Slashdot Mirror
World's Fastest Net Link 'Used To Dry Laundry'
praps writes "Last summer a 75-year-old woman from central Sweden became the envy of the IT world with her scorching 40Gbps internet connection. 1,500 simultaneous HDTV channels or a whole high definition DVD downloaded in two seconds were hers for the taking. Now Sigbritt Löthberg could soon be treated to an incredible 100 Gbps link — but it may not be put to great use. According to the head of the ultra-fast fiber connection project, Sigbritt mostly used the gear 'to dry her laundry.'"
Am I the only one for whom this page's style sheet has comitted suicide ?
If "drying her laundry" is a euphemism for the mass quantities of porn she is downloading, then I'd be doing the same thing.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Is this really that big of a surprise? I seem to recall from the original story that prior to this she had never even owned a computer.
I've never owned a space station, but I imagine if I suddenly came into control of one, I wouldn't get it put to as much use as someone with a clue.
Id like to come over and dry my laundry at her house!
There Can Be Only One...
It does work - I used to use my high-end HP workstation to dry my biking clothes when it rained. I did feel a bit sorry for the people in the neigbouring cubes though.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Hey I wanna dry my laundry too you know. I'll test this stuff out... I'd love to be able to download a full HD DVD of Porn in 2 seconds. Dammit.
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
... only old people have 40Gbps internet connection.
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
Brain the size of a planet, access to 1,500 high definition HDTV channels simultaneously, and she wants me to dry her laundry!
.... depressing
....is my Blue Gene L washing machine and I'll be ready set the record for the largest waste of computing resources in history.
Every time I hear everyone whining about "broadband adoption rates" I just think that they don't get it.
Lots of people don't want broadband.
Lots of people don't even care about Internet access.
Sure it would be nice to have availability everywhere, but when the measurement is of how many people use broadband, that doesn't say much of anything.
I once had the great idea to sell home exercise equipment that was very difficult to use as exercise equipment but had several long poles jutting out of it each long enough to hold a bath towel. I figured that since all my other home exercise equipment ended up being laundry racks anyway, that it would make sense to design some just for that purpose.
Never really got off the ground with it, though.
Bantu Tribesman Uses IBM Modem To Crush Nut
(linked to alternate site 'cuz I can't find it on theonion.com...)
If you're drying your undies and such, do you need to download porn to make them dry quicker? If so, this would be the first time I've heard of porn making clothes dry...
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
I was introduced to the guy whose mother this lady is at IETF in Chicago. Working for a networking hardware vendor kinda gives perks.
Anyway, even if the bandwidth is free I wouldn't call it cheap - the CPE device takes (I think) 3kW of power. So yeah, you can dry clothes on it quite easily..
"It was a big bit of gear and it got pretty warm."
doing what... nothing?
A friend of mine discovered that the washing line in the garden of his rented house was actually a very long Cat-5E cable. Sadly, he didn't find this out till it snapped, which was particularly annoying for him as he had just spend £30 on a massive bit of cable to reach all the way to his computer in the attic room of the house.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
Its strange that the link for what looks to be a highly informative photo documentary exploring the life and characters of Swedish nightclubs seems to be broken.
./ folk, especially since not many actually live in Sweden.
I wouldn't have thought Swedish nightclubs held all that many attractions for basement dwelling
can you imagine what would happen to the overall internet speed if any of us had a 40gb connection? talk about slashdot effect...
stuff |
It has a couple other problems:
1) Can she even get that kind of speed? I mean yes, she's got a big ass link. Ok, that's great. Does her ISP have the necessary upstream to support that? It is much easier to have a single connection running at a given speed than it is to have connections at that speed supported by the necessary upstream to the Internet to make them useful.
2) Even if she does, that is way past the point of it mattering. There just isn't enough things out there that need that kind of bandwidth. You discover that at this point, even 10mbit is really damn fast for normal usage like web surfing (including video) e-mail and so on. It is only if you download large things that it becomes much of an issue. 100mbit is really fast for anything. At work I've downloaded a Linux DVD in like 7 minutes. Really, that is to the point where extra speed wouldn't make a ton of difference. In this case, we are talking speed in excess of what a harddrive can handle.
3) There just isn't much, if anything, on the net that is going to have the kind of upstream to make any real use of that. Even if you are doing a ton of things at one, you'll be hard pressed to find enough fat pipes to start to fill up a link that large. There are backbones that aren't that fast.
This whole thing was nothing but a publicity stunt, and this just proves it. Despite his claim that this showed how fast connections can be put in the home for cheap, it does nothing of the sort. It shows how it really isn't that useful at this point, and how the gear is so high end it produces enough heat to use as a dryer.
As Slashdot is fond of saying: Nothing to see here, move along.
Isn't this story a day early for April Fool's Day?
Using plain old //slashdot.org/ for the article got rid of the problem for me.
I think this story arrived a day early.
Have you read my blog lately?
Having a 40Gbps connection is just dandy, but here's a question that's going completely unanswered:
She's surfing this on what kind of PC?
Last time I checked, your typical PC doesn't come with a 40Gbps NIC in it. It's usually GigE, with 10/100 for the cheap ones. Nevermind that most folks can't afford GigE switches to plug into in the first place, which means most folks are using 10/100 anyway.
40Gbps NIC's can't exactly be cheap since they're only found in the high-end server space. In fact, I couldn't find pricing on a separate 40Gbps NIC in a quick and casual Google search. The only 40Gbps stuff I've run into is either on the switch itself or came with the server. I have a funny feeling that, if you can actually buy one of these things separately, it would cost several times more than any PC this lady is likely to own.
Next, even if you get one of these NIC's, what exactly are you going to plug it into? The craziest PCI-X slot available (2.0, 533MHz) tops out at 4.3GByte/sec, which is 34.4Gbit/sec -- too slow! PCI-E 2.0 32x (not that you'll find this kind of connector on anything common, if you can find it at all) maxes out at 16GByte/sec, which is 128Gbit/sec -- fast enough, but again I don't think anyone makes anything with this kind of a connector yet. Your more-common PCI-E 1.1e 16x connector tops out at 4GByte/sec, or 32GBit/sec -- too slow for 40Gbps feeds.
And then there's the issue of actually saving this wonderful content she's so busily downloading. Saving a full-length DVD-9 (9GB) in two seconds would require a bandwidth of 4.5GByte/sec. Most hard drives today have a max sustained write speed of 20-30MByte/sec. Some SAN's have a hard time with the bandwidth being tossed around here. Does grandma have an EMC array in the basement next to this magical fiber link?
Lastly, exactly who is grandma doing to download stuff from that can actually provide her 40Gbps of bandwidth? Most small companies have DS-1's. Medium-sized folks have multiple DS-1's, fractional DS-3's, or full DS-3's. Your larger organizations have OC-3's and OC-12's, but it starts to get really, really rarefied if you go up above that. Suffice to say, unless grandma is getting stuff from the likes of Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, or Akamai, she's not going to be able to actually keep that 40Gbps pipe busy.
Now, a good bit of the above takes a sarcastic tone, but there's a lesson in it: you're only as fast as the slowest part of the chain. There's a helluva lot of work that needs to be done on the entire information interchange infrastructure -- from the server to the PC and everything in between -- before stuff like this even begins to make sense for the average Joe. Data centers? Sure. Home 40Gbps? Not so useful.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Just so we're clear... This is a Gb connection. Gb is is short for Gigabit, emphasis on the bit. Software and hardware are measured in bytes. There are 8 bits in a byte and honestly I think ISPs put the bit rates in instead of the byte rates to confuse the average customer. Currently we have 4 types of drives: IDE/ATA, SATA, SCSI and Solid State. Their standard transfer rates are as follows: IDE/ATA: 133 MBps SATA: 300 MBps SCSI: 320 MBps SSD: 12.5 MBps Now, this connection was 40 Gbps. The actual speed is 5GBps. With those numbers you can see the transfer speeds are too slow for the hard drives to keep up with the faster internet connection. Max speed (given that a person has a SCSI raid) is 320 MBps or 2.5 Gbps, OC-48 is about as close as it gets.