Yeah, but having that ping time of 36,000,000ms really kind of sucks.
Error-correction for dropped packets is also pretty shit.
oh, that's what's on my car.
Also having to manually bring the pigeon back to the launching site, because pigeons only work one way.
What if you attached two one-way pigeons together to make a two-way pidgeon? It would probably take a piece of string, and a coconut...
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes hurtling down the highway"
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.
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.
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."
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
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.
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!
RAID: Redundant Avians Indemnifying Death
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.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of flash drives. The latency's most annoying though.
The ever lasting war between bandwidth and latancy
Lag is a real bitch though...
Yea, and packet size is enormous, so one lost packet is catastrophic...
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.
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'd like to see that pigeon fly from Sydney to New York.
I wouldn't. Sounds boring.
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.
Get back to me when a pigeon can deliver high-speed porn.
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
Is the time of loading and downloading the files from the flash drives of the pigeon included?
Yes it was. Though he did use faster SSD drives rather then cheaper and slower flash drives. Which is something reasonable to do IMO. He also tested various network transfer methods to use the fastest one and transferred unique data to each drive rather then just uploading the same file over and over giving both sides a fair but also their best shot at working.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Popular TechTuber Jeff Geerling has delivered an updated take on the old chestnut about the relative merits of pigeon-based vs internet data transfers.
Spoiler alert: the pigeon with its high-capacity microSD cards won Geerling’s data transfer race by a significant margin.
Famously, in 2009, a South African company compared the transfer speed of a pigeon carrying a 4 GB memory stick vs local ISP Telkom’s ADSL service.
So, he donned a pigeon mask and jumped on a plane to carry 3 TB of files from his home in the US to the Canadian data center, which the internet transfer also targeted.
To conclude, Geerling says he could have easily done better as PiJeff, stuffing his luggage with very high capacity drives, but wanted to stick to the common 3 TB across all alternatives.
Hopefully, another decade later, we will all have broadband measured in petabits, and pigeons won’t have to endure having flash NAND devices strapped to their legs for our amusement (research).
The original article contains 432 words, the summary contains 163 words. Saved 62%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of ~~tapes~~ flashdrives hurtling down the highway.
For price per TB, modern tapes might still be a valid choice actually. But maybe not great for read/write performance. I guess that depends on how many tape drives you have on each end.
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?
A single packet takes longer to reach the destination, but that single packet can contain shittons of data. Ingenious! Of course... This assumes the packet actually arrives.
Packet loss is a pretty major risk with IPoAC.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
