I think seeing VLC die on the Mac would do much more harm than the death of the Windows version. There is plenty of wonderful video programs that allow you to easily tweak what filters and codecs you use, and pretty much can support any codecs you want. MPC-HC comes to mind as the most versatile. VLC is still useful for formats that you don't use very much - like *.flv, or videos that may not work for whatever reason in another video program.
However, on the Mac, there are far fewer options. A few days ago, I attempted to setup a Windows share on OS X 10.6. Besides the fact that you can't easily add a shortcut to a share (you need to mount it which doesn't work if the machine isn't on) the default player for pretty much all videos files is Quicktime.
I'm pretty sure that everyone can agree that Quicktime is utter crap. It's similar to VLC in that it's pretty much monolithic in that it's supposed to include support for many formats, and it's not easy to add support for new formats. WMP, however, can use any Directshow filter. So can MPC-HC. Why is this a problem? Because Quicktime doesn't support ANYTHING and yet is the default for pretty much EVERYTHING.
- Can't play H.264 above Baseline. That means you can't play H.264 from a Blu-Ray/HD DVD or any (decent) x264 encodes. Pretty much limits you to iTunes downloads - Can't play Xvid/Divx by default. I was shocked by this. It opens AVI's by default, but it just shows a black screen and won't play - Doesn't support Matroska (MKV) file format which is now used on all HD videos and and higher-quality SD videos that either use x264, AAC, or AC3/DTS. Most AVI's are plain xvid/mp3. - No easy way to add Xvid/Divx support. No Xvid codec for OS X that I could find. Installed 3vix (sp?) but it didn't work.
-----
As an aside, I tried setting up OS X to play MKV and AVI files over a Windows share a few days ago. This was my experience:
I couldn't get OS X to use VLC by default. Selecting "open with" VLC ALWAYS only works for that single file, not the file type, despite it saying so. Changing the settings in Quicktime to not play AVI's also did nothing. In the end, I just told my roommate to use the open with VLC option, as I gave up trying to get the Quicktime or the OS to do what I wanted. Couldn't get Quicktime to play XviD AVI's after installing the appropriate codec, and couldn't get OS X to play AVI's with VLC by default.
I just wanted to say that I have some experience with Virtualbox 3.1 and I disagree with the "ease-of-use" assessment of 7/10. I've played around with VMWare 7, Virtualbox, and VirtualPC, and Virtualbox is about as easy as a virtualization program can get. It has a simple GUI interface to setup your VM, provides sane settings by default, and allows lots of optimizations (like increasing # of cores used and 3D accel) easily.
I'm currently running Ubuntu 9.10 x86 in Windows 7 Professional x64, sharing 4 CPUs and allocating 512 MB of RAM to the VM. The VM runs very well and starts up incredibly fast. I'm very happy with it. It was also dead easy to install. Virtualbox also has a huge array of support for OS's - pretty much every Linux flavor, all Windows verisons from DOS/Win 3.x to Win 7/2008 R2, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, BeOS, Haiku etc. See http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Guest_OSes for a full list.
In addition, it has VT-x and AMD-V support, but it isn't required. But, the best part is that it is open source (there is a closed version with a few more features) and FREE.
I didn't find Vmware as easy to use (rated 9/10). It was fine, just not easier than Virtualbox.
The article says the 18th. The summary is incorrect - or the article has been edited:
"Subject: Operation Chokehold On Friday, December 18, at noon Pacific time, we will attempt to overwhelm the AT&T data network and bring it to its knees. The goal is to have every iPhone user (or as many as we can) turn on a data intensive app and run that app for one solid hour. Send the message to AT&T that we are sick of their substandard network and sick of their abusive comments. THe idea is we’ll create a digital flash mob. We’re calling it in Operation Chokehold. Join us and speak truth to power!"
What OS? When I disabled JS in Win 7 x64, it didn't ask that I restart the OS or even the application for that matter! I'm pretty sure I had the same behavior in XP. Are you sure the restart was related to changing the setting rather than some OS update? I find that very bizarre.
By default the free version has an advertisement at the top right. However, you used to be able to disable the ad in the menu settings. I'm not sure if you can still do that. Oh, and the full screen reader has a white border which I find annoying. Adobe Reader has no such border. I also am not a big fan of Foxit's update screen. There are too many components to update and it is therefore annoying. They also try to push their other pay products.
Foxit also has better options for adding comments and highlighting, among many other features, which I don't believe are available with the freeware Reader.
"What you *should* be saying is that Adobe, in realising they have a horribly insecure app, should be turning off things like JavaScript off *by default* and requiring users to turn them on manually."
My post:
"The bigger question is why Adobe doesn't just disable Javascript by default."
So, I *DID* say that Javascript should be disabled by default.
This may be a difference between Windows 7 and Windows XP. Superfetch in Windows 7 loads the binary into RAM after first run - or if it's a commonly used program - automatically. Therefore, I'm almost always running the program from RAM.
However, even on the initial start, it doesn't take more than 1-2 seconds. I haven't used Acrobat 5.0 in such a long time. Perhaps Reader loads faster.
Based on the numerous JS vulnerabilities, the default should be "No". A message should warn about the security vulnerabilities of running the document and tell the user only to enable JS (temporarily) if they trust the source of the document. However, it should also mention that if JS is disabled, it may not display correctly.
The fact is that Adobe simply doesn't care about the vulnerabilities. They have responded slowly or not at all to the issue.
Somewhat ironic, isn't it? If you want to use Adobe's security features (digital signing/encryption) and 3rd party software to achieve SOX compliance - you must accept security vulnerabilities from Acrobat/Reader itself.
A few seconds? On a modern machine I can load a 100 page scanned PDF in Adobe Acrobat in under 0.5 seconds (perceptibly instant with Aero) with Acrobat 9.0.2 on a Core 2 Duo/Core i7. Are you using a slow machine?
Half of my readings in Law School are scanned documents/books in PDF format. Many of the documents are 25-40 MB in size and several hundred pages. I find that PDFs actually load very quickly - much faster than a similarly sized Word or Open Office document, and easier to read. Of course, you can use any PDF reader and not just Adobe Reader/Acrobat.
On my Core 2 Duo and Core i7 systems, I can open PDFs pretty much instantaneously (less than 0.5 seconds). The only delay is the download. Thankfully, this is one area where Comcast's 25 Mbit "Speedboost" actually comes in handy. At school, being able to download at 100 Mbit/sec makes the files load even faster. The only issue is that Adobe Reader sometimes stalls and I have to try again. However, I find the Adobe reader plugin to generally work better than the alternatives, and I like the full screen reader. I've used Foxit for the tab support but I prefer Reader for its menu layout simplicity when I don't need many documents open.
I agree. These security vulnerabilities appear to be a weekly occurrence. Anyone that hasn't disabled Javascript in Reader/Acrobat at this point either doesn't care about the numerous vulnerabilities or doesn't understand the risks involved.
The bigger question is why Adobe doesn't just disable Javascript by default. I have never used a PDF that required Javascript and I've dealt with a number of user-fillable forms. So, what exactly is Javascript being used for? I know that it has some use. However, it seems that the security risk is far greater than any potential benefit of the "feature".
Thanks for the information. I really should have reserved judgment. Oh well, at least I learned something about how the process actually works. Anyways - back to learning about networking.
I agree. I generally only read peer-reviewed articles because they do a pretty good job of weeding out the crap. However, I am an aspiring attorney, not a scientist. While it may be more convenient to only read peer reviewed articles, that doesn't make it acceptable to ignore everything else in the academic literature.
Why the hell did this guy get moderated down? He posted the author's response to the Economist article! It's directly relevant.
Isn't this precisely the risk of overreliance on the peer review system? Unpopular opinions get silenced. I would mod up the parent but can't as I have posted in the thread. So, I'm going to repost the link:
Thanks for the link. I know that on Slashdot you're not actually supposed to read the articles, but nonetheless, I found the Economist post and the author's response illuminating. The author raises good points about the dangers of over-reliance on the peer review system. It's a good system but it is not doesn't always work - crap gets through and good articles aren't published. Simply ignoring any non peer-reviewed work puts far too much faith into the system.
Both AES and RC4 encryption is handled in hardware. I'm not sure what routers you've been using but I've never seen more than a 0-5% decrease in performance with encryption enabled.
The apartment is less than a year-old and was pre-wired with either Cat 5e or Cat 6. I'm not sure as I haven't checked which. I'm just using a Cat 6 patch cable from the wall to the other side of the room. Cat 6 is less prone to interference from power cables and other network cables, so it seems the better choice for patch cables. I paid $1.50 for 10' Cat 6 cables, about 20 cents more than Cat 5e, and a 50' Cat 6 cable costs $6. So, price isn't an issue.
If you just need internet access, print sharing, and light file transfers, 802.11g is fine* If you need high-reliability, very fast speeds, and want to engage in very large file transfers (HD Video) or networked backup solutions, you should get Gigabit ethernet.
The only plausible benefit 802.11n may have is for consumers that want to stream HD video and are unable or unwilling to wire their home. And 802.11n may not do so well at farther distances, as others have mentioned.
* This assumes there isn't too much interference in your area, in which case 802.11n won't help unless you're running in the 5 Ghz band. However, the 5 Ghz band isn't a benefit limited to 802.11n. You could have done the same with a dual-band 802.11a/b/g router, which is what pretty much every corporate and educational institution uses.
60 MB/sec is realistic to expect when transferring to or from a laptop with a 5400 RPM drive. 85-95 MB/sec or even 100 MB/sec+ is achievable when transferring between high-performance 7200 RPM desktop drives, at the beginning of the drive.
However, 1 GB is small. A typical HD tv show is 1.1-1.4 GB. A typical 720p x264 encode is 5-8 GB. A typical 1080p x264 encode is 8-15 GB. A system backup can be anything from > 10 GB for incremental backups to 60-100 GB for full backups of system partitions.
At 85 MB/sec you can transfer a DVD (4.37 GB) in 60 seconds.
802.11g can only reliably do 20 Mbit/sec or so. It maxes out at about 25 Mbit/sec. My gf has 25/15 FTTH from Verizon, and I had to cap the connection at 16-20 Mbit on 802.11g (20 feet from the AP) as 25 Mbit/sec downloads would cause erratic speeds.
However, the solution wasn't to upgrade to 802.11n. Since every room in the apartment is wired for 1000-BaseT, I just am going to hook up a Cat 6 cable, and then it won't be an issue.
The point is that you don't have to rewire. You could likely obtain Gigabit performance with Cat 5 cabling installed 15 years ago, and certainly could obtain 100 Mbit speeds with very old Cat 5 wiring - which is more equivalent to 802.11n performance.
A 15 year-old wired technology in most cases will beat the cutting-edge wireless technology. While rewiring for 10 GbE may be a bitch, you're doing so to obtain a level of performance totally unachievable over wireless.
BTW, when you wire for 10 GbE, are you using Cat 6 (for short distances), Cat 6a, or Cat 7?
I completely agree with the parent. Wireless is often more trouble than it's worth. It's great for casual internet access on laptops, but it's really unreliable for HD video streaming, system backups, or large file transfers. If you live in a single-family home, you probably don't have many interference issues to deal with, but in a multi-unit apartment building, there is often significant interference on the 2.4 Ghz spectrum not merely from other Wireless routers but from phones, microwaves, baby monitors and other devices. The end result is often dropouts, unreliable connectivity, and slow speeds.
Wired Ethernet is a reliable and mature technology that pretty much always works. While the vast majority of wireless routers are crap, it's quite easy to purchase a quality Gigabit Switch, and pretty much any wireless router will provide stable wired connections. People seem to ignore the fact that wireless only provides shared speeds while wired ethernet provides dedicated bidirectional bandwidth per port. In addition, the stated maximums for wired ethernet provide a sense of real world speeds while wireless does not.
For example, 802.11g provides real-world speeds of 20-25 Mbit/sec - not the 54 Mbit theoretical speed pasted on the box. 802.11n is advertised as 300 Mbit/sec but generally provides 100-130 Mbit/sec at best. However, these speeds can only be obtained with a line-of-sight connection at a short distance - a distance so short that you could easily connect over wired ethernet and obtain 10x the speed! At 100-BaseTX I am able to obtain 90 Mbit/sec after network (94 Mbit/sec with Jumbo frames). With Jumbo Frames Gigabit can achieve 950 Mbit/sec or higher speeds.
So, 802.11n in a best-case scenario (little interference, 10 ft from the AP) provides speeds only slightly in excess of 100-BaseTX, a standard formed 14 years ago (1995)! If you actually connect from any significant distance, 100-BaseTX will provide better speeds. In addition, you get dedicated upstream and downstream per-port bandwdith on 100-BaseTX.
Gigabit switches with Jumbo frame support can now be had for less than $30 - and in some cases $20. Nearly all laptops and desktops now come with Gigabit NICs and support Jumbo frames. Modern dual and quad-core CPUs can easily take the overhead of transferring at gigabit speeds with or without jumbo frames. Furthermore, modern OS's are more efficient at high-speed network transfers.
Yet, I see 802.11n routers advertised for streaming HD video, system backups, and large file transfers. Would you really want to backup 100 GB over 802.11n? Sounds like fun watching your entire network come to a crawl for 3 hours. Gigabit ethernet over Cat 5e/6 is generally limited only by your hard drive setup, and can be used for all the aforementioned tasks without any impact on network performance.
The following is my recent experience with wireless networking:
I use a WRT54GL with the Tomato (Linux) firmware. This provides a rock-solid solution, yet I was getting dropouts on wireless at my current apartment. I know it's not the router as it worked fine in my cinderblock college dorm, and I have another WRT54GL running Tomato at my home in NJ - which usually is up for months at a time - until a power outage.
At my latest apartment, I was getting constant dropouts on wireless. I ran a second AP to get a stronger connection. The connection was indeed stronger but I still got intermingle dropouts. I tried changing the wireless channel, antenna placement etc. but nothing worked. Finally, I just said fuck it, bought a 100' Cat 5e cable for $8 and ran it directly from the ADSL router to the router in my room. No dropouts since then - and I get more consistent and faster speeds.
I purchased an 8 port Gigabit switch with Jumbo Frames for my internal network and now my network speeds are limited only by my hard drives. Transferring between a 1 TB eSATA and 1 TB SATA drive, I was able to transfer a 12 GB file in 2:15 at an average speed of 95 MB/sec - around 800 Mbit/sec. With
Slashdot Mirror
I think seeing VLC die on the Mac would do much more harm than the death of the Windows version. There is plenty of wonderful video programs that allow you to easily tweak what filters and codecs you use, and pretty much can support any codecs you want. MPC-HC comes to mind as the most versatile. VLC is still useful for formats that you don't use very much - like *.flv, or videos that may not work for whatever reason in another video program.
However, on the Mac, there are far fewer options. A few days ago, I attempted to setup a Windows share on OS X 10.6. Besides the fact that you can't easily add a shortcut to a share (you need to mount it which doesn't work if the machine isn't on) the default player for pretty much all videos files is Quicktime.
I'm pretty sure that everyone can agree that Quicktime is utter crap. It's similar to VLC in that it's pretty much monolithic in that it's supposed to include support for many formats, and it's not easy to add support for new formats. WMP, however, can use any Directshow filter. So can MPC-HC. Why is this a problem? Because Quicktime doesn't support ANYTHING and yet is the default for pretty much EVERYTHING.
- Can't play H.264 above Baseline. That means you can't play H.264 from a Blu-Ray/HD DVD or any (decent) x264 encodes. Pretty much limits you to iTunes downloads
- Can't play Xvid/Divx by default. I was shocked by this. It opens AVI's by default, but it just shows a black screen and won't play
- Doesn't support Matroska (MKV) file format which is now used on all HD videos and and higher-quality SD videos that either use x264, AAC, or AC3/DTS. Most AVI's are plain xvid/mp3.
- No easy way to add Xvid/Divx support. No Xvid codec for OS X that I could find. Installed 3vix (sp?) but it didn't work.
-----
As an aside, I tried setting up OS X to play MKV and AVI files over a Windows share a few days ago. This was my experience:
I couldn't get OS X to use VLC by default. Selecting "open with" VLC ALWAYS only works for that single file, not the file type, despite it saying so. Changing the settings in Quicktime to not play AVI's also did nothing. In the end, I just told my roommate to use the open with VLC option, as I gave up trying to get the Quicktime or the OS to do what I wanted. Couldn't get Quicktime to play XviD AVI's after installing the appropriate codec, and couldn't get OS X to play AVI's with VLC by default.
I just wanted to say that I have some experience with Virtualbox 3.1 and I disagree with the "ease-of-use" assessment of 7/10. I've played around with VMWare 7, Virtualbox, and VirtualPC, and Virtualbox is about as easy as a virtualization program can get. It has a simple GUI interface to setup your VM, provides sane settings by default, and allows lots of optimizations (like increasing # of cores used and 3D accel) easily.
I'm currently running Ubuntu 9.10 x86 in Windows 7 Professional x64, sharing 4 CPUs and allocating 512 MB of RAM to the VM. The VM runs very well and starts up incredibly fast. I'm very happy with it. It was also dead easy to install. Virtualbox also has a huge array of support for OS's - pretty much every Linux flavor, all Windows verisons from DOS/Win 3.x to Win 7/2008 R2, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, BeOS, Haiku etc. See http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Guest_OSes for a full list.
In addition, it has VT-x and AMD-V support, but it isn't required. But, the best part is that it is open source (there is a closed version with a few more features) and FREE.
I didn't find Vmware as easy to use (rated 9/10). It was fine, just not easier than Virtualbox.
The article says the 18th. The summary is incorrect - or the article has been edited:
"Subject: Operation Chokehold
On Friday, December 18, at noon Pacific time, we will attempt to overwhelm the AT&T data network and bring it to its knees. The goal is to have every iPhone user (or as many as we can) turn on a data intensive app and run that app for one solid hour. Send the message to AT&T that we are sick of their substandard network and sick of their abusive comments. THe idea is we’ll create a digital flash mob. We’re calling it in Operation Chokehold. Join us and speak truth to power!"
What OS? When I disabled JS in Win 7 x64, it didn't ask that I restart the OS or even the application for that matter! I'm pretty sure I had the same behavior in XP. Are you sure the restart was related to changing the setting rather than some OS update? I find that very bizarre.
By default the free version has an advertisement at the top right. However, you used to be able to disable the ad in the menu settings. I'm not sure if you can still do that. Oh, and the full screen reader has a white border which I find annoying. Adobe Reader has no such border. I also am not a big fan of Foxit's update screen. There are too many components to update and it is therefore annoying. They also try to push their other pay products.
Foxit also has better options for adding comments and highlighting, among many other features, which I don't believe are available with the freeware Reader.
"What you *should* be saying is that Adobe, in realising they have a horribly insecure app, should be turning off things like JavaScript off *by default* and requiring users to turn them on manually."
My post:
"The bigger question is why Adobe doesn't just disable Javascript by default."
So, I *DID* say that Javascript should be disabled by default.
This may be a difference between Windows 7 and Windows XP. Superfetch in Windows 7 loads the binary into RAM after first run - or if it's a commonly used program - automatically. Therefore, I'm almost always running the program from RAM.
However, even on the initial start, it doesn't take more than 1-2 seconds. I haven't used Acrobat 5.0 in such a long time. Perhaps Reader loads faster.
Foxit Reader loads very quickly as well.
Based on the numerous JS vulnerabilities, the default should be "No". A message should warn about the security vulnerabilities of running the document and tell the user only to enable JS (temporarily) if they trust the source of the document. However, it should also mention that if JS is disabled, it may not display correctly.
The fact is that Adobe simply doesn't care about the vulnerabilities. They have responded slowly or not at all to the issue.
Somewhat ironic, isn't it? If you want to use Adobe's security features (digital signing/encryption) and 3rd party software to achieve SOX compliance - you must accept security vulnerabilities from Acrobat/Reader itself.
A few seconds? On a modern machine I can load a 100 page scanned PDF in Adobe Acrobat in under 0.5 seconds (perceptibly instant with Aero) with Acrobat 9.0.2 on a Core 2 Duo/Core i7. Are you using a slow machine?
Half of my readings in Law School are scanned documents/books in PDF format. Many of the documents are 25-40 MB in size and several hundred pages. I find that PDFs actually load very quickly - much faster than a similarly sized Word or Open Office document, and easier to read. Of course, you can use any PDF reader and not just Adobe Reader/Acrobat.
On my Core 2 Duo and Core i7 systems, I can open PDFs pretty much instantaneously (less than 0.5 seconds). The only delay is the download. Thankfully, this is one area where Comcast's 25 Mbit "Speedboost" actually comes in handy. At school, being able to download at 100 Mbit/sec makes the files load even faster. The only issue is that Adobe Reader sometimes stalls and I have to try again. However, I find the Adobe reader plugin to generally work better than the alternatives, and I like the full screen reader. I've used Foxit for the tab support but I prefer Reader for its menu layout simplicity when I don't need many documents open.
I agree. These security vulnerabilities appear to be a weekly occurrence. Anyone that hasn't disabled Javascript in Reader/Acrobat at this point either doesn't care about the numerous vulnerabilities or doesn't understand the risks involved.
The bigger question is why Adobe doesn't just disable Javascript by default. I have never used a PDF that required Javascript and I've dealt with a number of user-fillable forms. So, what exactly is Javascript being used for? I know that it has some use. However, it seems that the security risk is far greater than any potential benefit of the "feature".
Thanks for the information. I really should have reserved judgment. Oh well, at least I learned something about how the process actually works. Anyways - back to learning about networking.
That's odd. The article was there when I posted. Try this link:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/12/sticky-for-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/#more-13888
I agree. I generally only read peer-reviewed articles because they do a pretty good job of weeding out the crap. However, I am an aspiring attorney, not a scientist. While it may be more convenient to only read peer reviewed articles, that doesn't make it acceptable to ignore everything else in the academic literature.
Just in case anyone is wondering, when I saw the post it was at "1". Somebody moderated as "Overrated" after I responded to the link.
Moderation 0
50% Insightful
50% Overrated
Why the hell did this guy get moderated down? He posted the author's response to the Economist article! It's directly relevant.
Isn't this precisely the risk of overreliance on the peer review system? Unpopular opinions get silenced. I would mod up the parent but can't as I have posted in the thread. So, I'm going to repost the link:
Willis Eschenbach's Response to the Economist Article:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/sticky-for-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/
Thanks for the link. I know that on Slashdot you're not actually supposed to read the articles, but nonetheless, I found the Economist post and the author's response illuminating. The author raises good points about the dangers of over-reliance on the peer review system. It's a good system but it is not doesn't always work - crap gets through and good articles aren't published. Simply ignoring any non peer-reviewed work puts far too much faith into the system.
Both AES and RC4 encryption is handled in hardware. I'm not sure what routers you've been using but I've never seen more than a 0-5% decrease in performance with encryption enabled.
The apartment is less than a year-old and was pre-wired with either Cat 5e or Cat 6. I'm not sure as I haven't checked which. I'm just using a Cat 6 patch cable from the wall to the other side of the room. Cat 6 is less prone to interference from power cables and other network cables, so it seems the better choice for patch cables. I paid $1.50 for 10' Cat 6 cables, about 20 cents more than Cat 5e, and a 50' Cat 6 cable costs $6. So, price isn't an issue.
Doesn't that just support our point?
If you just need internet access, print sharing, and light file transfers, 802.11g is fine*
If you need high-reliability, very fast speeds, and want to engage in very large file transfers (HD Video) or networked backup solutions, you should get Gigabit ethernet.
The only plausible benefit 802.11n may have is for consumers that want to stream HD video and are unable or unwilling to wire their home. And 802.11n may not do so well at farther distances, as others have mentioned.
* This assumes there isn't too much interference in your area, in which case 802.11n won't help unless you're running in the 5 Ghz band. However, the 5 Ghz band isn't a benefit limited to 802.11n. You could have done the same with a dual-band 802.11a/b/g router, which is what pretty much every corporate and educational institution uses.
That's an exaggeration. Here are real-world best-case-scenario speeds:
1 GB file
802.11b- 27 Minutes at 5 Mbit/sec (625 KB/sec)
802.11g- 8.5 Minutes - 7 Minutes at 20 Mbit/sec (2.5 MB/sec)
802.11n- 1 Minute, 15 seconds at 110 Mbit/sec (13 MB/sec)
100-BaseTX- 1 Minute, 30 seconds at 92 Mbit/sec (11.5 MB/sec)
1000-BaseT from/to Laptop drive- 17 seconds at 480 Mbit/sec (60 MB/sec)
1000-BaseT from+to high-performance desktop drive- 11 seconds at 800 Mbit/sec (95 MB/sec)
1000-BaseT RAM --> RAM - 9 seconds at 945 Mbit/sec (118 MB/sec)
60 MB/sec is realistic to expect when transferring to or from a laptop with a 5400 RPM drive. 85-95 MB/sec or even 100 MB/sec+ is achievable when transferring between high-performance 7200 RPM desktop drives, at the beginning of the drive.
However, 1 GB is small. A typical HD tv show is 1.1-1.4 GB. A typical 720p x264 encode is 5-8 GB. A typical 1080p x264 encode is 8-15 GB. A system backup can be anything from > 10 GB for incremental backups to 60-100 GB for full backups of system partitions.
At 85 MB/sec you can transfer a DVD (4.37 GB) in 60 seconds.
802.11g can only reliably do 20 Mbit/sec or so. It maxes out at about 25 Mbit/sec. My gf has 25/15 FTTH from Verizon, and I had to cap the connection at 16-20 Mbit on 802.11g (20 feet from the AP) as 25 Mbit/sec downloads would cause erratic speeds.
However, the solution wasn't to upgrade to 802.11n. Since every room in the apartment is wired for 1000-BaseT, I just am going to hook up a Cat 6 cable, and then it won't be an issue.
The point is that you don't have to rewire. You could likely obtain Gigabit performance with Cat 5 cabling installed 15 years ago, and certainly could obtain 100 Mbit speeds with very old Cat 5 wiring - which is more equivalent to 802.11n performance.
A 15 year-old wired technology in most cases will beat the cutting-edge wireless technology. While rewiring for 10 GbE may be a bitch, you're doing so to obtain a level of performance totally unachievable over wireless.
BTW, when you wire for 10 GbE, are you using Cat 6 (for short distances), Cat 6a, or Cat 7?
I completely agree with the parent. Wireless is often more trouble than it's worth. It's great for casual internet access on laptops, but it's really unreliable for HD video streaming, system backups, or large file transfers. If you live in a single-family home, you probably don't have many interference issues to deal with, but in a multi-unit apartment building, there is often significant interference on the 2.4 Ghz spectrum not merely from other Wireless routers but from phones, microwaves, baby monitors and other devices. The end result is often dropouts, unreliable connectivity, and slow speeds.
Wired Ethernet is a reliable and mature technology that pretty much always works. While the vast majority of wireless routers are crap, it's quite easy to purchase a quality Gigabit Switch, and pretty much any wireless router will provide stable wired connections. People seem to ignore the fact that wireless only provides shared speeds while wired ethernet provides dedicated bidirectional bandwidth per port. In addition, the stated maximums for wired ethernet provide a sense of real world speeds while wireless does not.
For example, 802.11g provides real-world speeds of 20-25 Mbit/sec - not the 54 Mbit theoretical speed pasted on the box. 802.11n is advertised as 300 Mbit/sec but generally provides 100-130 Mbit/sec at best. However, these speeds can only be obtained with a line-of-sight connection at a short distance - a distance so short that you could easily connect over wired ethernet and obtain 10x the speed! At 100-BaseTX I am able to obtain 90 Mbit/sec after network (94 Mbit/sec with Jumbo frames). With Jumbo Frames Gigabit can achieve 950 Mbit/sec or higher speeds.
So, 802.11n in a best-case scenario (little interference, 10 ft from the AP) provides speeds only slightly in excess of 100-BaseTX, a standard formed 14 years ago (1995)! If you actually connect from any significant distance, 100-BaseTX will provide better speeds. In addition, you get dedicated upstream and downstream per-port bandwdith on 100-BaseTX.
Gigabit switches with Jumbo frame support can now be had for less than $30 - and in some cases $20. Nearly all laptops and desktops now come with Gigabit NICs and support Jumbo frames. Modern dual and quad-core CPUs can easily take the overhead of transferring at gigabit speeds with or without jumbo frames. Furthermore, modern OS's are more efficient at high-speed network transfers.
Yet, I see 802.11n routers advertised for streaming HD video, system backups, and large file transfers. Would you really want to backup 100 GB over 802.11n? Sounds like fun watching your entire network come to a crawl for 3 hours. Gigabit ethernet over Cat 5e/6 is generally limited only by your hard drive setup, and can be used for all the aforementioned tasks without any impact on network performance.
The following is my recent experience with wireless networking:
I use a WRT54GL with the Tomato (Linux) firmware. This provides a rock-solid solution, yet I was getting dropouts on wireless at my current apartment. I know it's not the router as it worked fine in my cinderblock college dorm, and I have another WRT54GL running Tomato at my home in NJ - which usually is up for months at a time - until a power outage.
At my latest apartment, I was getting constant dropouts on wireless. I ran a second AP to get a stronger connection. The connection was indeed stronger but I still got intermingle dropouts. I tried changing the wireless channel, antenna placement etc. but nothing worked. Finally, I just said fuck it, bought a 100' Cat 5e cable for $8 and ran it directly from the ADSL router to the router in my room. No dropouts since then - and I get more consistent and faster speeds.
I purchased an 8 port Gigabit switch with Jumbo Frames for my internal network and now my network speeds are limited only by my hard drives. Transferring between a 1 TB eSATA and 1 TB SATA drive, I was able to transfer a 12 GB file in 2:15 at an average speed of 95 MB/sec - around 800 Mbit/sec. With