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.

  • @Bobert@sh.itjust.works
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    1431 year ago

    “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes hurtling down the highway”

  • idunnololz
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    1021 year ago

    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.

  • Agamemnon
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    541 year ago

    Haha, in some parts of germany you can do that yourself. on foot. with a zipdisk.

      • @c10l@lemmy.world
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        171 year ago

        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.

  • CazRaX
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    491 year ago

    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.

    • @Steve@communick.news
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      1 year ago

      That’s kind of the point though. It’s not about practicalities.

      There is an ancient proverb.
      “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes.”

    • @nous@programming.dev
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      161 year ago

      There are no winners or losers here and they are not suggesting you start uploading things via pigeons, just gives a more interesting way to talk about and get people to think about how large volumes of data can and are still moved around via trucks and ships.

    • @Sludgeyy@lemmy.world
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      141 year ago

      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.

        • @Sludgeyy@lemmy.world
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          21 year ago

          You missed the point of what I was saying

          2 tb flash drives are expensive but exist

          Pigeon could carry 4 tb in 2 flash drives worth of weight.

          But simply 3 1 tb drives a pigeon can carry so they did that.

          If they had to transfer 5 tb of data to win. 3 2 tb drives would have worked.

          This article just states that a pigeon can carry 3 1 tb drives and deliver it faster than gigabit internet.

          They didn’t need to push the envelope anymore

          So yes they calculated that the pigeon could carry 3 drives and that 3 tb was all that was needed to carry to win.

          But they didn’t set up the experiment to favor the pigeon. They set it up to prove it could be done that way.

  • Meldroc
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    321 year ago

    Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of flash drives. The latency’s most annoying though.

  • @devbo@lemmy.world
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    321 year ago

    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.

      • @devbo@lemmy.world
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        11 year ago

        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.

        • @Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          21 year ago

          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.

      • @nxdefiant@startrek.website
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        231 year ago

        This is why you use TCP: Trusted Concurrent Pigeons.

        Trusted Pigeons so that a simple hash check can prove the veracity of your data AND provide a free dedupe / data integrity check for when multiple/single packets arrive.

        Concurrent Pigeons so that transmission issues don’t impact latency (throughput is essentially unlimited here, assuming sufficient pigeons)

        Downsides include needing to implement a pigeon cache and power (birdfood) requirement increases.

    • @Ultraviolet@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Cethin
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      21 year ago

      Yeah, this is super dumb. It’s too dumb for me to akchually it though.

    • @Piers@lemmy.world
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      141 year ago

      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.)

      • Bezerker03
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        141 year ago

        Amazon snowmobile it’s called. Let’s you uoad to s3 that way.

  • @PM_ME_STEAM_KEYS@reddthat.com
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    231 year ago

    This reminds me of the age when the egregiousness of home Internet data overage charges in Canada reached their zenith, with some back of the napkin math, I realized it would be more cost effectuvd to buy and fill a solid state drive (which had only begun to come down in price) with stuff, ship it overnight international, and then destroy it after downloading its contents, than to hit the overage charge limit with my provider.