Why? Because you have to figure in labor.
When you have a one-off transfer it's not a big deal, but imagine if you spent all day installing a hard drive, copying data over, and then packing it up to be shipped back out with the result. It would get pretty old, I think. Imagine if you had to pay someone to do this, all day long. Now imagine that you needed a lot of bandwidth, like 20tb/second. Assuming one hard drive stored 200gb, and assuming it took 10 seconds to install the hard drive (I'm assuming these would be set up for easy install, rather then unscrewing the computer or whatever, it would be more like a jazz drive) you would need two thousand people working continuously. Paying that many people, even minimum wage would cost $1,000 a second, or $864,000 a day. That's $315 million dollars a year, and that isn't even figuring in fuel costs, and extra 'overhead' labor costs (you think you can manage 2k people yourself) and all kinds of other infrastructure. Depending on how far you need to ship, you could probably lay your own DWDM. Lines. One tech from allows 1.6tbits per second, or 200gb/sec over a single line. You would only need 100 separate fibers to get 20tb/second of bandwidth, and that whole setup would probably cost much less then all that infrastructure.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The awesome power of cheese?
The awesome power of a fully operational mothership?
The awesome power of turning up!
Yay me!
We've realized this at my school also. Sharing large files ("NOT" movies/software) is much easier via passing CDs and DVDs around than setting up network connections at home. Download once, pass twice. Really, with the increase in physical capacity, we've come full circle in networking. It's sneakernet all over again, but no more floppies.
Q:A man with a delivery bike can pedal at 20mph between the organisations two offices that are 5 miles apart. The basket on the bike can carry five half-inch tape reels. What is the effective throughput of this datalink? For extra credits: A modem can transfer data at 300bps. At what distance does this outperform person with bike.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The station wagon comment reminded me of an idea that I had a long time ago, when I first read about how the Internet routes packets around. You know how you can ship stuff UPS overnight? It can get pretty expensive, depending on how big and heavy the package is. And sometimes, businesses would pay an even greater price to have a package delivered even faster. Why not introduce a system for getting things delivered extremely fast, and I do mean fast, all around the world?
Imagine this: Put together a network of railroad-like tracks that are enclosed in concrete tunnels. In a vacuum. Individual cars would travel on these tracks at greater than mach speeds. They would essentially go from one switching station to another, kind of like the telephone network or the Internet. They might come in several sizes, these cars. When you need something delivered fast from, say Los Angeles to New York, the package would be placed on a dedicated car which would take it at blazing speeds through, say, Albuquerque, Oklahoma City and Louisville, to New York. At each station, equipment would adjust switch tracks to route the car to its next switching station; the car would not even have to stop or slow down. The package might be there in four hours, counting the time it takes to bring the package to a station, have it loaded, unloaded, and then transporting it to its final destination.
This might actually make shipping cheaper rather than more expensive. Automatic equipment sorts mail at the USPS. If this mail were collected, say, once every hour (during business hours), taken to the nearest major USPS distribution center, where it is sorted, placed in boxes heading to the same destinations, and then shipped (tunneled?) through the above method, mail going to a distant location might arrive faster than mail going across town. This could be done with collections of packages that are all going from one major city to another together. Load them in a container and bust them all over there. Sure, it'll still take, say, 24 hours to ship packaged in such groups, to save money, since you have to wait for enough packages, sort them, group them, etc., but if you want something shipped right friggin now, the option to get a dedicated car is still available. This might reduce use of gasoline and use of air and ground traffic. If computers can control the cars on these tracks so that cars are going mach 2 almost bumper to bumper, that would allow for extremely great throughput.
Back to the station wagon comment, supposing this could be done, (running more tracks all over the world and installing these switching stations at each major city), you could load hundreds of terabytes of data onto a big friggin raid system and then get that data across the world faster than shit going through a tin horn.
If you needed to ship data between two points, you could get a direct physical connection, which would let you use the full speed constantly. Obviously if you had a lot of data, that would be the way to go.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Here in NYC, Time Warner now allows us to pick from several dozen movies to be played at any time, including the ability to pause, FF and REW (with preview), etc. (video on demand). All of this at close to DVD quality too.
So how do they do this? I've always been under the impression that with digital cable and cable internet, all of the data has to be sent to everyone (in the same neighborhood anyway), so how can they handle the hundereds of channels (some of which are actually lower quality than others), the multiple VOD streams (even for the same movie), and eveyone's porn and mp3 activities all at the same time?
You could get up some decent bandwidth if the pigeons were carrying microfilm or holostores. See
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-257064.html
My rights don't need management.
Another interesting aspect of this is security. In one of Gibson's novels, Mona Lisa Overdrive(?), bicycle couriers do good business physically transporting discs from one place to another.
The idea is that if you transmit something over the internet, you can never feel quite sure that no-one else managed to get a hold of your data.
There is an ironic sense of security in having a person physically move the data on discs.
Tor
...snail mail may be cheaper, like the SETI data, but for small amounts of data it's always better to use computers. :-)
I may be working in one room of the house and my wife in an other room and she'll IM me to tell me something's on TV.
I work in a AmLaw top 100 law firm in DC. We do a lot of complex litigation work. We use software such as Concordance, Ringtail, and Litgator's Notebook (runs on Lotus Notes) to manage collections of documents. The documents are scanned to group IV tiff; the meta data and OCR text that is extracted from the documents at scan time is loaded into another database that overlays the images.
These tiff file collections run into the millions.
Of course the point of doing this is to facilitate collaboration on document review between us, our clients and our co-counsel. These people are often 1000s of miles apart, and nearly as often have crap for IT resources (equipment and personnel).There are ways of accessing this stuff over the internet securely but it's never quite the same as having the real version of the software. This form of access often proves to be impractical for the lawyers who travel alot depending on the type of access they can get wherever they end up.
So what often happens is, we end up dumping the entire collection on a laptop with a big hard drive or a bigger firewire or USB drive, so they can work without access to the internet and then replicate changes when they can get the laptop back on ethernet or a POTS line.
Collections of images and databases (not to mention the various Power Point presentations and word processing files) can very easily run over 50GB. Moving this across the LAN, over my PC BUS to another hard drive and then FEDEXing it is certainly faster than doing the same transfer using FTP or SCP. Not to mention, that way I can install the software (properly) and test the whole setup before I send it off. The extra wear and tear I save on my psyche from NOT having to explain how to install all of the software, point it to the image collections, and deal with equipment I have no control over while being screamed at by extreme Type A attorneys going to trial makes that laptop look like a pretty good investment.
These are good if you have someone on the other end of your FEDEX run who know how to open the case on a PC and install a HD themselves. I can setup one machine with everything, image the hard drive, make copies on other drives and drop them into FEDEX pouches as fast as I can make 'em. I can't think of a faster way to move a few 100 GBs of stuff to a half dozen places inside of a day. If someone has ideas, I'm all ears.
If you never make mistakes, it's probably because you're not doing anything.
Imagine if your hard drive or processor was 50 miles long and buried underground. How often do you think you'd upgrade then? What would have them do, rip up everyone's lawn ever 6 months to install the latest and greatest?
And DSL and cable modems can go pretty damn fast, the problem is the upstream connection.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
That reminds me of a remark made by a professor in college: "It's hard to beat the bandwith of a station wagon full of magnetic tape."
-- yawn. --
Don't go to such a crappy school. There have been some ranking of 'cyber civil liberties' on campuses out there. I know I saw a blurb about it in wired. Some schools lock things down to a ridiculous level.
You could also just go back to a modem. It's slow, but hey. It's fast enough to transfer papers and stuff.
And you can also attach things to email.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
but I pay $45/month for Comcast, and transfer probably about 30 gigs a month. $10/gig over 5 gigs for broadband? Smells like a terribly contrived example.
OK, so what if I have a pickup truck that just arrived full of hard drives? How fast can I get that data into a useful state (i.e. loaded into RAM)? You still need to plug it in.
This is a bit like marriage... just because you've got a wife doesn't mean that you're experiencing a real-live porno 24-7.
- passion
13 million T1 lines, maybe. But only 2,000 OC-768 lines, and only 100 of those Lucent DWDM lines which I linked too. I think it would cost less to lay that line yourself. One hundred .5mm fiber cables could fit in one bundle of cables just ~2 centimeters in diameter. It might cost a lot, but it would certanly make back what you paid in 10 years, if not 1.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Clifford Stoll talks about this a lot in his book (from back in the day, yes, but the points are still relevant (obviously, with this article)) Silicon Snake Oil. It's officially required reading for any internet junkies, as it will make you rethink all your opinions of technology.
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
I wonder if they can update the RFC? It's just another medium like 100baseTX vs 100baseFL
You could just setup an HTTP server on your home machine with SSL, a properly configured firewall/webserve configuration, etc. Then just write a simple script in the language of your choice that contains an html form with enctype set to "multipart/form-data" and the code to write form field contents to your disk, very simple. Oh yeah, and of course encrypt all your data you send over using PGP, only store the encrypted uploaded data on that machine, only keep it online when you have to (if possible), and isolate that machine from the rest of your network. Hell, you could even just run OpenSSH setup to listen on a port your schools firewall allows and use SCP, Zmodem, or an FTP tunnel through SSH.
Seth
Don't forget, the sender has to pay for the upload data volume, and the receiver has to pay for the download data volume. So overall, using the Internet is even more expensive than your estimate. Whereas with mail, the sender generally bears all the costs.
At ~700 Mb per scene, we'd cut Landsat images onto Exabyte and send a taxi across town for about $20 AUD. As 700 Mb of data at 20c/Mb would cost $140 AUD _on_each_end_, putting it in a taxi was a bargain (even the latency was comparable).
More recently, we're getting 100's of Gb of RADAR data being shipped overnight on firewire drives.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Depending on how much your sending your kbps as calculated from the amount of data over the amount of time to arrive could well and truely suck by today's standards. :)
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
% units '200gigabytes/(2megabits/second)' days
- * 9.2592593
Just over a week to transfer 200gigabytes over a 2megabit line. (of course, I can only send at 500kilobits/second, so you can quadruple that to over a month for me)/ 0.108
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
At some point you have to actually get the tapes into the computers. Even if the tape drives themselves had relatively infinite bandwidth, it would still take at least 10 seconds to get it off the truck and loaded into the reader. Maybe you could save time by using some sort of SUPER GIANT SPOOL like 2 meters in diameter and height.
Imagine that, cassettes the size of shipping containers. Of course, if we're going to talk about things like that, we really need to talk about tape read speed too. Lets say the tape thickness is 8 microns. In that case, each layer can hold (4-(8*10^-6)*i)*pi where i is the layer number, So the total number of layers is Sum(2*(2-(8*10^-6)*i)*pi) (2*pi*r where r is 2m - 8um*i) for i from 0 to 2/8*10^-6. that gives us about 4*10^11 meters of tape. Even if we spun the tape at the speed of light it would still take 20 minutes to read one tape. At the speed of light, it would take about 1309 seconds to load the data into the computer. Since 1309/100 is 13.9, assuming you did your math right the cost would be $278 million per year. Of course, we can't actualy spin the tapes at the speed of light.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The algorithms are simple enough so most implementers can understand them, and they are complicated enough so most people who can't understand them will want somebody else to figure it out for them. It has this nice property of being both elegant and relevant.
proclaims the accusation of their high ping latency is just a myth
I'm involved in a project moving 150TiB from the West Coast to the East Coast. I can attest to the fact that it is cheaper and faster to ship tapes via FedEx.
Ask Slashdot gets this sort of answer once in awhile - someone says "I just use two disks as my backup". Of course, they're boned once lightning strikes and fries both of them.
This article got me thinking about using disks as storage that's online as needed, and sitting on a shelf the rest of the time. I picked up one of those 3ware RAID cages recently, and hotswap is on my mind.
What if you could buy a cage that's built for repeated insert-remove cycles along the lines necessary for backups? Buy a hotswap cage with one bay and a bunch of trays. Slap a bunch of disks into those trays and keep them in padded anti-static containers when they're not in use.
Backing up is simple. You insert the disk, lock it into place (which powers it up), fsck it, mount it, rsync across (why copy duplicate bits?), umount, unlock it, and stow it.
Disks kick the crap out of tapes in terms of speed, and you don't have to copy duplicate bits if you use something smart like rsync. Disks also use things like SMART to holler when they're going bad in many cases. Tapes just fall over and die.
DDS-4 tapes hold 20 GB uncompressed and cost about $20. 100 GB drives cost about $100. Which would you rather do - run 5 tapes at 3-4 MB/minute (typical DDS-4 tape drive rate), or run one disk for a spell while it does the rsync magic? Remember that if you forget about the backup and walk away, it's stuck until you swap tapes...
And then we should install W98 fileservers in our basements to serve these backups to any room in our homes. Windows file sharing is excellent for this use.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I mailed myself a floppy disk a few years back and today when I opened my mailbox I found the same 8" floppy...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Scientists have been shipping around disks (well, first disk packs, then disks) with experimental data for years, and doing so is more popular than ever. It doesn't take a genius to figure that out: let's see, we have to download 100G of data, at the current rate that's going to take whatever, so let's just ask the good folks to send us a tape/disk/whatever.
Of course, in many cases, it is still actually more convenient, cheaper, and less time consuming to just rsync something than to send a disk; the bandwidth may be lower, but it takes fewer man hours. I suppose that may not matter to Gray, who probably can command a bunch of assistants to do his bidding, but for normal people, it does matter. I rather type a couple of commands and forget about them for a week than go out, buy a disk, hook it up, transfer stuff, pack it, stamp it, and take it to the post office/FedEx.
This leads me to wonder: has Gray done anything scientifically or technically interesting lately? Just buying lots of disks and installing MS SQL Server on them for various Microsoft marketing gimmicks doesn't count.
"Today disk-capacity growth continues at this blistering rate, maybe a little slower."
What is a bit slower than a blistering rate? A skin-reddening, sensitizing-to-the-touch rate?
RTFM; please, I beg you.
This is totally the Legend of John Henry.
It has been postmarked on Tuesday, the day after I mailed it, but they didn't receive it until the following Monday. An entire week after I mailed it. Why it would take that long to get there I have no clue.
Maybe there is a lesson to be learned. Being lazy isn't always the fastest way to get something done.
Favorite quote from the article: "Not many of us know what to do with 1,000 20-terabyte drives--yet, that is what we have to design for in the next five to ten years."
Heh. I do, so get designing. The various law firms reviewing documents from cases like Enron (criminal , bankruptcy, and civil procedings), Microsoft's antitrust suit, the SCO v. IBM, etc. etc. need that space to store all the materials from their case work. Lots of paper from all those places get turned into electronic images managed by very large custom databases.
Guess how many Group IV tiffs and pdfs some of these become. Answer: millions. In five or ten years, cases such as these will likely consist of collections of data that large. Terabytes of data for cases such as these are not uncommon now. Enron could get this big by itself by then. It's well on its way to becomming one of the largest cases of all time. Check this out. Whoa.
If you never make mistakes, it's probably because you're not doing anything.
Enjoyed the mention of Louisville (my hometown, and a great place to live) in the parent posting about underground high-speed shipping.
Louisville is the main UPS (United Parcel Service) hub. One can hear the planes all night from Thanksgiving to Christmas: one fully laden 747 landing/takeoff every two minutes for at least four hours (120 jumbo jets.) The package sort building is mammoth (not NASA Vehicle Assembly Building sized, but still.)
Funny, every time they build a new runway to make things quieter I seem to move closer to the airport.
Lest this happens to them. Make sure you check out those pictures!
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with backup tapes.
;-)
This is a statement by Andrew S. Tanenbaum from his book titled Computer Networks. Though it's supposed to be a text book (with 4.5 stars on Amazon.com), I and most of my friends also regard it as a nice collection of stories related to computer networks and communication
...will be bored college students knocking on each others doors, with USB hard drives full of MP3s. Nodes can be linked via CD-ROM and DVD media. What's the point of buying CDs when you already have literally months worth of music that you haven't even sorted through?
Honestly, I think RIAA would do well to back off. If they manage to kill off P2P trading, it will only be replaced by something much, much worse.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
i can burn over 100 cd's and hand them out to friends ' (only shareware and gpl stuff) quicker than using a dialup, cheaper, too. at 10.95 a month,on dialup, i'd only get 30 minutes sleep because of downloading files, and emailing the poor peoples republican army on how to poke the gov.
to bad the rest of the populace are a bunch of pusilaniumus cattle, afraid of what the gov can do. i guess that the gov can only be squelched by us small weak folks. funny how the bigger the genitals, the smaller the BALLS. I'm glad i got a little one.:-)
We had 115 gig of audio data shipped overnight Fedex from New York to Winnipeg. do that over the internet!
Moved from a basement of a building to the third floor of another because of hurricanes, and availability of more networks at lower costs.
Back around 1970 I persuaded my boss to rent me time at the big IBM data center in LA. Got to use one of the first 370 model 155's, IIRC, the first business computer that had microsecond cycle time. We carried in copies of our data and all on tapes. You had to rent 1-hr blocks for $300 and we had some time left when we finished, and I discovered that they had IEHMOVE sitting on that machine. What was cool was going home with everything hot that IBM had ever done -- OS/360, PL1, Fortran IV, and sort all in the back of the '51 Plymouth wagon. Never found a machine to load it on. Might still have some of the 800 BPI tapes in my garage. Anyone have a drive?
I run free anonymous FTP off my server because I can. Occasionally someone asks me if I worry about someone filling up my HD and crashing my server in the process.
Then I point out it takes around 8 hours to back up the 80GB drive over a 100Mbit LAN. I have a 640Kbit downstream connection. It would take a month to fill the entire drive.
I had someone connected to my server for 14 hours uploading a pirated game. I let him finish. Opened up the zip file and replaced everything in it with a single text file with the person's IP and log entries showing their attempt to pirate software.
I've often burned stuff to CD rather than upload it to my server over the net. Even for relativly small sites like my own, it's far more efficient. It's never an emergency situation where the files have to be there "this second" anyway.
It's not surprising that big companies don't waste their bandwidth that customers need and just transfer physical media instead where possible.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
I once lost something in the back of a stationwagon, so you had better back up your data!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
I don't know about a network of subterranean conduits, but if a customer wants to pay for it, he can get a human to courier a package from one city to another, even hand-deliver the package to its recipient. If the customer paid for a charter plane, the package's route wouldn't be limited to scheduled flights. (I suppose you wouldn't need the human courier/escort, but a dedicated courier might be simpler than arranging for a separate person to intercept and babysit the package at each point.)
Expensive courier services for original documents, transplant organs, valuables, etc. will persist for the time being because there just isn't widespread demand for a 4-hour L.A. to N.Y. run for physical objects.
On a sidenote, has anyone tried to send a telegram recently? The yellow pages has listings for this service. I called Western Union a few years ago checking into it and they said it cost $30. (I wish I knew for sure whether that included hand-delivery to the door; I think it did.)
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
Maybe we should supercede the Avian Carrier RFC with the AV-based transport (AV Autonomous Vehicle). We could then describe them as high-bandwdth, high latency, variable speed, self-routing carriers with internal collision avoidence systems which move in a network of 2d and 1d (and sometimes 3d in the case of ICE-based light aircraft) etherspaces.
Of course, Most AV-base carriers (aside from those which are amphibious or airborn) require bridges between domains, and may most may be subject to adverse throughput during times of peak activity on congested networks.
Transfer between carriers requires a hub or "port" (such as an airport or shipping center) and additional latency may occur while queued...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The Internet has limited bandwith but will ship small mounts of data almost instantly.
The post office has amost unlimited bandwith but insain lag.
For example this message is posted from my pda to slashdot in seconds. The same message would take at least three days over the postal network.
But if I tried to send the entire contents of my computer over the net it would take a few weeks (for mainnence reasons I erased the mp3s and porn from my system.. already backed up)
I could copy everything to cdr and ship it.
There is a max load for postal but you'll only see it if your in retail or masproduction and shipping whole batches of refridgeraters or TVs.
The data bandwith of the postal system will continue to increase as long as data storage improves.
Internet bandwith has to contend with burrocracy and corprate compacency postsl bandwith dose not.
I don't actually exist.
"Bitty" usually starts with a "B" =]
In the end you are still limited to the bandwidth of the reader reading the tapes, etc. Sure you can drive it there really quickly, but now you have to hire someone to actually load the tapes and transfer the data, all being delivered at the speed of the reader. Those couple of minutes(arbitrary amount) downtime between tapes add up to the point where theoretically it's faster, but in reality it's not. Script it, do whatever, let the computer do the work and go golfing.
In the end I guess it depends on what medium is important to you and do you need to pretend to keep your job because it's "important".
Let's see -- sanity check
Package ready in 50/1000 of a second. That is some mailroom clerk. He needs to be promoted to assistant VP of mailing immediately.
Picked up by the USPS in 0.9 seconds, and delivered to the depot within 5 minutes! This is awesome.
Of course, it seems that we have some kindof network disconnect over at the USPS itself. Or maybe the mailroom clerk is fudging everything, and just carrying it all to his own van. Yep, that's it.
You don't need to go at high mach speeds. High mach is expensive and dangerous in closed quarters; vacuum is also expensive. I've thought about this one, in terms of running railrods in America profitably.
All you need to do is have the train cars be dynamically linkable. I mean, you get on a train at the station. It goes out ahead of the main train coming in, and then slows down to link. Each car, then has a destination. The door opens, and you walk back to your destination car [for freight, you'd need standardized packages, and onboard computerized conveyors.]
You sit down, order a meal [which comes with the next car]; each car has its own driver, so for a 5-car train, that means that the most recent addition's driver is driving the train; the others function now as security and wait staff.
Eventually, your car drops off the back of the train, and then delivers you to your destination.
The train, thus, never stops rolling at approximately 60 mph; you make a nonstop trip to your destination; the drag per train car is like a car running at 15 mph; the trains can run regularly, even every hour; and as per Vanderbilt's plan for steam boats, the trip could be extremely cheap or even free [since people are eating their meals on the train].
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I venture to ask, why not buy a two-way satellite uplink? The latency is bad, but once you get the data flow going, it really flies.
Of course, now we can watch the economy crash as the Vikings destroy the last infrastructure...
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Practicality over cost, especially since companies wants to save more lately. I guess sometimes simplicity is the best solution.
very funny
blackmerlin
That's about the most pointless thing I've read all week.
Ok, so if I put 1000 80 gig tapes in a large box and Delta-dash them from Atlanta to LA it'll get there quicker than sending the information over an Internet connection.
How could someone not know that? It's the most basic common sense. I guess I deserve a good modding down on this one. It's just so obvious of a thing that I can't NOT say something.
Not many of us know what to do with 1,000 20-terabyte drives--yet, that is what we have to design for in the next five to ten years.
Creating the technology then coming up with what to do with it, great idea!
--
Well, the practical speed limit would be the speed at which the tension in the tape from centerfugial force would rip the stuff apart.
Anyway, I still think it would be cheaper to run fiber and use DWDM tech to cram terabits/sec over it.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
How about this, a solid matrix of silicon memory units with transmiters attached. As soon as the truck goes through the transmiter, all of the units transmit using a tiny cap for power. So much energy is released that the entire matrix evaporates instantly, thus resolving us of the need to dispose of it.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If they let me download DivX, I will give it to all my friends. Of course, everyone watches movies on their PC. Nobody will ever consider buying a DVD with surround sound and extra features after watching my streaming video quality movie. Certainly, there is no reason for me to worry about a digital watermark that might identify me as the source of the program on Limewire. It's totally impossible to hide an 8-byte id number in a 1G file in a way that is hard to get rid of. This whole steganography bullshit is so overrated.
On the other hand, if they send me DVDs, there is no way for me to make a copy. Certainly not a full-resolution, full-feature 2 DVD-R copy watchable on a regular TV. Especially not using this program. I swear I never gave any copies of my LTR DVDs to my co-workers.
Now isn't it ironic?
This was the most amazing thread I ever read on /.. Slashdot is still awesome, indeed.
Thank you all.
This thread touches on a thought of mine... As of 2003, I still see a big gap between the free software crowd and computer users. Mostly, it has to do with access to free software. Not everyone has access to a T1 line to downloand the latest ISOs of their favorite Linux distro. However, many involved in the free software camp are passionate about keeping the free software movement growing. So I came up with an idea of creating a network of distributors who would download and distribute free software -- all from the kindness of their hearts. For those interested: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fbsw Let's see if it works. -Charles
What a concept. Doesn't it sound good? 'Terascale sneakernet'. I think I'm going to say that about a dozen times before lunch...
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
I am on of the PI's on the DRIFT Dark Matter Search
(http://euclid.math.temple.edu/~martoff ; funded by the National Science Foundation http://www.nsf.gov ). We collect about 6 GB/day of data on a Linux PC located 1180 meters underground in a salt and potash mine in North Yorkshire, England.
The only practical way to get this data home to the USA for analysis is to remove and ship the 40 or 80 GB hard drives. We have collected over a dozen drives this way, total around 700 GB. Of course we analyze this on another Linux PC, dual Athlon plus a farm of 5 surplus computers from around the university (500 MHz PII's + 768 MB ram just weren't fast enough for those office-types to run Windoze with!).
The article heavily concentrated on heavy users, but the same questions - "download" or "get a physical copy" - have to be answered by normal users every day. For example I have 200Gb of storage filled with DivX movies and I needed to choose between cheaper CD-Rs and faster access HDDs. I also need to decide whether to get the film on a printed CD for 3$ or to download it using a flat-rate megabit connection. These were not the easy choices and I am looking forward to 20Tb drives.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Global point-to-point wireless data transfer
"Back in school we always had a saying, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with backup tapes." Seems like that still holds true."
This was never true. The time it takes to write data to the tapes at point A and the time to read the data at point B compounds to make the overall bandwidth of the system much lower than it seems.
Yeah, working with HTML forms to upload data. That works, I tried that and itwas nice, sort of :) It's a bad solution if I'd ever want to upload larger files due to various issues, like the initial drawbacks of http. (being stateless and all that) Still, it works up to a level and it works nicely if you don't expect too much out of it.
HTTP tunnels are a good solution so far but I don't have any working tunneling software yet apart from a trial version of a commercial tunneler. Granted, I haven't taken a very good look at gnu/httptunnel yet, so that might be an answer. Once I get back in college that is and by then I'll have one of those USB keys :)
Hate me!
Uhuh. Dial up access isn't good for getting first post on predictable jokes, especially if you want your ping times to be accurate :)
Back in school we always had a saying, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with backup tapes." Seems like that still holds true.
Of course if still holds true, storage capacity is increasing faster than bandwidth is. A station wagon full of tapes holds alot more than it did when that saying started out.
That was Andrew Tannenbaum in his networking book -- just a minute, i'll go get the thing for a decent citation -- here it is: "Computer Networks." That's where "Never underestimate ..." comes from.
Hi, Mom!
Years back I was in a big meeting with the Air Force and we were talking about the various networking options available with their fancy new front-end network processors. They liked the idea of the network being independent of the hosts and the ability to ship data around and log into any machine on the national ring. Then we had our discussion about following out a full OS refresh for the various logitical systems and a Colonel looking at the network map asks me "What's going to be the fastest way to get everything to the logisticas centers?". My reply was obvious. "Fed-Ex".
I love this article. There's all kinds of stupid crap being discussed, and it's all on-topic. Go figure.
From the article:
...
...
Something that I'm convinced of is that the processors are going to migrate to where the transducers are. Thus, every display will be intelligent; every NIC will be intelligent; and, of course, every disk will be intelligent. I got the "smart disk" religion from you, Dave. You argued that each disk will become intelligent. Today each disk has a 200-megahertz processor and a few megabytes of RAM storage. That's enough to boot most operating systems. Soon they will have an IP interface and will be running Web servers and databases and file systems. Gradually, all the processors will migrate to the transducers: displays, network interfaces, cameras, disks, and other devices. This will happen over the next decade. It is a radically different architecture.
What I mean by that is it's going to have a gigahertz or better processor in it. And it will have a lot of RAM. And they will be able to run almost any piece of software that you can think of today. It could run Oracle or Exchange or any other app you can think of.
In that world, all the stuff about interfaces of SCSI and IDE and so on disappears. It's IP. The interface is probably Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) or some derivative of SOAP; you send requests to it and get back responses in a pretty high-level protocol. The IP sack does security and naming and discovery. So each of these "disks" will be an IP version 6 (IPv6) node--or IPv9.
Umm... so if I understand this, he envisions SOAP over IP to replace be the functional equivalent of DMA/SCSI transfers...
This is SOAP we're talking about here... not some mythical "uber-fast" protocol.
If the underlying hardware indeed got that fast to make SOAP over IP possible... wouldn't disks be that much faster with a tad bit more efficient (albeit a little less standardized) protocol?
-- dforce
SELECT * FROM USERS WHERE A_WINNER = "YUO";
Isn't the SAN just a very large version of the smart disk he talks about? Most SANs do block level but cat also do file services if you like and who knows what they can do tomorrow. It seem to me he missed that connection. He states he doesn't understand the big fuss over SANs but hypes up the smart disk.
Imagine getting all that pr0n at once though! ;-)
Fooling who, I wonder?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of the Concorde filled with CD-ROMs (now DVDs) flying at full speed. Now, go calculate the latency...
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
Since 1309/100 is 13.9, assuming you did your math right
No comments...
I'm pretty disappointed (although not entirely surprised) in SlashDot posters. This article was clearly more than simply 'mailing disks' which > 95% of the topics (including dupes of dupes of dupes of ...) on this article have been about.
/. audience.
Sure, he mentioned cost of shipping disks, and actually concluded that shipping an entire computer system is more economical than mailing individual disks. However, there are far more interesting and discussion-worthy conclusions he raises.
What about disk capacity reaching such incredible sizes as 2TB/disk - and the fact that current random-access methods will render such drives unusable? This affects all of us, since our OS' filesystems will need to fundamentally change to be more sequential (e.g. like tape drives). Personally, I hope that whatever happens to the fs the OS will insulate me from being forced to use it in a sequential manner (e.g. will I be exposed to the sequential nature of the medium or can it be successfully abstracted?)
He talks about, in almost glowing terms, the SlashDot favorite MySQL and how "At some point, somebody will say, 'I'm running my company on MySQL.' Indeed, I wish I could hear Scott McNealy [CEO of Sun Microsystems] tell that to Larry Ellison [CEO of Oracle]." And, although the Research Area people are pretty independent, this is from a MICROSOFT employee. Not a peep from the
Personally, I think that using MySQL as a 'research tool' as he suggests is a Very Bad Idea - it's not even a mediocre implementation of the relational model and there are better open-source implementations out there (PostgreSQL being the one that comes to mind). Basing scholarly studies on MySQL would be like basing the foundation of a skyscraper on a shack (not that any other SQL DBMS's are much better, but why use one of the worst?). The best 'research vehicle' would be an open-source truly relational database management system (there are no commercial TRDBMS either). It doesn't have to be very advanced, but it has to be architected from the ground up to be a TRDBMS (which means SQL doesn't cut it as a query language).
One thing he notes which I see as being a large problem in the open-source community as well is how "...The thing that slows Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft down is the testing, and making sure they don't break anything--supporting the legacy. I don't know if the MySQL community has the same focus on that." As a long-time PHP developer and advocate I'm still hesitant about updating our production systems - it seems as if every successive release of PHP has innumerable functions removed or changed with no ability for backwards compatibility. I guess it's a lot easier to say to users 'you get what you pay for' when they are just that - users and not clients. One of my disappointments from many open-source proponents (which I am one) is the hostility to treating clients as clients - 'you can always edit the source', etc. - for the most part large companies don't care/want to edit the source - that is what they want to pay you to do. Until more projects (MySQL included) start to realize this, then they will pretty much always occupy niche roles in the enterprise.
Finally, even he, an academic seems to (at times) confuse the relational model's implementations' details (e.g. the SQL product performance) with the model itself (of which there is no mention of performance, because it has nothing to do with the model). Theoretically, a TRDBMS should be faster than the SQL implementations we have today. It just takes someone to do it, and I don't see why the open-source community can't build the BEST mousetrap there is - we just have to abandon the 'mob culture' of MySQL.
Thanks,
--
Matt
I acquired some discs at the local Amiga store. I also used to use the Internet. In the late 80's I worked at Wang, which had a net connection. I would:
- Find ftp servers hosting Fish images
- Download them to a Wang VS
- Copy them to a Wang PC
- Copy them on a PC floppy
- Load them on my Amiga using DOS floppy emulation.
BTW, was AmigaDOS the worst filesystem ever? Using DOS emulation made it obvious how bad the Amiga filesystem was. It actually made FAT look good."No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
All the raw sequence trace files for the human genome project (not the finished sequence) are so massive, they are flown across the atalantic between US and UK. This has been happening for a few years, as it is just loads more economical and faster for the vast quantities of data.
I find it interesting that with the supposed glut of bandwidth and an apparent need for more bandwidth in business, that the telecoms are not offering faster data service at more reasonable cost. Seems that they have screwed themselves by locking in price structures that squeeze the largest of companies, but don't allow for any growth in the marketplace. Basically they have made big capital investmests laying fiber around the country and are going to sit on it charging the big corporations a premium.
Wouldn't economies of scale make more sense and deliver this service to more business? It has worked in the PC business. Why couldn't Moore's law work with telecom too. They too have billions of dollars in development costs to recoup and have found a way to spread that over enough customers. Seems the telecoms lack motivation or a clue. They look like cowardly penny-wise businessmen compared to the barrons of the computer business.
When I got started as a (Data Guy) not the commuications guy that most IT types are now. Coding for optimal use of storage was a way of life! Great artical and very eye opening!
Beauty is only skin deep.... but ugly goes strait to the bone....
of RFID tags
My upload speed is crimped to 30kB/s at the cable modem. It's not a shared resource problem, it's an intentional limitation designed to create an artificial scarcity over the small slice of bandwith the company gives to internet. Before they put that crimp in place, I routinely got three to four times that performance on routes that traversed half the country. It should also be obvious that not everyone is going to demand the bandwith at exacly the same time. The speed it there, it's just being alocated to crap people don't really want at times people don't want it.
This also has nothing to do with the practicality of moving movies by IP instead of digital broadcast. At your internet land speed record of 400MB/s I can download the average movie in 5 seconds. I'd be willing to wait a little longer than that, but once I've got exactly what I want, I'm good for a couple of hours if not the whole night. It's easier than driving to a video store and cable companies are implementing just this sort of service already. They just don't want you to have any sort of control of the storage.
Peer to peer services have beat them to it. They take advantage of the bandwith that's available on each little chunk of the cable net so that most trading is fast. Once a requested file hits the local node, everyone has it. It's a distribution system that's more than adequate for the limited number of movies you find at Blockbuster. It's this efficiancy, demonstrated in music offerings no traditional publisher can match, that has the movie moguls scared out of their witts. This is the reason your upload speeds are being crimped to something that would take 45 days to upload the average movie. I can remember when it only took weeks to get those movies too.
They aren't giving you small limits cause they are afraid you will download videos. Don't be paranoid.
You are not paranoid when they really are out to get you. If anyone's paranoid it's the big publishers, telcos and software companies. The networks in place make them obsolete. Microsoft should be embarased to be moving data around by sneaker net, but they've always hated networks. Bill Gates accused 90% of his Basic customers of "stealing" his software at the beginning of his career. He did not even mention the internet in his 1995, "The road ahead" and his company still strives to make sure that no two people can use the same program at the same time. It's a completely backward mindset these people have. Why are you apologizing for them?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This is an estimate to move 1 Terabyte of data via a T1 line. T1 has the bandwidth of 2Mbps - 10Mbps, with a real world average of 4Mbps. So, doing a calculation of 8,796,100 / 4 we get that many seconds. Do the rest of the math yourselves to see how many days it would take to transfer that much.
terabytes = 1
megabits = 8,796,100
seconds = 2,199,025
minutes = 36650.41667
hours = 610.8402778
days = 25.45167824
Yep, I'm FedExing that sucka'!!
Also remember that digital cable TV can afford to drop at least a few percent of the data and just 'play through' without a hitch. There are no data timing issues, no packets, no ACKS on data, no CRCs, no headers or addressing, and it only goes one way.
(most) IP data, on the other hand has all of those things that end up making the data stream very compute-and-wire intensive. 5% data loss on the TV is a skipped frame every few minutes or some 'blocking' pictures, on your data line it would be totally unacceptable, and you would FEEL it.
Saying that the cable companies are just capping you at the very bottom of their capacity is like saying you can transfer 170KB/sec over your headphones, because the sound coming from them is CD-quality stereo; you DO hear the sound, and it is high-quality, but it's not digital, 'exact', or 'guaranteed' once it hits the stereo plug.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
that FTP'ing X^Y Gb of data really chokes our WAN/LAN/Internet pipes and that they should use Tapes or DVD's. When we show them that the $1000's of recurring costs for bandwidth can be used more efficiently for a DVD +/- R/RW and postage, they realize this actually makes their bottom line a whole lot better.
One issue that has come up, and that is having media/reader problems. Make sure your data partner can actually read your tapes/disks/cards.
I think, therefore I am - Rene Descartes; I yam what I yam, an' that's what I yam - Popeye
747s are used to move hard drives from their mfg. plant in the far east to US. Many of these HDDs are preformatted with an OS, apps etc. If you do the math a 747 loaded with HDDs moves more bits per hour than any other media, including fiber.
1976(?) Volkswagen Adventurer. Slept 5, refridgerator stove, perfect part-y mobile. Also slept 2 nudge nudge. Curtains included.
i know this is slashdot but Wow.
> if a customer wants to pay for it, he can get a human to courier a package from one city to
:)
> another, even hand-deliver the package to its recipient
Some researchers do that for conference deadlines - it's called "grad student express".
just leave the tapes in a silo installed in the back of the van, then using a 802.11 g wireless set up you could start processing before you acutally got into the dock, and leave before you were actually done...That is of-course totally disregarding the 48 QuadZillion $$$'s this kind of system would cost, the entire concept of security, redundancy or reality for that matter :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
> What's the bandwidth of a large cargo ship...going across the Atlantic
A large supertanker can hold about 300,000 tons of oil, or ~300,000,000kg.
A DVD is about 1mm thick by 12cm across for 5GB, or about 0.4GB/cm^3. Cut that by a factor of 2 to account for storage overhead and assume DVDs weigh approximately what water does - 1g/cc.
That would give us 300,000,000,000cc*0.2GB/cc = ~60,000,000,000GB = 60,000,000TB = 60,000PB = 60 exabytes of data in the tanker.
Top loaded speed is about 25km/h, making crossing time over the ~5000km of about 200 hours; double that to account for loading and unloading.
Accordingly, that's 150PB/h, or a measly 40TB/sec bandwidth.
A typical transatlantic cable does about 2.5Tb/s = ~0.3TB/s, meaning this supertanker has the bandwidth of about 140 such cable systems.
More realistically, to get any kind of speed from network to network, you'd need FireWire hard drives mounted in racks so you could fill them up, unplug the wire, drop the rack into the boat, sail, lift 'em out, plug 'em in, and dump the data. This system would probably work with the loading/unloading times and extra space assumptions I've made, and since hard drives like that are about 0.1GB/cc, you'd get 10TB/s bandwidth, or 30 transatlantic cables.
...and what are these "ladies" you speak of?
Unless the driver is a moron, then the route should be much more direct. Seeing as when I do a traceroute to pretty much anywhere it goes through at least 2 or 3 major cities that aren't even remotely in the right direction.
That station wagon has a great transfer rate, but the latency sucks.
Will the real Richard Stallman please stand up?
One of the things I've been wanting is a good way to backup systems using cheap "IDE" drives, instead of these annoying and expensive tape drives. @ $5,000 for the 160/320GB tape drive, another $5,000 for the software, and $100 a pop for tapes, seems to me some type of hot plug drive bay would work great. I've seen something that works on Linux, but not on NetWare or Windows? Is there any chance of Veritas, or HP creating a hard drive backup system.
> "Who would ever, in this time of the greatest interconnectivity in human history, go back to shipping bytes around via snail mail as a preferred means of data transfer? Jim Gray would do it, that's who."
Jim Gray, the sportscaster dude? I never liked that guy - good intuition, huh?
---
"Take care of him?" (pulling right thumb from left side of the throat to the right)
Must-not-watch TV!
Heh. That might work in some scenarios... However, the advantage of the laptop that's not to be overlooked: you can bill it back to the client rather painlessly most of the time. The satellite uplink cost would be a lot harder to justify. You often pay for the expertise of one or two people in a given location, which doesn't justify that type of cost. It'd be fun to play with one if I could justify it though. :-)
If you never make mistakes, it's probably because you're not doing anything.
Fusion splicing fiber is still expensive, and optical .
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routing gear is still expensive
This has a trickle down effect to the T1, but they are
still overcharging for the service
Uncapped DSL is faster than a T1, then something is up
The price of ATM connectivity and Long Reach Gig Ethernet over
fiber are dropping, but the gear is still expensive as it is
not mass produced yet
When ATM cards are as cheap as NIC's , and an ATM router costs
about as much as a 100 Base-T Router then you will see a
revolution in long haul costs
Right now patents, etc etc, are keeping the cost of ATM gear
a bit higher than it should be, but it is still cheaper than
Sonet and looks to stay that way
Wireless may be the cheapest last mile solution for areas the
carriers have deemed unworthy of broadband due to cost to
implement
Alot of small rural communities are hungry for broadband and
are sick to death of dial up after visiting friends and
famalies in the city and seeing what broadband is like
I am starting a Wi-Fi Coop ISP in a rural town like ALOT of
ppl all over the world have already done . If enough ppl
do it , it will solve this problem , check out www.locustworld.com
and the MeshAP
A central access to bandwidth, then Mesh AP's all over a small
town will work , in fact it already is around the world
Work around the telecom industry, go Wi-Fi
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Sure, it's easy to say that moving physical media via any of a variety of shipment methods would be faster than sending it over the wire. But what about accumulating or preparing the tape, disk, flash drive, etc.? How much time is factored in for that?
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.