Yes, a Pigeon is Faster for Data Transfer than Gigabit Fiber Internet::A decade ago, a pigeon with a 4 GB memory stick outran an ISP’s ADSL service. A 2023 rematch features a bird with 3 TB of flash drives vs gigabit internet.
Yeah, but having that ping time of 36,000,000ms really kind of sucks.
Error-correction for dropped packets is also pretty shit.
Also having to manually bring the pigeon back to the launching site, because pigeons only work one way.
Its UDP man
I’m not the original author:
Trebuchets are the most technologically advanced siege engines of all time, and are capable of hurling a 90kg stone over 300m using a counterweight.
With this in mind, we can perform the following calculations:
A 22TB WD Red Pro drive weighs 670g, with a maximum hurl weight of 90kg, trebuchet can hurl 134 drives at once, totalling 2,948 TB of data.
The average speed of a trebuchet projectile is 54m/s and the average size of an American ‘block’ is 100m. Lets presume 3 blocks to get our full trebuchets use (fuck you catapults).
It’ll take 5.5 seconds for the projectile to go from launch to dramatic landing, meaning a throughput of 536TB a second.
Therefore, trebuchets are the best transfer method.
All of these methods have extreme bandwidth but terrible latency and packet loss.
Just use half the bandwidth for redundancy.
Haha, in some parts of germany you can do that yourself. on foot. with a zipdisk.
Good ole sneakernet. It’s hard to have dropped packets when they’re delivered by hand
It’s not. Just drop the storage device in a manhole, or get mugged, or break it in some way. Also when you do so, pretty much all packets are lost and to retransmit you need to go back to the point of origin and make a new copy, assuming you still have the original.
Recovery after a lost packet is pretty awful, I’ll give you that
Can’t help but think that they are rigging this for the bird. Just calculate how long it takes the bird to get from here to there and then pick a capacity that takes longer to download.
Yes and no.
If you could put a 1 petabyte flash drive on a pigeon, it would easily crush the gigabit internet
Does a 1 petabyte flash drive exist? Could it exist?
They put 3 stripped-down terabyte flash drives on the pigeon. Could it carry more weight?
You get to the point where the pigeon can’t carry the weight.
All this is saying that sending data by pigeon can be faster and using 3 tb sticks proves it.
If it needed to be 4 tb, then they would have had to use 4 sticks. If it couldn’t carry 4 sticks, then you have your answer that the pigeon can’t do it with current technology.
We need to RAID pigeons in case of hawk outage.
More redundancy!
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Lag is a real bitch though…
its like they choose 3 TB because they knew it was the smallest amount that would lose. lets make it a real re-match and go back to transfering 4 GB.
In that case: Time appropiate storage size.
i guess im confused why 3 TB was chossen. what is this representing. Most people are not transfering 3 TB on a regular basis, 100 GB is a large transfer for common cases. who is this information for? who should be looking into pigeons/jets for regular multi-TB data transfers. just sounds like pigeon propaganda to me.
birds arent real is leaking… Neat :D
Most people are not transfering 3 TB on a regular basis
The usual Joe? Yep.
Off site backup is usually out of question except for datahoarders and businesses. But they might benefit from it.
I’d like to see that pigeon fly from Sydney to New York.
I wouldn’t. Sounds boring.
Jokes aside, but you also have to upload & download data from portable storage.
If it’s mounted, what’s the difference?
He included those transfers as well. He used usb sticks with an actual SSD chip, since those are faster to read/write from.
I really have to fight the neck beard in me to not aKchutually the shit out of fun stuff like this.
It’s a classic example in education to demonstrate the difference between bandwidth and latency. Extremely high bandwidth, but also extremely high latency. It’s not for practical use, it’s a thought experiment to explain something that’s often counterintuitive to students that are just starting out learning about networking.
When can I start using a pigeon to preload games like Starfield?
Used to be called “install disks” that you would have to preorder for the convenience of having it available at your local game store
💀
I wrote a similar blog post recently, about magnetic tapes in minivans. https://www.humancode.us/2023/02/03/a-minivan-full-of-magnetic-tape.html
I once signed up for a cloud backup service that would mail out a HDD so the user could backup to that, mail it to them, seed the data on the backup servers, and then let the user start doing incremental backups. FedEx, round trip, was faster than uploading it all over the network.
I can’t remember who (probably all of them) but one of the fang companies offers a service where they’ll send you a truck with a huge backup server in a shipping container to do an on site backup to drive back to their cloud servers (for similar reasons.)
Is the time of loading and downloading the files from the flash drives of the pigeon included?
I can carry way more HDDs than that weakass stupid pigeon. So what I can’t run to save my life.
Isn’t gigabit internet more about amounts of data you can transfer rather than the overt speed that is not important to average user?
I’m reminded of this: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
