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Pigeon Turns Out To Be Faster Than S. African Net
inject_hotmail.com writes "The results are in: it's faster to send your data via an airborne carrier than it is through the pipes. As discussed Tuesday, a company in South Africa called Unlimited IT, frustrated by terribly slow Internet speeds, decided to prove their point by sending an actual homing pigeon with a "data card" strapped to its leg from one of their offices to another while at the same time uploading the same amount of data to the same destination via their ISPs data lines. The media outlet reporting this triumph said that it took the pigeon just over 1 hour to make the 80km/50mile flight, whereas it took over 2 hours to transfer just 4% of that data."
Suck it, non-pigeons.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
What's the speed of an unloaden African swallow?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Fine. So your data rate is higher. But the fact is, a carrier pigeon is only half-duplex, whereas your network connection, though slower, is full-duplex. I bet your carrier-pigeon vendor didn't talk about that part, did he?
This give a new meaning to "cloud computing". Just look at the clouds to see the results coming in!
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
They forgot to mention that they also got the pigeon to stop and poop all over the Telkom bosses enroute.
They've been Pigeowned.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
Excellent proof of concept by Lord Vetinari. I do hope Moist Von Lipwig gets this contract as well. Increased pigeon poo fertilizer along the main trunk lines should help agriculture in the region as well. Remind me to participate in the subsequent land-snatching.
You mean hawks?
>> but did they think about pigeon packet loss ?
The carriers have an intrinsic collision avoidance system, which increases availability.
Because IP only guarantees best effort delivery, loss of a carrier can be tolerated. With time, the carriers are self-regenerating. Audit trails are automatically generated, and can often be found on logs and cable trays.
50 Win points (TM) to whoever tagged this "half-duplex"
Wait a minute! Suppose *two* pigeons carried it together?
No, *I* was 4 gigabyte on an USB key! And so was my wife.
Well, yeah, you're not likely do do VoPTP (Voice over Pigeon Transfer Protocol) or play an online game using pigeons as packet carriers. The latency is bad. But this was a POC (Pigeon of Concept) that will lead to an RFC (Request Flying Carrier) and eventually it will go Beta (Birds Enabling Telecommunications Applications).
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
A major source of packet loss...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
From the article:
Well, that's because you used email. If you'd sent it pigeon post, it would have got through!
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
... of the quote at the bottom of the page as of 8:55AM (EST): "It's not against any religion to want to dispose of a pigeon. -- Tom Lehrer, "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park"
Patent application granted to "Telkom Communications" for a "method for transmitting data via avian carrier", even though lots of prior art exists.
> no, yes, maybe (tagging beta)
obviously, this setup does not conform to RFC1149
I fear that this might have been an unfair comparison, though. The pigeon was, after all, dedicated to only that one transfer.
For a more apples-to-apples comparison with most companies' networks, the pigeon should also be transporting:
- a porn DVD or two
- half the collection of lolcat movies on youtube
- and half the collection of funny clips
- a periodic refresh of Slashdot, in 1 second intervals.
- an IRC session on sexnet for the network admin. Logging connections doesn't apply to him, after all. You can contact him under the nickname Linda1991 faster than through the internal channels.
- a couple of managers' correspondence with the distressed widdow of a nigerian prince. Hey, they're only trying to help her.
- a trojan download or two, from those guys in marketing who got admin rights on their computer because they can't work without it. And now can't work without the latest animated gizmo off www.i-pwn-your-machine.ru.
- the keylogger traffic in the other direction from the couple more who already downloaded it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
so you just have one pigeon from the other office boxed up with your memory stick. the first pigeon arrives, you take the other office's pigeon out of the box, take the memory stick, put in a new memory stick, put your pigeon in the box, attach the box to the previously boxed pigeon, and send him back from whence it came.
What if you just strapped one pigeon onto another pigeon? Each pigeon goes one direction. Thus if we strap two pigeons together we have a bidirectional avian connection. The future is now.
ed duval the very last person
Then your fired.
My fired what?
.. is the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Pigeon?
We recently ran a similar experiment at work where we took 2 copies of a 50 page document and asked one student to scan and email it to the neighboring desk, and we got another student to hand deliver the second copy over the same distance.
The results were startling.
We have now opted to remove all computer equipment from our offices as we consider them inferior to manual transfer of information.