Siemens Reaches 107 Gbps Data Transfer Record

Hooray! by PixieDust · 2006-12-20 15:48 · Score: 4, Funny

And everywhere, lonely geeks rejoice at the decreased download time for the favorite pr0n!

Re:Hooray! by poopdeville · 2006-12-20 17:21 · Score: 3, Funny

107 Gb/s sounds like a lot. How much is that in Metallica discographies/s?

--
After all, I am strangely colored.
Re:Hooray! by Jello+B. · 2006-12-20 18:36 · Score: 2, Informative

About 110 Metallica discographies per second, according to a torrent I found, which lists it at 973 megabytes. That should be a new file transfer measurement. Md/s.
Re:Hooray! by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-20 20:21 · Score: 0

the favorite pr0n!

Do you really think it's a coincidence that the company developing this technology is Siemens?
Re:Hooray! by Bastard+of+Subhumani · 2006-12-21 01:13 · Score: 1

So maybe "Siemens" wasn't quite the word they were looking for?

--
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Re:Hooray! by Vintermann · 2006-12-21 01:59 · Score: 1

In other words, it's competitive with CDs in the mail. Especially if you have to put them in the drive and read them in the other end.

I'm impressed.

--
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Re:Hooray! by oc255 · 2006-12-21 02:58 · Score: 1

Huh? I don't think anyone could snail-mail CDs fast enough without using very large bulk shipments. You figure:
- 2 day air shipping by specialized carrier
- an unlimited amount of CD drives all operating at the same time would still take some time to maintain, load, setup, etc even with unlimited staff

So let's call it three days. Using GP's 110 Md/s number, I'd have 259,200 Metallica albums transferred at this speed in a digital format, of course I suppose the filenames and album names would all be duplicates so without a storage system that is not filename based, it'd just write in place I suppose.

So, ship 259k CDs. A jewel case with 4 inserts weighs 11g and a CD disc itself weighs about 15g. All those CDs would weigh 6,739.2 kilograms = 7.42 tons in 3 days and every three days just to keep up with my 110 Md/s pipe. :D

Competitive, if you like a tanks weight of plastic every month at your doorstep. "Sign here please."
Re:Hooray! by 42Penguins · 2006-12-21 03:30 · Score: 2, Funny

Not to be confused with MD/s, Megadeths per second, a much smaller unit.
Re:Hooray! by Orestesx · 2006-12-21 10:34 · Score: 1

Well its Gbps, so wouldn't that be about 13 gigabytes per second, or just over 13 metallica discographies per second?

The problem is... by TrisexualPuppy · 2006-12-20 15:51 · Score: 4, Informative

And everywhere, lonely geeks rejoice at the decreased download time for the favorite pr0n!

This will not matter much, at least on the individual's machine. Most hard disk drives transfer on the order of 25MB/s. This fiber transfer is applicable only for supercomputing links and Internet backbones. Good luck finding a 107000000kbps stream ;)

Re:The problem is... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-20 15:58 · Score: 0

Pardon me, but if we're going to be petty about details, let's be it all the way: 112197632 kbit/s :))::)):)99.9.9äö,.wtf
Re:The problem is... by Barny · 2006-12-20 16:00 · Score: 4, Informative

Yes it will actually, this is a bigger pipe, and since the internet is a series of pipes..

But really, if an Aussie ISP (internode for instance) has just upgraded from 3Gb/s to around 6Gb/s, how much would it benefit them if they could just sell off most of the fibre they are using currently and just run one at 107Gb/s?

As for 25MB/s, a newer HDD will easily reach around 40-50MB/s, added with the popularity of NAS and small raid systems most good PCs can suck almost 70MB/s (560Mb/s).

Of course, with Australian broadband being lucky to get (until just recently) above 1.5Mb/s this is rather moot.

--
...
/me sighs
Re:The problem is... by dextromulous · 2006-12-20 16:02 · Score: 1

This will not matter much, at least on the individual's machine. Most hard disk drives transfer on the order of 25MB/s. This fiber transfer is applicable only for supercomputing links and Internet backbones.
And my ISP is a gateway to those lines. I'd rather be pushing my data through someone else's big tubes than my own... its a lot cheaper that way.
Good luck finding a 107000000kbps stream ;)
Well, I might be able to find a 25MB/s stream ;) and that's good enough for me.

--
There are two types of people in the world: those who divide people into two types and those who don't.
Re:The problem is... by NerveGas · 2006-12-20 16:10 · Score: 3, Informative

Most hard disk drives transfer on the order of 25MB/s

Maybe you should upgrade that machine you bought four years ago. :-)

A lot of drives today can write at twice that speed, and read even faster. I've got an external firewire 800 drive (a single drive, not one of the RAIDs-in-a-box setups) that can write at a little over 60 MB/s. Your point is, of course, still valid... few users are even able to make use of a gigabit - or sometimes even half of that.

--
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Re:The problem is... by DAldredge · 2006-12-20 16:28 · Score: 3, Informative

My year old SATA Maxtor 7L300S0 can sustain ~ 50 megabytes / sec averaged over the entire surface of the disk. Don't speak again on this subject until you learn more about it.
Re:The problem is... by consolidatedbord · 2006-12-20 16:45 · Score: 1

Way to kill the guy's joke. Just let him enjoy his +2 funny. :-P

--
while true ; do echo this is my sig; done
Re:The problem is... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-20 16:47 · Score: 0

This fiber transfer is applicable only for supercomputing links and Internet backbones.
Mod parent: (Score:5, duh, no shit - really?)
Re:The problem is... by TheSkyIsPurple · 2006-12-20 18:27 · Score: 2

He did say "on the order of"... so unless you've got a disk pushing 250MBps or 2500MBps, I wouldn't nitpick too much.

That fiber is pushing several orders of magnitude more data per second
Re:The problem is... by dal20402 · 2006-12-20 19:08 · Score: 1

MacBook Pro. 7200rpm 100GB Seagate. 41MB/s sustained until the cows come home. It's a *laptop* disk.
Any decent SATA disk in a desktop should give you 50MB/s sustained. I have a two-disk RAID 0 in mine that will do 103MB/s. No, it's not a burst. I can write 250 GB at a time at that speed. Check out some 2004 hardware before you speak...
Re:The problem is... by ComaVN · 2006-12-20 21:02 · Score: 1

actually, when measuring bandwidth, si prefixes are in powers of 1000, not 1024.

--
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
Re:The problem is... by Mike89 · 2006-12-20 21:37 · Score: 1

Hello, fellow Whirlpoolian ;)
Re:The problem is... by drsquare · 2006-12-21 01:57 · Score: 1

HD limitation is only an issue if you're saving a file. It's not important for watching videos. But at the end of the day your speed will be limited by all the links from your computer to the site. I have an 8MB connection but still can't download from youtube faster than it plays. I can on Google video, but then there's not much to watch on there.
Re:The problem is... by fostware · 2006-12-21 01:58 · Score: 1

We Whingepoolians can't limit ourselves to one audience!

--
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
Re:The problem is... by cciRRus · 2006-12-21 02:10 · Score: 1

Yes it will actually, this is a bigger pipe, and since the internet is a series of pipes..
I think you meant tubes instead.

--
w00t
Re:The problem is... by Kjella · 2006-12-21 02:14 · Score: 1

Good luck finding a 107000000kbps stream ;)

Well, if you're working with raw HDTV then a HD-SDI link is a 1485000kbps stream, so about 72 of those at the same time should do it. Ok, so it's not everyday use but for individual's machine: I doubt you could fit all the cameras of the Olympics to a master console through one of these cables. In any case, it doesn't take much of a town before you can saturate this cable.

--
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Re:The problem is... by s31523 · 2006-12-21 02:51 · Score: 1

Or you could use the HyperOS HyperDrive, which is a DDR RAM based drive which claims "Seek time is 50-60 microseconds", that is right microseconds.

Granted, this is RAM based technology with the obvious pitfalls (this one has a external power source so as to not lose your data), but with upcoming flash based drives and other improvements, I wouldn't be surprised if these drives become more mainstream, especially with network transfer rates of 100Gb/s.
Re:The problem is... by the+eric+conspiracy · 2006-12-21 03:27 · Score: 1

Yeah, but this is getting up there with your frontside bus bandwidth.
Re:The problem is... by bdonalds · 2006-12-21 04:10 · Score: 2, Funny

Yeah, but this is getting up there with your frontside bus bandwidth.

Aren't you listening? This technology allow you to download more porn, which increases the width of your frontside bus!

--
The most important thing to do in your life is to not interfere with somebody else's life. -FZ
Re:The problem is... by pclminion · 2006-12-21 07:01 · Score: 1

Interesting you mention it. My wife works at a very large maker of computer parts (which will remain unnamed). They regularly have to send several terabytes of technical data between a site in Oregon and one in California. They have a FAT PIPE to do this with, but they discovered that the servers on either end of the pipe aren't fast enough (sending OR receiving) to saturate the pipe.

So my wife's task was to construct a program which reads the data in parallel from their massively parallel filesystems, compresses it and sends it via hundreds of "little servers," and it is received by hundreds of other "little servers" on the other side and integrated back together. This is literally the only way that they can saturate the pipe. A cool project really, and a hard one to solve reliably due to race conditions, general unreliability when you have that many machines interacting, etc.

Point is though, it's really damn hard to fill a pipe that wide, and practically impossible for a home user with a computer that can, at best, only crank out a measly gigabit per second or so.
Re:The problem is... by dotgain · 2006-12-21 07:42 · Score: 1
Well, it had to be said, even if he knew it was obvious. Every time there's an article here about some new data transfer record, half the page is taken up by:
- People bickering over SI, MiB, MB, Mib, Mb etc.
- "But my PCI bus can only..."
- "Hard disks can only..."
...completely missing the point.
Re:The problem is... by Anthony · 2006-12-21 13:06 · Score: 1

Unless you have access to SAS (Serially Attached SCSI) drives :)
sudo /sbin/hdparm -t /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: Timing buffered disk reads: 268 MB in 3.00 seconds = 89.20 MB/sec sudo /sbin/hdparm -T /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: Timing cached reads: 12632 MB in 2.00 seconds = 6321.11 MB/sec

Or even better, a HPC cluster file system with Fiber Channel and/or SAS drives

--
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance

See also by Sampizcat · 2006-12-20 15:53 · Score: 4, Informative

Fiber is Great but quite expensive still by vg30e · 2006-12-20 16:01 · Score: 2, Interesting

I wonder if we will get higher speeds on copper or maybe just cheaper fiber interface cards. Fiber optic networking technology has always been fast, but I guess due to production quantities, it never seems to be as cheap to implement even in a Data center environment. I wonder if we will ever get to see fiber optic network interfaces that are close in price to the copper ones.

We run multiple cat6 cables as trunk links between our switches just because there are more ports to do so and it is cheaper to do those runs.

Re:Fiber is Great but quite expensive still by timmarhy · 2006-12-20 16:23 · Score: 1

huh? fiber isn't expensive when your talking data centers...

--
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Re:Fiber is Great but quite expensive still by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-20 16:42 · Score: 0

Is that why the cost is measured "per port"? Anyone that finances data centers knows the per port cost of fiber over copper, whether it's IP networking or SAN. This is known because the two mediums are fungible for many uses. Even the price of cables is dear.

The parent is right. Optical is costly, and it doesn't seem to matter how much they manufacture; that cost has a floor that is comparatively high.
Re:Fiber is Great but quite expensive still by 3.14159265 · 2006-12-20 17:44 · Score: 1

errr... I almost bet your switches are 4m appart. 10m? I've even say 20m. But not kms appart, which is what these systems are for.
Re:Fiber is Great but quite expensive still by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-21 02:04 · Score: 0

There's an IEEE 802.3an standard for 10 Gbit/s over UTP (up to 100 metres of cat 6a). My employer, Solarflare, has the first full-reach implementation. It also works over shorter lengths of cat 5e and cat 6 cables. We've distributed evaluation kits and expect customers to be able to ship products next year.
Re:Fiber is Great but quite expensive still by dotgain · 2006-12-21 08:03 · Score: 1

It's not so much the fibre that's expensive (nor does the actual quality of the glass need to improve in the forseeable future), but the endpoints.
Re:Fiber is Great but quite expensive still by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-23 21:07 · Score: 0

If you are speaking about connection between provider and household, than it is indeed cheaper to use slowest fiber solution than fastest copper (speed of those two may be same). It is why, somewhere fiber is used to connect several households to provider (e.g. Tokyo). However, there is little box which converts fiber to 100Mbit ethernet and then the cheap 100Mbit switch is used to connect individual user's computers. If something like 5 houses share this one fiber line, which is utilized to only 100Mbit, it is more than anybody dreamed before, and it is cheap solution. It may seem like "wasting" the fiber, but it is not. You do not need to overcome various problems if you use optical connection (thunderstorms, no amplifiers needed, etc.), which makes it cheaper. And if 1GBit components get cheaper in future, than it may be upgraded.

Excellent, but... by JoshJ · 2006-12-20 16:04 · Score: 1, Insightful

If this technology is proprietary (which it likely will be), the lock-in could be rather vicious, especially for the businesses that would likely be the first ones impacted, and when it does get around to the average citizen, they could give horrible service, drop people, restrict their bandwidth, etc- and they'd be able to get away with it because of the monopoly they'd get over the high speed.

--
Care about privacy? Read this!

Re:Excellent, but... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-20 16:36 · Score: 2, Funny

If sun would shine and it wasn't cloudy, this could be a warm day. I bet you didn't know that. Now, mod me insightful.
Re:Excellent, but... by modecx · 2006-12-20 16:41 · Score: 1

Huh?

So you're suggesting that Siemens AG will able to say "okay bend over" to everyone and his brother, because they're going to suddenly be solely in control of this technology, no less the rest of the global telecom industry, and everyone will put up with their asinine ways because bandwidth will fall from the skies like mana from heaven?

Suuuuure....

Here's how Siemens works: They make stuff and they sell stuff, and as much as they like to buy other companies, it's just not in their usual habit to buy all of the telecom companies everywhere, and at any rate, this tech is not likely to operate at half that rate in the real world.

--
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.

And Windows Still Takes... by sycodon · 2006-12-20 16:05 · Score: 5, Funny

...fifteen looong seconds to list the contents of a folder.

--
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.

Re:And Windows Still Takes... by MillionthMonkey · 2006-12-20 18:21 · Score: 3, Funny

Oh like you could even find batteries for that flashlight in fifteen seconds...
Re:And Windows Still Takes... by Hemmer · 2006-12-20 23:11 · Score: 1

Vista takes even longer...

--
What would a mongoose do?

Upgrade costs? by headkase · 2006-12-20 16:06 · Score: 1

How much effort and cost is involved with upgrading the current backbones to this standard? Can existing fibre be used? Especially all the "dark fibre" that was laid during the .com boom and AFAIK is still just sitting there unused to this day! If existing fibre can be kept only having to upgrade optical nodes could provide a relatively cheap upgrade to network bandwidth in the US at least?

--
Shh.

Children of lock-in. by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-20 16:12 · Score: 1, Insightful

"The Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications"

I assume that's related to the institute that gave us the "proprietary" MP3?

Re:Children of lock-in. by ahillen · 2006-12-20 20:03 · Score: 4, Informative

I assume that's related to the institute that gave us the "proprietary" MP3?

Well, if you want to call an MPEG-Standard "lock-in". I'm sure most users don't feel very "locked-in", it is probably the most widely supported digital audio standard, I would say. Sure, it is proprietary, and you have to pay license fees, but at least anyone can use it who wants it.

Nevertheless, you are wrong. It is not the same institute that gave you MP3. That was the Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen (http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/index.html). This is the Heinrich-Hertz-Institute in Berlin (http://www.hhi.fraunhofer.de/english/). There are about 60 institutes of the Fraunhofer Society in Germany (http://www.fraunhofer.de/fhg/EN/profile/index.jsp ), with widely varying research topics. More info as usual on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraunhofer_Society).
Re:Children of lock-in. by imsabbel · 2006-12-21 00:04 · Score: 1

Yo, they are the same umbrella organisation that spend all the years of effort to develope the MP3 format.
You might know the after-the-faft knockoffs like LAME, but hey, copycats are everywhere.

--
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?

Re:Warning.. by ZDRuX · 2006-12-20 16:13 · Score: 0, Offtopic

Do not... repeat DO NOT... try to shave your balls with a "Gillette Fusion" razor (the one with five blades.) Why? Not like anybody on /. has any use for them. Don't worry, you're not loosing anything usefull.

--
The magical number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Re:Warning.. by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-20 16:14 · Score: 0

rookie. i bet you tried to use shaving cream. soap&water nutsack shaving FTW.

How viable is it over longer distances? by presentt · 2006-12-20 16:16 · Score: 2, Interesting

From the article:

sent it over a single optical fiber channel in a 100 mile-long (161-kilometre) U.S. network

After 100 miles, how much does the throughput degrade? The technology might be limited if, after 200, 500, or even 1000 miles, its speed drops significantly. Or does it reach a hub of some sort that re-sends the signal every 100 miles? I should admit now that I'm not very familiar with how large telecom networks are set up.

--
I decided to stop stealing cynical quotes to use as a signature line.

Re:How viable is it over longer distances? by MrJynxx · 2006-12-20 16:49 · Score: 4, Insightful

Telecom companies dont' usually have fiber that long because of the risk of breaks and really costly repair processes, it's not because of degradation. Also the distance doesn't really matter(remember, how do you think the contients are connected? single link fiber), because if it's a good cable the data should travel at the speed of light. It depends on the recieving ends how fast your can process it.

Also the infrastructure for telecom is quite large, you'd be surprised how much stuff is running underground.
Re:How viable is it over longer distances? by ZX3+Junglist · 2006-12-20 16:54 · Score: 2, Interesting

This figure of 100mi is actually quite good,
a general standard in the industry is in the order of 30mi of fiber before signal regeneration is necessary. This is a main reason why the US is not very well suited to fiber octics transmissions in the way a smaller countries like germany or netherlands are. It's not the cost of running fiber, but the cost of maintaining sites and equipment to provide a long distance (cross-country?) signal.
Re:How viable is it over longer distances? by 3.14159265 · 2006-12-20 17:29 · Score: 3, Insightful

sigh... of course they usually have fiber, that's the only way you've got to carry those kind of bitrates! What do you think Verizon and AT&T are getting? CAT5e?
sigh... of course the distance matters, the higher the span length the higher the attenuation and dispersion!
sigh... if they say they can do 107Gb/s that's because they can fire up the laser on one side and get it with an acceptable bit error rate at the other side. These tests are not based on sending something to /dev/null!
Re:How viable is it over longer distances? by 3.14159265 · 2006-12-20 17:38 · Score: 1

What general standard? Nowaday it's pretty common to have 400..500km without electrical regeneration, and certain systems go all the way up to 2500km. Either way, how else are you going to carry traffic?
Re:How viable is it over longer distances? by 3.14159265 · 2006-12-20 18:19 · Score: 3, Informative

The bitrate ("speed") is always the same, no matter the distance. What changes is the bit error rate, which is proportional to the distance. For this particular test they defined a certain bit error rate as acceptable (don't really know which, 10^-15, 10^-16?) and when they say they did 107Gbps over 100km it means they've got the signal on the other side with a bit error rate low or equal to the defined one. When the bit error rate it just too high, you need to electrically regenerate the signal, which is almost like having a "normal" receiver and a "normal" transmitter (i.e. a diode and a laser, more or less) back-to-back. Sometimes you don't need to regenerate, but just need to give the signal a boost, in which case you'll set up some optical amplifiers along the way. Fun stuff really, specially when you get to the part if you want to boost up the signal in one direction of the fiber then you shoot a high power laser in the other direction.
Re:How viable is it over longer distances? by umghhh · 2006-12-20 21:10 · Score: 1

I am part of this infrastructure and I am not running. Not under the ground anyway.
Re:How viable is it over longer distances? by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-20 22:18 · Score: 2, Informative

Okay there seems to be some misinformation that I must correct here.

Distance is very very important in fibre systems. Distance causes attenuation (which affects the signal-to-noise ratio), polarisation mode dispertion, chromatic dispertion etc. All of these have a detrimental affect to the bit-error-rate at the reciever. All must be compensated for along the way. With long reach systems, intermediary nodes are required to regenerate the signal, amplify it, re-shape it, re-time it etc. In addition, lengths of special fibre may be used to compensate for the dispersion introduced by the channel (called, wait-for-it dispersion-compensating fibre).

And data does indeed travel at the speed of light, but this is slightly misleading - the speed of light in glass is less than it is in air.
Re:How viable is it over longer distances? by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-21 00:24 · Score: 0

The last quote I was given was, "We haven't found a theoretical maximum for single-mode fiber yet, because nobody manufactures a spool long enough."

For practical purposes, it comes down to the amount of dB loss due to refraction in angled pulls and (the big one) splice quality in your run. Each splice, fusion or mechanical, introduces some level of loss.

So, if Microsoft Zune uses this technology... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-20 16:18 · Score: 4, Funny

Then Steve Ballmer can say something like "I can squirt Siemens"

Re:Warning.. by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-20 16:19 · Score: 0, Offtopic

Cooking oil works best. Soap and water evaporate, while sunflower or corn oil does not. You can take your time, and get each and every pubic hair.

Thats nothing by Swimport · 2006-12-20 16:25 · Score: 1

A dump truck for of DVDs does at least 5 Terra-bytes a second.

Re:Thats nothing by Adeptus_Luminati · 2006-12-20 17:00 · Score: 2, Insightful

... Imagine the Blue-ray version! /// ...Imagine the dual-sided Blue-ray version! /// ...Imagine a bewolf.. no wait that doesn't apply, unless it's in Russia.

--
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Re:Thats nothing by 3.14159265 · 2006-12-20 17:40 · Score: 1

Sounds logic, until you figure you have to burn those DVDs first :)
Re:Thats nothing by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-21 02:15 · Score: 0

yeah, but the latency is horrible.
Re:Thats nothing by VWJedi · 2006-12-21 06:18 · Score: 1

Considering how clean the average dump truck is, I'd rather burn the DVDs than put them in my computer.

Tacky joke... by nick_davison · 2006-12-20 16:50 · Score: 5, Funny

Record?

Given the amount of information DNA encodes... that there's, what, a complete set in every single sperm?... I think my Siemen can squirt more than 107Gbps of data per second down "a series of interconnected pipes" than their Siemens can.

Of course, that's of minimal practical use as a) Those are burst figures, I'm damned if I can sustain them and b) I read Slashdot which means my odds of finding a compatible interface are pretty minimal.

Re:Tacky joke... by xebecv · 2006-12-20 17:30 · Score: 1

Dude, I bet you cannot shoot as far as they did, you have to do a lot of training for this.
Re:Tacky joke... by alanwj · 2006-12-20 18:36 · Score: 3, Funny

Given the amount of information DNA encodes... that there's, what, a complete set in every single sperm?... I think my Siemen can squirt more than 107Gbps of data per second down "a series of interconnected pipes" than their Siemens can. The bandwidth of a penis is estimated at 15,600 tb/s.
Re:Tacky joke... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-20 20:50 · Score: 0

The latency is also rather high due to both travel time and "preparation time."
Re:Tacky joke... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-20 22:07 · Score: 0

And then there's the whole virus/trojan issue...
Re:Tacky joke... by kestasjk · 2006-12-20 22:23 · Score: 1

There are apparently around 3 billion base pairs in our genome, each base pair has 4 states it can be in, which is the equivalent of 2 bits, so that's about 6 billion bits of information per sperm, times 5 million (iirc) ~= 3 TB.

On the other hand this is the one form of data transmission for which speed from the start of the transmission to the end is not a priority..

--
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Re:Tacky joke... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-21 00:59 · Score: 0

Bounce it off a latex firewall.
Re:Tacky joke... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-21 01:26 · Score: 0

but you have to keep an open port. . .
Re:Tacky joke... by D4rk+Fx · 2006-12-21 01:37 · Score: 1

The big problems are that it's only one way, and the data content is just random garbage. I mean, look at most of the posters here on slashdot...
Re:Tacky joke... by High+Hat · 2006-12-21 02:03 · Score: 1

Well, actually the protocol is redundant by factor 5*10^6 because the Link is rather "unstable". As well as a maximum inbound capacity of the receiving end of 6 billion bits. So we're talking about 6 GBit/E.
Figure out how many seconds E amounts to yourself. :)
Re:Tacky joke... by Hillgiant · 2006-12-21 02:31 · Score: 1

The heck with a station wagon full of backup tapes, you should see the bandwidth of MY PANTS.
Hrmmmm... that is bad on so many different levels. I am sorry to have subjected y'all to it. (But not sorry enough to not hit [Submit])

--
-
Re:Tacky joke... by Daverd · 2006-12-21 04:08 · Score: 1

But the latency is terrible.
Re:Tacky joke... by ZOMFF · 2006-12-21 04:14 · Score: 1

... does a tube sock count as a compatible interface?

--
Launch every sig.

107Gbps is too slow... by BurningPi · 2006-12-20 16:50 · Score: 0

They could decrease the time even more: just put the fibre plugs on the two machines side-by-side with a 1nm fibre cable connecting them (and overclock the comps to 50THz). That's talking MUCH faster. (Disclaimer: 50THz is Beyond recommended OC freq.)

Actually... by zifn4b · 2006-12-20 17:03 · Score: 0, Redundant

According to some, "the internet is a series of tubes."

So you know the increased bandwidth will definitely help because "if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled. And if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material" ;)

--
We'll make great pets

That's a lot of DVDs by ksw2 · 2006-12-20 17:04 · Score: 2, Insightful

Siemens said in a statement it had processed data using exclusively electrical means at 107 gigabits per second -- roughly two full DVDs per second [...]

Damn, I can barely keep up with the 5 DVDs at a time I get from Netflix.

Re:That's a lot of DVDs by 3.14159265 · 2006-12-20 18:23 · Score: 1

How it this insighful?...
Re:That's a lot of DVDs by snutte · 2006-12-20 19:40 · Score: 0

Correction, "That's alot of pr0n." ;)

107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by the_REAL_sam · 2006-12-20 17:37 · Score: 2, Informative

I really don't know why they express download speeds in such an outlandish way. End users do not "gigabits" ...gigglebits, maybe, but not gigabits... for anything, they use kB, MB, & GB.

107Gb/s = "107 gigabits per second"
13,696 MB/s = "13,696 megabytes per second"
13.375 GB/s = "13.375 gigabytes per second"

Source:
http://www.matisse.net/bitcalc/?input_amount=107&i nput_units=gigabits&notation=legacy

Divide by 8 to get the number that makes sense. The "little b" stands for bits, and there are 8 bits per byte; the "big B" stands for byte.

1B = 8b.

The byte is the amount of data you could store on a single coin if you had a code worked out placing it either heads up or heads down. Ones and zero's.

Source:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29130 :-)

--
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer

Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-20 17:58 · Score: 0

Umm, maybe because bandwidth is ALWAYS denoted in bits not bytes.
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by TopSpin · 2006-12-20 19:22 · Score: 2, Informative

End users do not

End users routinely use multiples of bits per second. Some examples; modems 1200/2400/9600/56k b/s, SATA 1.5/3.0 Gb/s, USB 480 Mb/s, Firewire 400/800 Mb/s, Ethernet 10/100/1000 Mb/s, 802.11b 11 Mb/s, etc.

Using bytes introduces too much ambiguity when discussing line capacity. In real communications bytes are often encoded (8B/10B) or are accompanied by (a possibly configurable number of) error correction bits. Higher level protocols add effectively arbitrary amounts of overhead. People who sell capacity aren't going to attempt to promise some number of JPEGs/s via HTTP; they can't know how your use case will actually perform. Siemens labs are certainly not going to deviate from the well characterized and correct practice when promoting their latest work.

It is convenient to convert between line rates and amounts of storage. An easy rule of thumb; 1Gb/s is good for about 100MiB/s. The math says more MiB/s, but usually the people who have to care are dealing with protocols that rob ~15% of this capacity for framing, error correction, security, etc. 1Gb/s -> 100MiB/s errors on the safe side.

--
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by Hes+Nikke · 2006-12-20 20:02 · Score: 4, Insightful

The byte is the amount of data you could store on a single coin if you had a code worked out placing it either heads up or heads down. Ones and zero's.

almost

The bit is the amount of data you could store on a single coin if you had a code worked out placing it either heads up or heads down. Ones and zero's. A byte would therefore need 8 coins.

--
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by dtzWill · 2006-12-20 21:18 · Score: 1

Good point, and I agree. However:
The byte is the amount of data you could store on a single coin if you had a code worked out placing it either heads up or heads down. Ones and zero's. A bit is the one or the zero, or the 'heads' or 'tails' in your example. And as you correctly stated, a byte is 8 bits.
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by mikkelm · 2006-12-20 21:19 · Score: 0

I don't know where you're from, but around here, bytes are only dealt with in storage. Audio, video, networks, and pretty much everywhere it's applicable and correct, bits are used. As they should be. If you sell someone a 500KB/sec connection, they'll expect their IE download window to say 500KiB/sec. What you'd actually be getting, after PDU overhead and error correction, assuming that you'll even be able to max it out, would probably be closer to 450KB/sec. That's false advertisement. If they sell you a 5Mbps connection, you don't have the percieved promise of a fixed (in lack of more current terms) Baud rating on your connection, and as long as the ISP is shovelling (2^20)*5 bits down your pipe, no amount of overhead or errors can make them responsible for your final, application layer download speeds. Replacing a sensible measure with a dumbed down illogical one isn't a noble endeavour, it's perpetuating ignorance, and do you really want your consumers to remain ignorant considering the cost of user support?
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by the_REAL_sam · 2006-12-20 21:40 · Score: 1

Amazing. I can't believe I mistyped it, but you're right. Thanks for pointing it out. I'd hate to misinform people.

--
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by the_REAL_sam · 2006-12-20 22:04 · Score: 1

I'm not sure if this makes sense to you, but here goes:

Bytes and bits are interchangeable. They measure the same thing. It makes no sense to say that "one of them is false advertising, and therefore the other should be used." Any measure of download speed that can be expressed in terms of one of the units can be expressed in the other, and with absolutely no loss of accuracy.

For example, if they started selling gasoline by the "kilo-fluid ounce", people might be asking "how much gasoline is in them yar 'kilo fluid ounce?'". Since nobody ever uses a kilo fluid ounce for anything else, there would be no real-world frame of reference to make it meaningful. That doesn't mean there would be "false advertising", as you phrase it, it simply means that the unit of measure would lead people towards ignorance of the actual amount of gasoline being bought/sold.

You could look it up and find out, but it might be a pain in the posterior.

I think they should be measuring line speed terms of meaningful units, so that people would be able to say "in the ideal, a 1GB download should take x minutes, give or take, and I know that due to my line speed being consistent[, and expressed in clear terms]."

Basically it boils down to this: File downloads are "sized up" in terms of the size of the file and the time it takes to download. File size is measured in kilo- mega- and giga- (sometimes even terra-) bytes. Therefore it makes better sense to measure line speed in terms of kilo- mega- and/or giga- (and, eventually, terra-) bytes.

THAT way, people would have a better instinct for how much time downloads would take.

LOL. I guess it's not that important though. :-)

--
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by mikkelm · 2006-12-20 23:32 · Score: 0

I'm afraid that you're not getting the point here.

To build on your gasoline analogy, expressing connections in byte ratings is the equivalent of stating a "miles per gallon" value for a car under normal conditions, not maximum potential. While it's fairly safe to assume that this value will be somewhat accurate for a car, it's also important to note that these numbers are calculated in typical driving conditions. Internet traffic, however, has extremely varying overhead, and connections will always be rated according to maximum potential, as this is the only reasonable way to rate them.

Expressing connections in general term such as "bytes per second" is too ambiguous for a user who expects that one byte transmitted across the wire is one byte of formatted data received. This assumption is common, and very far from accurate. When dealing in bit values, things become less ambiguous. The average user does not rate storage in bits, so if you say "100kbps" to a user, they'll ask "how fast will that let me download songs?". If you said "2MBps" to that same user, they'd say "hey neat, half a song a second", because they deal with megabytes on their MP3 players. What happens when they really only get an effective 1.5MBps download speed due to overhead? They complain.

Instead of dumbing down a rating affected by many variables that cannot all be guaranteed, I think it's more prudent to either educate the end-user, or let the professionals deal with the technical aspects.
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by Detritus · 2006-12-21 00:00 · Score: 1

Engineers and scientists use bits and symbols. Take a look at any text on the mathematical theory of communications. Bytes are ambiguous (see octet) and are at a higher level of abstraction. While we're at it, k = 10**3, M = 10**6, G = 10**9.

--
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by the_REAL_sam · 2006-12-21 00:43 · Score: 1

true true. ty. see above. :-)

--
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by the_REAL_sam · 2006-12-21 01:12 · Score: 1

I understand your claimed advantage. However, I'm inclined to say that your claimed advantage is not a real advantage, at all.

Since bytes and bits are interchangeable measurements of the same thing, the only "advantage" you seem to claim is that by using bits instead of bytes the ISP can fail to meet user's expectations without it being recognized.

Since bytes and bits are interchangeable, if the ISP can state a reliable rate of bits per second, they can express the same reliable rate in terms of of bytes per second. If the user were going to complain about one, they could just as easily complain about the other, so long as they understood both means of expressing the DL rate.

Unless you're really just saying you think the user not knowing what their service actually provides (in MEANINGFUL terms) is a justified end in itself. I don't consider that an end in itself, though, and I doubt you do either.

To carry the analogy, if the gas stations started selling gas by the 1/13th fluid ounce to cause difficulty in determining actual gas mileage (to avoid complaints), I think you might then understand what I'm saying. I'm glad they don't to that at gas stations. I would like it if they didn't do it with connection speeds. :-)

--
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by the_REAL_sam · 2006-12-21 01:34 · Score: 1

Although what you say is true, it does not change the bottom line: bytes and bits are interchangeable measures of the same thing. If potentially inefficient high level protocols, parity bits and SSL are taking that 15% from bytes per second then they're also taking 15% from bits per second.

Right? :-)

--
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by mikkelm · 2006-12-21 01:45 · Score: 0

I can see how you're getting this wrong. For that analogy to work when dealing with internet connections, you can't deal with the values that gas is sold at. You need to deal with how that gas is used. The speed of the connection is determined by the cabling, and the bandwidth of the connection is determined on how you use the cable, just like the speed you go at in a car is determined by the specifications of the car, but your gas milage is determined by how you drive your car and in what conditions you drive it in.

You commenting on "actual gas milage" with connotations of a determined, invariable value is hugely inaccurate. As I said, overhead changes wildly.

It doesn't matter whether I charge $30/month for a "64kBps" connection or a "512kbps" connection. Those are interchangable. What matters is the percieved bandwidth from the given value. You saying that I claim using bits is advantageous because "ISPs can fail to meet user expectations without it being recognised" is a gross misinterpretation of my previous post. Using bits instead of bytes gives the advantage that ISPs *can* accurately meet the advertised bandwidth in comparably unambiguous terms. When you get 512kbps, you get 2^19 bits through your pipe. When you get "64kBps", what do you get? Effective download speeds of 64kBps? Or is the overhead included? What kind of measuring standard do you go by? Theoretical or practical values? How can you ensure a 64kBps download speed in an environment with different applications and protocols with varying overhead? How can you possibly argue that this is a "meaningful" metric?

The argument here isn't whether or not bits and bytes are interchangable. Of course they are. The issue is how they'll be percieved, and the ambiguity of the terms. If a novice user signs up for a "100kBps" connection, they're going to expect to download at 100kBps. If we assume 15% overhead, their connection will cap out at around 85kBps. These people -will- complain, and I think we can both agree that the massive load of support calls and possible class action lawsuits over misleading advertisement are wholly undesirable.
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by Idbar · 2006-12-21 02:34 · Score: 1

Precisely, As you say "end" users. In networks, the end user should not be in the "Link Layer".

The reason why, bits per second is a better approach is because that's the smallest data unit to be transmitted.

The Byte is, perhaps, the smallest data unit to be processed, thus, you will be saying that, NOW, that we have 64 bit processors, we should use "64-bit" units?

Communication devices understand binary signals, they can be coded into symbols, that are completely unrelated to "bytes", so there is no reason for talking about "Bytes" in layers like Physical or Link.
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by the_REAL_sam · 2006-12-21 03:03 · Score: 1

But you see, anything they could say about x bits they could say about x/8 bytes. The same things that detract from bytes per second also detract from bits per second.

What's more, the ISP would win in court if the download speed were expresed either/or, as long as they were living up to their agreement (of download speed), or the terms of their contract, as well as relevant local law.

What's lost to the protocol, to parity bits and to SSL, etc, is still being downloaded to the client, they're just not getting any on disk end-use out of it. The ISP could easily explain that to anyone, right?

"sir you're downloading more than what shows up on your disk, due to the protocol you're using. some of the bandwidth went to verify data integrity, some of it went to encryption, some of it went to addressing the data to your computer" 15%. (ouch) But that would be 15% of bits or bytes. There's no hiding that one.

Ok, if you think the gas station analogy is broken, consider a rope salesman. A guy is selling rope for $1.20 per linear foot. You ask him for 10 feet of rope, but he won't tell you he's selling it by the foot. Instead, he sells you 120 inches of rope b/c for some strange reason he MUST tie a bunch of knotts into the rope, and he knows you won't have 10 full feet once he's done...BUT HE STILL BILLS YOU FOR A FULL 10 FEET. AND YOU'RE STILL GETTING THE 10 FOOT ROPE! It's just technically shorter once you get your hands on it, due to the knotts. Same with the ISP. inches : feet :: bits : bytes.

It's 7am now i have been coding all night. lolz. so I'm checking out. Fun chatting with you though.

--
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by mikkelm · 2006-12-21 03:33 · Score: 0

I'm sorry, but are you reading my posts at all?

We've already established that bits and bytes are both able to represent the bandwidth of a connection. You really need to get past that. What I'm saying (and have been saying) is that dealing in bandwidth with bytes has a lot more ambiguity than dealing with bandwidth in bits, and the questions I used as examples are the *result* of that ambiguity, so no, they can't be applied to a bit value to the same effect.

You advocate educating the user about overhead. I did that in my -very first reply-, and when doing this, it really is fully applicable to both bit and byte throughput measurements, so you're in effect advocating my idea without presenting any real evidence as to why it would be practical to use an ambiguous and confusing unit to express these values, as opposed to a well-established and relatively unambiguous unit.
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by alx5000 · 2006-12-21 04:01 · Score: 1

Right? :-)
Not quite. End users use KB/s, MB/s, GB/s, just because that's what Firefox or IE or Azureus report. If you say it's a 13,696 MB/s line, your confusing your end user by making him believe he will achieve that d/l speed, whereas you have to take all the overhead into account.
So: Bandwidth [bps] and Download/Upload Speed [xB/s].

--
My 0.02 cents
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by FrostedChaos · 2006-12-21 08:32 · Score: 1

What I'm saying (and have been saying) is that dealing in bandwidth with bytes has a lot more ambiguity than dealing with bandwidth in bits...

Um... divide by 8?
Don't let those EE courses go to your head... not all math is complex.

The irony is, bytes are actually more standardized than prefixes like "m," "k,", or billion.
Remember that there is, or used to be at least, an "english million" and "english billion" that were NOT 10^6 and 10^9. And there's sometimes confusion between mega- and milli-, although this is usually resolved by the context.

The real reason electrical engineers don't measure things in bytes is because, in the past at least, they didn't care about the software side of things. So there was no need to group things into bytes. Now that everyone and his dog has a computer, and most EEs have computers on their desks, it would probably be best if line speeds were in bytes per second. But in an industry where L2TPV2 and BFD are viewed as legitimate acronyms, I wouldn't expect much!

--
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by mikkelm · 2006-12-21 08:50 · Score: 0

Oh god.

Read my posts. The ambiguity I'm referring isn't mathematical, it's colloquial.
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by the_REAL_sam · 2006-12-21 13:53 · Score: 1

In fact it seems to me that he must have read them...probably the entire thread...but I just signed in again from yesterday.

Perhaps I don't understand what the ambiguity is. I accept the 8 bit byte as the standard, but I guess there might be some who don't. Are you claiming that the conversion of bytes to bits is ambiguous, due to some machines being 9 bit, and others being 32 bit, etc?

If that's your claim, then wouldn't you also have to agree to the corollary that bits should used for EVERYTHING, not just bandwith... hard drive storage, download speed, upload speed... since, by the same token, the bytes THEY use are ALSO ambiguous?

But you're claiming that colloquial ambiguity is the reason not to use bytes. I guess I just don't see the colloquial ambiguity. If a byte is 8 bits, then bits and bytes are mathematically (and colloquially) interchangeable. If not, then we're pressed to explain why ALL "data volume" measurements are not made in bits.

But the byte is here to stay, and there's NO ambiguity when my operating system tells me that a file on my hard drive is 400 MB. There's no ambiguity when I download a 400 MB file, and it takes x minutes to download. AND, there's no ambiguity when I lose y% of that download speed to a protocol, parity or encryption.

But I don't claim to know everything. Is it ok to ask if you could describe the colloquial ambiguity..?

--
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by the_REAL_sam · 2006-12-21 14:07 · Score: 1

Since byte and bit are interchangeable measures of the same thing, it occurs to me that using one measure (as opposed to the other) does nothing to correct that type of potential confusion you described, and that a clearer description of the difference between "line speed" -vs- "download speed" would correct for that same type of potential confusion (in the case of confused customers).

On the other hand, there's much less potential confusion when line speed is expressed in the terms of measure that people actually use.

For instance, if the company wanted to sell bandwidth at 1 MB/s, and protocols/parity/encryption were taking up 15% of that, then they would advertise:

1 MB/s bandwidth
870 kB/s (at least) download speed, depending on protocol, parity, encryption

Right? Both are expressed in bytes, and still there's no confusion.

--
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by fait · 2006-12-21 16:32 · Score: 1

Dude... really. You are making this be much harder than it really is. Saying 10 bytes or 80 bits changes nothing. They are the same measurment. The overhead argument that you keeping posting about is a strawman and has nothing to do with the other poster's point. A 100 Mbit LAN can be just as easily described as a 12.5 MB LAN. This is no different than saying something is a centimeter or converting it to a millimeter. He's right that any non-tech person will associate with megabytes (since it relates to file-size) much faster than they do to megabits. To be honest, I had to tell my wife how many mp3's that was a second, generally.
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by mikkelm · 2006-12-21 19:32 · Score: 0

>Are you claiming that the conversion of bytes to bits is ambiguous, due to some machines being 9 bit, and others being 32 bit, etc?

Hold on here.

>But you're claiming that colloquial ambiguity is the reason not to use bytes.

Can I ask *why* you need to ask questions that you apparently know the answer to yourself? Never mind that the answer is in the post you're replying to.

>If a byte is 8 bits, then bits and bytes are mathematically (and colloquially) interchangeable.

Let me give you a painfully obvious example here. Liquid gallons and fluid ounces are interchangable. Referring to a "gallon" in speech, you'd automatically assume a liquid gallon, since dry gallons are practically dead. If, however, you refer to "ounces" in speech, you really could mean either fluid ounces or ounces of mass.

Bits and bytes are interchangable. Referring to a "bit" in speech, you'd automatically assume a bit across the wire, since it doesn't really connote anything else. If, however, you refer to "bytes" in speech, there would be considerable confusion, since tech savvy people would associate a byte as 8 bits on the wire, but the less experienced users would associate a byte with one byte of delivered, formatted and error corrected raw data on the wire.

Two units being interchangable does *not* make either unit colloquially unambiguous. Step out of your mathematical box for a second, and think about that without getting stuck on the flawed "but they're interchangable!" argument.
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by mikkelm · 2006-12-21 19:38 · Score: 0

I'm going to refer you to both the reply I just made to the other post, and also common sense. When I'm saying "*colloquially*, not *mathematically*", I mean colloquially, not mathematically. I don't know why I bother replying if, even after something as clearly stated as that, you still reply with mathematical arguments.
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by the_REAL_sam · 2006-12-21 22:08 · Score: 1

Can I ask *why* you need to ask questions that you apparently know the answer to yourself? Never mind that the answer is in the post you're replying to.

I thought the exercise would either force you to see it with fresh eyes, or perhaps that it would reframe the conversation around the specific point of contention, since it seems to me that there's nothing to disagree about if the two units ARE interchangeable. See what I told the other guy in the thread:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=212886&cid=173 32866

Flag bandwidth as bandwidth.
Flag upload/download speed as upload download speed.

Use bytes for both.

That should make it very easy for everyone to understand, AND to use.

But for heaven's sake, don't make information difficult for people to interpret the data. Rather, make it EASIER to interpret. Again, that means flag bandwidth as bandwidth, flag upload/download speed as upload download speed. Use bytes to designate both.

There is the expression "honesty is the best policy".

I think it is presumptuous to tell people what they would think or assume about anything...what they would be confused about...techie or not.

I believe most people are capable of a great deal of understanding, and all the moreso when they're not being typecast as fools, and when the effort is made to communicate with them clearly rather than talking down to them. I've found that the more expectation I put into people, the more I get back out of them.

Several times I've read you saying people would fail to understand, that they'd get confused, that they would sue rather than trying to understand. Those are negative assumptions.

I'm not trying to diss on you, but it is important to recongnize the pattern, in the interest of breaking it. It is worth breaking that pattern.

--
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by mikkelm · 2006-12-21 22:39 · Score: 0

I see that you obviously have no experience working with networks whatsoever.

First, to address your accusations of presumption, I would like to know how many people you have ever assisted with bandwidth related questions. It is not a presumption to say that people will be confused if they are handed a kilobyte/sec value for their bandwidth that doesn't correspond with the number they will see when downloading things in their browser. This is a well-established fact that I have personally witnessed through many hundreds of conversations with end-users. 9 out of 10 people who have confronted me with questions about their bandwidth have thought that that "1 meg" connection that their friend told them to get would let them download one megabyte per second. There is nothing presumptuous about assuming that the less tech savvy people aren't very tech savvy.

Apparently you advocate a bandwidth number *as well as* an down-/upload number, *both* expressed in bytes/sec. Your argument is that bandwidth should be denoted in bytes/sec because it is easier to manage. Surely if users get a byte/sec value stating their maximum potential down-/upload speeds, this will satisfy the people who have no idea what the difference between a bit and a byte is. Great! That's already being done by many ISPs. There's nothing wrong with that, and obviously my previous arguments would show me to favour this method.

Then you go on to saying that bandwidth should be measured in bytes/sec as well. Let's just quickly go over what the different processes on that level deal with.

Bits:

* Modulation happens per bit.
* Ethernet transmissions occur as bit streams across the wire, not byte segments.
* Frame/packet headers and trailers frequently use single or double bit fields.
* Not all equipment has 8 bit WORD lengths.

Bytes:

* ?

Now, I can't see a single good argument for expressing bandwidth in bytes/sec as opposed to bits/sec. You seem to think that a change like this would be welcomed by the majority. I don't know if you recall, but this has actually been done before. Remember that funny little thing called "Baud"? If you do, you may also recollect which one you heard more frequently. "56k" or "n Baud?
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by the_REAL_sam · 2006-12-21 23:22 · Score: 1

I see that you obviously have no experience working with networks whatsoever.

Actually, that's far from the truth.

I would like to know how many people you have ever assisted with bandwidth related questions.

I've never worked support, if that is what you mean. I've written servers, built lans and many other such things. But I have not worked on a phone with end users.

I dont see any position to your argument at all. It seems to me that your position has changed many times, and I've been advocating only one thing from the start. You took issue with it at the start, the debate began, and now you've finally gotten around to saying you agree with it.

OK, good, we agree...shake hands. Goodnight. :-)

PS

Yea I remember baud. Those were the good ole days, huh? Don't ask me why the standard changed. As the other guy said, "now that everyone and their dog has a computer..."

--
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by mikkelm · 2006-12-21 23:40 · Score: 0

Your desperate attempt to backpedal and even try to accuse me of changing my position is pathetic. I've argued one thing, and one thing only. I've even had to reiterate. You've said the same thing over and over, and when I present to you indesputable evidence as to why your method would be senseless, you pull something as asinine as this. You've backpedalled, changing it to suddenly having to be two different values, avoided facing my arguments, and now you're chickening out with a pathetic excuse like that.

I don't expect you to concede. You're obviously too caught up in your own opinion to do that. What's pathetic is that you would try to convince yourself that I have at all moved one inch from my initial position.

Read my last post. If all you've been arguing is what you did in your first post, there is no way that we have come to this supposed "agreement", as my parent post argued the complete opposite.

If, however, you feel that we've come to an "agreement", the compromise must obviously have been on your part. Honestly, use your head. It's not that hard.
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by the_REAL_sam · 2006-12-22 00:29 · Score: 1

I've been posting on slashdot for a long time. I guess I was bound to come across somebody like you eventually.

Jesus said love your enemies, and pray for them.

God bless you.

--
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by mikkelm · 2006-12-22 00:50 · Score: 0

The continuing lack of substance and contrary arguments in your posts really just leads me to believe that you're desperately trying to save face. Stop cluttering my inbox with it.

I'd pray for you, but I'm agnostic, so I'm afraid you're going to have to find a sense of logic and perception of your own.
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by the_REAL_sam · 2006-12-22 01:57 · Score: 1

I'm afraid you're going to have to find a sense of logic and perception of your own.

The Lord helps me when I pray, helps me when I forget, helps me when I need help, helps me against demons, helps me when I lose patience, helps me against bad habits, helps me with things you'd never even imagine. There is time to myself, but there IS no alone. There IS no "on my own."

Jesus said we are not supposed to resist evil. Rather, we are supposed to return kindness in exchange for evil. Sometimes it's easier than others.

You remind me of me. You also remind me of one of my oldest friends, who is semi-estranged since I realized I had to start praying. He used to look for Christians on /. so he could rate their posts down. In a completely uncanny way, this very conversation reminds me of something he once told me about.

I was an agnostic for 15 years, and it eventually led me to a place with many many demons. Everything, and everyone was a demon, or a demon's tool. Friends, family, everything I owned, Everything and Everyone were demons. I've spent plenty of time with demons. With God's help, I've learned to talk with them, live among them, and turn them without even giving it a second's thought. Laugh with them? Not their way. Call it hell, if you like, but the LORD makes life possible whereever you live.

If your eyes are eventually opened in a place like the one I'm describing, just remember that it's never too late to pray to God. I went years struggling in a pit of hell, thinking I was completely past redemption.

BTW, Christians aren't supposed to pray to Jesus, they're supposed to pray to the LORD, God the Father, who SENT Jesus. I've met plenty who seem unclear on that, but the first of the 10 Commandments says pray ONLY to God. Jesus never claimed he was God. He claimed to be the savior that the LORD sent.

The Trinity is a theological explaination of the relationship between Jesus, God and the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit is the way the LORD uses us, and the way he explains things to us. The Son is Jesus, whom He sent as a teacher and as the sacrifice on the cross, and the Father is the LORD in Heaven, by whose strength, power and guidance, Jesus was able to redeem all of mankind.

Prayer from an agnostic is the LORD's favorite kind. If you pray to the LORD, He will hear you. I don't know HOW he will answer, but he will find a way for you. I honestly hope that you find the LORD, and sooner rather than later. Once you find Him you'll understand.

God Bless You,
Sam

http://slashdot.org/journal.pl?op=display

--
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by mikkelm · 2006-12-22 02:25 · Score: 0

Great. Good luck with life. You'll need it if you're incapable of conceding.
Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by the_REAL_sam · 2006-12-22 17:38 · Score: 1

??? I don't MIND conceding AT ALL. In fact, I somehow ENJOY conceding a lost debate... not as much as I enjoy WINNING, but I still enjoy it. Win or lose, it is cathartic.

It it gets to be time to concede, I'll let you know, and I won't hide it. I'll do it right here on /. in a totally public way.

If that makes you happy, I'll even submit my concession to /. as a full-fledged story. Of course they'd turn it down, but I'm just saying..

But, right now, there's nothing TO concede, and that WOULD complicate the matter.

Ok. ? :-)

Happy Holidays. God Bless You, and I hope Santa brings you lots of fun toys, and that you have a good woman to kiss on new years eve.

--
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer

Re:Warning.. by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-20 18:18 · Score: 1, Funny

Do not... repeat DO NOT... try to shave your balls with a "Gillette Fusion" razor (the one with five blades.)
Why? Not like anybody on /. has any use for them.

The balls or the razor blades?

what do I care? by brainspank · 2006-12-20 18:29 · Score: 1

I really couldn't care less until I can get greater than 486kbps over my ~17,000 foot link to my CO. You can transmit your butt to Uranus at the speed of light and it isn't going to make me thing you're some kind of super hero. That would still be cool though.

-bs

--
It's only a model.

Re:what do I care? by walt-sjc · 2006-12-20 23:40 · Score: 1

You should care because this kind of pipe (or tube) is used on backbones. A fast backbone ensures that you and 30 million others just like you can all download pr0n, browse MySpace and play WoW ath the same time at your full local link speed.

BIG FREAKING DEAL!!!! by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-20 19:20 · Score: 0

I dont care if they can do 2 trillions GPBS - try to offer 50Mbps to everyone home,
and only cost $19.95 a month, and I'll be really impress

What OS? by RAMMS+EIN · 2006-12-20 20:41 · Score: 1

I wonder what operating system they used for this. NetBSD?

--
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.

Re:What OS? by rtyall · 2006-12-20 21:04 · Score: 1

OS/2 Warp-speed edition?
Re:What OS? by RAMMS+EIN · 2006-12-20 22:56 · Score: 2, Informative

NetBSD was used to set a lot of transfer speed records. See, for example, this story on BSD News.

--
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Re:What OS? by HateBreeder · 2006-12-20 23:45 · Score: 1

I wouldn't be surprised if no OS was used at all and the bandwidth was measured by some sort of hardware network analyzer taking data directly from the cable.

Also, this is probably raw data throughput, without any protocols as overhead on top of the payload: i.e. the entire Ethernet frame size including headers was taken as the basis for what is considered "data transfered" (- if Ethernet was even used...)

--
Sigs are for the weak.

Technology anyone? by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-20 20:52 · Score: 2, Interesting

Why do I see no post above my threshold about:
fast photodiodes
fast multiplexers
GaAs-transistors
fibre amplifiers (this is for the post about connecting continents)
?

They say they do it electrically, so they need to have a photodiode with 200 GHz bandwidht,
compare that with the diode in your DVD!

Re:Technology anyone? by 2.246.1010.78 · 2006-12-20 22:24 · Score: 1

well, the HHI has incredibly fast photo diodes... you can buy a 100GHz PD for less than $20000 from them...

Re:Warning.. by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-20 21:11 · Score: 0

Armin, is that you?

Comment removed by account_deleted · 2006-12-20 21:22 · Score: 1

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:The problem is credibility of Siemens by umghhh · 2006-12-20 21:23 · Score: 1

Even if the report is true it does not descibe any major feat - no reason to get excited then.

But if what one can hear in German media about Siemens corruption is at least partially true, then one may start having serious doubts whether the results are real or the report is bogus 'cause it was bought by money saved in e.g. BenQ Mobile disaster (more details only in german version of the article I am afraid). For those that missed the story: Simens sold its mobiles making division (together with people) to chinese and let such new company go bust. It was much cheaper and faster (and thus even cheaper) than laying people off.

NTT in Japan reached 111Gbps! by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-20 23:05 · Score: 1, Interesting

optics.org / FibreSystems Europe reports: "Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) of Japan has demonstrated optical transmission of 14Tbps over a single fibre 160km long. The transmission consisted of 140 channels of 111Gbps each using complex DWDM techniques."
107Gbps... pfft... yesterdays news. :)

Re:NTT in Japan reached 111Gbps! by maxrate · 2006-12-21 03:50 · Score: 1

Using DWDM is using more than one channel. The german researchers transfered 107G on one channel.
Re:NTT in Japan reached 111Gbps! by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-21 10:13 · Score: 0

Um, and according to the parent comment to your comment, Japan reached 111Gb/s... faster than 107. They then put this over 140 channels to reach the larger TB rating. So the parent's comment is still valid.

LoC/sec by lidocaineus · 2006-12-20 23:57 · Score: 1

Uh, this summary is missing the obligatory Library of Congresses/sec.

Re:The problem is credibility of Siemens by OnlineAlias · 2006-12-21 00:24 · Score: 1

It is a huge feat. Its 107gb per second per channel. That means one can layer on multiple channels through a single fiber, for outrageous throughput. When many computers have to talk to many computers over a single run of fiber (say, like on the internet across intercontinental links) this kind of throughput is can be kind of important.

The problem is... by Blappo · 2006-12-21 00:47 · Score: 1

I beleive he said "most" and since we're being nitpicky dickheads, do you think "most" hard drives are like yours, or older, slower drives that are near his estimate?

Don't speak on ANY subject until you're less snotty.

--
Why are so many posts with factual errors modded up?

Record? How? by tmdybvik · 2006-12-21 01:23 · Score: 1

So NTT transfers 14 TB/s over a single 100 mile fibre. (=112,000 Gb/s) And Siemens manages to transfer about one thousand of this (107Gb/s). In what way is this a record, or even interesting? http://techfreep.com/ntt-sets-download-record-at-1 4-terabytes-per-second.htm

--

-- Fortes Fortuna Adjuvat --

Call me immature by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-21 01:49 · Score: 0

But I can't say the word "Siemens" to anyone without smiling a little bit. It's just a funny name for a company, I always find myself wanting to bust out laughing and start making jokes like "Siemens: Relieving your pr0n craving at 107 Gbps since 2006"

So what.... by Thraxen · 2006-12-21 05:15 · Score: 1

It seems like we read about a new data transmission speed record each month, but my home internet connection has barely improved at all in 10 years times. So let me know when I can actually see the improvement at my home and maybe I'll give sh!t.

Re:So what.... by mandelbr0t · 2006-12-21 06:10 · Score: 1

Hmmm. American? Perhaps you are one of many people suffering from the American economy's lack of desire to invest in consumer-grade DSL. Unfortunately for you, there's some considerable infrastructure upgrades that are required to bring fast, reliable service to your residence if it isn't already there. 6Mbps/1Mbps DSL is the DSL standard that the local Telco is releasing for the new year, and I've heard of cable rates around 20Mbps downstream. Or is that just not fast enough for you? ;) I started on 2.5Mbps cable with horrible latency and constant bandwidth bottlenecking, so I'd say that my residential service has improved considerably in 8 years.

mandelbr0t

--
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully

The same press release that lucent issued in Sep? by wsanders · 2006-12-21 05:28 · Score: 1

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jht ml?articleID=193005453

--
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"

Fraunhofer Institute? by autophile · 2006-12-21 06:10 · Score: 1

The Fraunhofer Institute: now you can get your patented and licensed MP3's even faster!

--Rob

--
Towards the Singularity.

clock skew issues by viking80 · 2006-12-21 06:23 · Score: 1

I worked on 40Gb/s over single channel back in 1998. One of the (many) challenges was clock distribution in the transcievers.

At 107Gb/s a bit is less than 2mm long. Would be interesting to know how they solve the clock skew issues.

--
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org

Awesome by miyako · 2006-12-21 07:04 · Score: 1

I can't wait until ISPs here start offering this connection, so I'll finally be able to get a 100 Gb ps connection*
*with 1kbps upload

--
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"

Re:Warning.. by beckerist · 2006-12-21 07:12 · Score: 1

holy sh*t. stop. please.

Re:The problem is credibility of Siemens by dotgain · 2006-12-21 07:44 · Score: 1

Single-mode fibre does not have these "channels" you speak of.

Act now. Call today. by k1e0x · 2006-12-21 08:42 · Score: 0

Wow..

112197632 times the speed of AOL Dialup!!

--
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/

Re:Warning.. by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-22 02:18 · Score: 0

Haven't had any problems myself with it. Of course, very few people on /. have a reason to bother, but I'm lucky enough to have a reason for shaving down there.

Re:The problem is credibility of Siemens by OnlineAlias · 2006-12-27 04:05 · Score: 1

Yes, they do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWDM/

Re:The problem is credibility of Siemens by dotgain · 2006-12-27 09:30 · Score: 1

I see, thanks for the correction.

Whoo-hoo by d_54321 · 2007-01-04 08:15 · Score: 1

more data faster, yay!
Howbout better data? Less nonsense content?

--
Support the FairTax

Slashdot Mirror

Siemens Reaches 107 Gbps Data Transfer Record

161 comments