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Internet Speed Record Broken (Again)
captain igor writes "CNN is reporting that researchers at Caltech and CERN successfully send 1.1 Terabytes of data at a rate of 5.44 Gbps. This is around 20,000 times faster than your typical home broadband connection and almost doubles the previous record. "
Their math is wrong all over the place. 1) 20,000 times faster that standard broadband 2) "compact disc within one second -- an operation that takes around eight minutes on standard broadband". 8 minutes = 480 seconds, i.e. 480 times faster. This is a difference of about a factor of 40 from the 20,000 number. Also: 90-minute DVD download in 15 minutes. Assuming 3GB (shooting lower than a full DVD here). That would be 25Mbit/second. That cannot refer to "standard broadband" but neither to the previous speed record equipment so what is this "current technology"? Journalists need to start using their brains just a bit.... /Claus
University of Illinois at Chicago was able to achieve 6.8Gb/s a few days ago using the UDT protocol .... http://www.ncdm.uic.edu/pressrelease.html
Whenever lay tech writers talk about data, they describe it in terms of Libraries of Congress, which I've always felt is a pretty bullshit quantizer, as the library obviously has things like photographs, movies, and albums that would take a lot of honking space, so much so that no storage medium exists that could conviently and economically store even 1 Library of Congress.
Sorry to interrupt your crusade against ignorance, but I though you'd find interesting that as early as in 1959 among all people Richard Feynman himself spoke about storing Libraries of Congress (to be exact, about storing Library of Congress plus British Museum Library plus National Library in France). His estimate was that about three square meters of surface was necessary to store all books in the library (all pages visually, not the text in ASCII) using electron lithography.
Speaking in terms of Libraries of Congress instead of terabytes or petabytes is not an oversimplification, it's an easy way to convey the idea of large storage to people who still confuse HDD capacity and RAM.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
[Why] have or download data that you never see or listen to?
*Glances over at spindles of discs ~50 days of anime fansubs, which I will never have time to watch.*
*Glances at 25 DVD-Rs of video game background music, which I will never have time to listen to.*
Um... Obsessive-compulsive disorder?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").