Comments on: Bandwidth of Large Airplanes, Take 2

By: walt

walt — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 14:48:54 +0000

Peter: You’re welcome. I’d discount Tyvek sleeves too, probably–but spindles with covers (which is what I was measuring, including weight) are probably at least as safe as slimpaks–less breakage-prone and with discs firmly locked in place.

marcbl: You’re over 64? Good to have some older readers. And, actually, you might want to click on the first link in the post again and read the comments–specifically Eric Lease Morgan’s comment about Google and FedExing hard discs as a cheap, fast way to move large quantities of data. Sure, if you needed, say, one gigabyte the net is the way to go–but if what you need is, say, 500 Terabytes, shipping objects around starts to look pretty attractive.

(One reason why the U.S. probably isn’t going to have universal on-demand high-def “any movie or tv program you want, any time” real soon: Not only is most U.S. broadband far too slow for HD, the backbones don’t have the capacity for tens of millions of distinct 30mb/s streams. For certain purposes, broadcast and physical carriers still make lots of sense.)

By: Peter Murray

Peter Murray — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 14:09:35 +0000

Thanks for picking up the challenge to take this to the next level, Walt. I discounted Tyvek sleeves and spindles because I was concerned about the potential for damage to the discs. After all, the “cost” of retransmission (mostly in time) is so great when your transport layer is a cargo aircraft. But, then again, if those techniques are good enough to ship new discs, they are probably good enough to ship written discs. Geez — to describe it like this makes one think we’re actually taking this scheme seriously.

Very interesting to see that the bounding variable is weight and not volume!

By: marcbl

marcbl — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 07:11:11 +0000

however, LATENCY is teh sux.

this is a real-time world, old man! get with the frikken’ program!
(insults were meant as a joke. i’m older than thou!)