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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.
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
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.
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.
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 ]".
...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
Basicly they shunt data around, the same way Exxon et al move oil.
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
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
Work units are ~300 kilobytes a piece, or at least thats how much the client downloads.
Vonal Declosion
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.
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.
Well there is a Pattern That goes along comparing Desktop Performance and information needed v. download bandwith.
First during the mainframe era a serial connection was fast enough to operate a dumb terminal hooked to a large expensive mainframe because the information that needed to send was small and processors were expensive.
Bandwith Wins.
Then the PC era came about where software starts to become more graphically intensive and needing more direct access to the CPU power which is becoming cheaper.
CPU Wins.
Internet Era, when people are getting use to using the internet using now using graphics and bandwith have improved to send the graphics at a resonable speed.
Bandwith Wins.
Today. We have been collecting a lot of data and storage is cheap we are use to having a lot of data on hand. Data now is becoming more multimedia based thus taking a lot more space then a text file.
CPU Wins.
Possible Future. After echomony picks up and improvements in PDAs and a wide spread of wireless internet ether via WiFi or Cell. The PC will become more pointless in todays life. Servers will be providing the data for the PDA and intercommunicating with other PDAs.
Bandwith Wins.
And continues.
It is not a real circle and these times overlap but there is change in focus of desktop computing to client server.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.