19 January 2018

Days of Future Present

If you're old enough, and I sure has heck am, then the term "sneaker net" will be familiar. Hadn't run across it in a while. Today is one of those times.
The use-case presented to us in our briefing was one for video editing, where a film studio has a server/machine full of these drives, and when a days recording is done, the drives can be packed up and shipped to a visual effects studio (either by courier, or by placing an intern on a flight) to do their magic. This is commonly known as sneaker net, and offers much better bandwidth than transferring the raw 8K/16K footage through fat internet pipes. (Big data center services, like Google/Amazon, literally ship petabytes of data around using couriers, as the overall bandwidth is quicker.)

And there's this from that embedded link (and the memory of reading it years ago still gets tickled in the lower brain stem!).
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
-- Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
[my bold]

And cheaper, I'd bet.

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