[HN Gopher] I raced a homing pigeon against the Internet [video]
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I raced a homing pigeon against the Internet [video]
Author : tambourine_man
Score : 41 points
Date : 2023-08-29 03:52 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| markdown wrote:
| A South African company tried to shame their Telecom provider by
| doing this way back in 2009
|
| https://www.wired.com/2009/09/in-africa-a-pigeon-transfers-d...
| tspike wrote:
| He mentions that as the inspiration for the video
| ketanmaheshwari wrote:
| What if they used drones in place of pigeons? Much more reliable
| and leaving them birds alone.
| xyst wrote:
| I think the speed of drones is mostly constant and known. Pick
| a model, get its top speed from the spec, and just calculate
| it. No need to perform any real experiment.
|
| Plus this is more fun to watch :)
| gwill wrote:
| wind would still affect the speed and direction of the drone.
| fdwlbs wrote:
| I suppose it depends a lot on what drone one is actually
| considering, but I'll bet compared to most drones, the pigeon
| has much better range.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| Also
|
| - food may be easier to source than electricity in certain
| rural area
|
| - auto scale mating
|
| - no replacement part shortage
| RoyalHenOil wrote:
| There is a legality aspect as well. Drones are not
| permitted to fly in all places. Where I live, they can't
| fly above private property (without the property owner's
| permission) or near airports.
|
| Such rules, of course, do not apply to birds.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I suspect that training time for a pigeon is a lot longer
| than programming time for a drone.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Some examples of real world races, including one against an
| Australian ISP the pigeon won:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers#:~:te...
|
| If this tickles you, give Going Postal by Terry Pratchett a read.
| kypro wrote:
| From the comments:
|
| > Time for a data transfer startup based on pre-programmed drones
| with relay terminals to recharge or change carriers.
|
| I know it's a joke, but I'd be interested in knowing if anyone
| knows of any theoretical or known commercial use cases of exactly
| this?
|
| If you're a corporate with a petabyte of data you want to send
| from the US to Europe to do some data analytics on, would you not
| back it up to tape and load it on a plane? Seems like this must
| happen from time to time, no?
| natemcintosh wrote:
| At my previous job we had to get data off a ship after a test.
| The upload rate off the ship was slow. The solution was to put
| the data on drives, put them in a helicopter, and fly them to
| land.
| mhink wrote:
| For terabyte-scale data it might make sense to send it along
| with a person, but for larger amounts there are definitely
| services to help handle the process.
|
| He mentioned AWS Snowmobile in the video, but they also have a
| lower-volume equivalent: AWS Snowball [1]. It's basically just
| a suitcase-sized device that you plug in, upload data to, and
| ship to the destination. They have some really nice features to
| help make the process smooth. But yeah, at its core the idea
| really is "pack up a lot of hard drives and have it shipped to
| the destination".
|
| 1: https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| Also reminds me of the XKCD What-if: "When - if ever - will
| the bandwidth of the Internet surpass that of FedEx"
|
| https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| [delayed]
| teekert wrote:
| In the genomics field this is why we are working on making
| "data visiting" easier: https://www.ga4gh.org/product/workflow-
| execution-service-wes...
| OmarShehata wrote:
| This isn't very uncommon in geospatial companies, where data is
| often hundreds of terabytes. I remember there was open
| government data you could request from USGS (high res satellite
| imagery of all of the US), it was technically free, but you
| couldn't download it. You requested it, filled out a form, and
| they shipped you 4-5 drives with bubblewrap.
| macintux wrote:
| Not quite the same, but Peter Jackson famously used iPods to
| transport dailies while filming LoTR.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| Ditto in my previous job, there were weekly package deliveries
| of hard drives from Europe, which were a magnitude faster
| (then) compared to what was possible for a reasonable price...
| Of course this was all back in the day, and might only be
| economical these days from somewhere with major airports but no
| connecting fibre.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of
| tapes hurtling down the highway." -Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Nowadays you can buy 30TB 2.5 inch SSDs which includes a
| durable metal housing. So a station wagon could feasibly
| transport close to 300 petabytes. Though that would be close
| to a quarter billion dollars worth of SSDs.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| Are ssd the best alternatives regarding price/bite and
| volume/bite ? It seems and SDUC card will largely beat on
| the volume comparison.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Not if you expect to actually get data out of them after
| hurtling down the road. Even for top end enterprise grade
| SSDs made at the highest standard, I would only assign a
| <99.9% chance of doing so. So that's 10 bad SSDs per trip
| at least.
| biomcgary wrote:
| Erasure codes are your friend, if you have the compute.
| fdwlbs wrote:
| I suppose it mostly depends on how much the saved time is worth
| and how that compares to the cost of transport. I suppose there
| are some cases where shipping a box of drives makes sense.
|
| I think a much more common case is having a critical machine
| crash and needing a backup sent to you. Depending on the
| bandwidth you actually have, restore by mail can be faster. And
| that's why companies like backblaze offer it.
|
| https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/features/restore
|
| Restoring 8TB, which is not an unreasonable amount of data in
| 2023, at 40Mb/s, which is not that uncommon in much of America,
| still takes more than 2 days when everything goes perfectly.
|
| FedEx'ing a 8TB drive should be able to beat that in many
| cases.
| gwill wrote:
| i can't find a source for it, but i know nasa has done this in
| the past.
| LakshyAAAgrawal wrote:
| I introduce to you https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/
| dotancohen wrote:
| Use case, really interesting:
|
| https://blog.maxar.com/earth-
| intelligence/2017/digitalglobe-...
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