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The Internet

2.4 Gigabit Network Demoed 112

Posted by Nathan from the Faster-Better-Higher dept.
coaxial writes: "At SuperComputing '99, the fastest network in the world, 2.4 gigabits, was built between the University of Washington and Microsoft's Redmond campus thanks to the DARPA-sponsored National Transparent Optical Network (NTON), the university's Pacific/Northwest Gigapop, and Nortel. You can read all about it from the NCSA now apart of The Alliance . " Cool, MP3's and DECSS'd DVD movies at the speed of the light.
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2.4 Gigabit Network Demoed

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  • The posting comment didn't help (Score:3)

    by at-b ( 31918 ) on Saturday November 20, 1999 @03:52AM (#1517492) Homepage

    Hey
    This isn't meant to be offensive to the Slashdot crew or Nathan in particular, and I understand that the comment added to the news posting was most likelt humorous in nature. But: Do you guys think that

    > Cool, MP3's and DECSS'd DVD movies at the speed of the light.

    is a good impression to give to non-hacker types reading Slashdot? (hacking, not cracking) Of course, lots of nerdy techies like myself :) read Slashdot, and we'll grin at the deCSS and MP3 comments, since we know stuff like that happens, because people simply exploit it. I've never deCSSed a DVD, not do I intend to ever copy one off the net.
    But many of the industry people who do read Slashdot and try to form an opinion of Open Source (Unreal and Q3 developers, for instance, both of whom have posted here previously), will form the opinion that we're just a bunch of immature geeks who'll steal their software, if necessary.
    Again, I know the comment was probably meant to be funny - but guys, we aren't alone here anymore. 'Suits' and industry people read Slashdot, and their opinion counts if we want to bring proper DVD support to Linux, for instance. Or if we want full Linux support for games, etc.

    We're in a phase right now where everything that happens to Linux really, really matters. Let's not throw it away by acting childishly, and fitting into the 'zealot geek' stereotype many would like to categorise us as.
    Sorry, Nathan - this really isn't a flame against you.

    Alex


    "Your telnet is talking to itself. Welcome to the wacky world of TCP/IP."

  • Reason (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Microsoft/AOL created the internet therefore they are king of it. If you don't like it then get your god damned head out of your ass, and kneel to King Microsoft. They have done everything for you and you spit in their face. Microsoft has sacrificed greatly and this is the thanks they get? Some loser whining about Microsoft? Quit whining you baby, Microsoft is the reason you're here.
  • It was almost a year ago that frontier globalcenter turned up the first OC-48 Packet Over Sonet link between SF and LA, so this is less than impressive. That link was turned up into a production network, using Cisco GSR routers (which will take OC-48 POS cards with no sweat). I don't see where these people get off saying this is the first application.

    OC-192 POS, on the other hand, would be something nice and new ...

  • Good for yo, Canadians! Anyway, I dont get it. It seems that MessyDos has a *far* better PR department than my employer has (suprise :-). In the Netherlands KPN has a fully redundant 2.4 Gb network between 4 cities for internet connections already. See dutch kpn site [kpn.net]
  • Well, I believe there have been several 100 gigabit fibers running the entire width of the country for quite some time. Maybe if Microsoft does it it's supposed to be an innovation but Microsoft is really only one company. There are many other companies building networks much faster than Microsoft's.

  • If you are "lucky", the economy will generate something much more efficient than the "free market" defined by copyright law and patents. There will be gobs of cash available for those who know how to direct focus groups and shift paradigms: don't worry, you'll be able to watch more great, soul-searching films like "Titanic", "Jurassic Park", and "Lion King" and listen to great, ground-breaking music like N-Sync, BackStreet Boys, Menudo, and Brittany Spears.

    But where will this gobs of cache come from? Currently these things get money from distribution of the product, basically on a pay-per-use basis, which is fair: the people who want the service pay for it. However, in the new economy, who will pay for this? It costs literally millions of dollars to film movies and record music albums. If nobody can make money off it, who will invest in it? The only solution I can see is government subsidies; however, this is highly communistic, because we all pay for it, regardless of it we want it. What is wrong with the current system, and how will the new system improves things? If you are a typical slashdotter, you enjoy movies such as The Matrix, Star Wars, Star Trek... All of which are extremely expensive to produce, but all of which did extremely well in the theaters and on video. It is simply not true to propose that these works can be produced without the money that was put into them. Nor would they have been produced if there wasn't a possibility of making millions and millions of dollars off of it. If funding for making movies is cut off -- who pays for development of movies?

  • Er, you're assuming that $2 is the maximum profit-generating price point for a movie. The current price for a DVD is $20-$25, and I'm sure the companies know what they are doing in pricing these, assuming they are half-way rational. I also think you are underestimating the costs of electronic distribution. The cost of delivering say 1,000,000 copies of Titanic (which would be, what, about 1 GB in size?) electronically would be massive, and certainly not economically feasible under current bandwidth limitations. In 10 years, when everybody has 2.4 GB connections to their homes, things may be different, but now most people have just 56k.
  • But where will this gobs of cache come from?

    I wish I knew the answer to this. If I did, I'm sure I would be a very rich man in the coming years. This I do know: the system as it is, while imperfect, has worked fairly well for the past century or so. However, it is clear that it cannot sustain itself given the progress of information technologies. A different approach must (and will) be taken, because our current one simply isn't effiecient any more.

    Even if it was, I expect technology to give rise to a much more competitive method. This alone is cause to expect the current system to collapse, with or without the help of those "anti-patent" crackpots.

    What will it look like? I have no idea. The only shift im seeing currently is one to a service based information economy, where people are paid to write specific code to accomplish a specific task for a (sold-per-unit) material good.

    Is this, combined with the non-profit GPL enough? Probably not. It doesn't cover big budget movies, or music. But I'm positive other models will prevail.

    Personally, while I enjoyed The Matrix, Star Wars, and other big budget attractions immensely, I would not shed a tear if they were the last of their kind. Especially if it meant total freedom from information exchange restrictions.

    I realize others disagree, but I'm sure a useful solution will arise from the muck.
  • BSD can already handle it, check out the Juniper Networks M40. Its FreeBSD based, and can already handle a terabit, pretty snazzy stuff.

    That's a pretty misleading statement. The M40 uses ASICs to route packets directly, so the OS kernel isn't involved most of the time. Also, the M40 doesnt's seem to run a standard BSD kernel.

    More generally, let's please get over this notion that every OS needs to be best at everything. Making one OS do everything is Bill Gates's obsession and is, in a large part, responsible for the bloat and complexity of that operating system. If Win2k wants to become a backbone router with a Win32 GUI, an incompatible CORBA clone at its heart, and a built-in relational database, good for it, and good luck to the programmers at Microsoft.

    I'm pretty happy with Linux network performance the way it is. I'm sure Linux will keep pace with the performance of standard networking hardware and software.

  • Linux/Intel the clear leader?

    You surely meant linux/PPC the clear leader if you were talking about pure performance per watt?

    Slainte Torc
  • Much of what you say is true. Artist do have to be fed somehow, and the current system DOES work to create creativity and innovation, at least to some extent. There is no doubt a lot of good music drowning in the one hundred times more plentiful crappy music (though you are wrong when you speak of the margins being used for unprofitable artists, music companies only sign artist for profit, though sometimes the gamble turns out wrong (and trust me, you will get dropped)).

    If things were all equal, I think I might vote for keeping the current system. But things are not all equal. Copyrights are at odds with the information society, and some of the things that the industries dependant on them are doing are clearly dangerous to liberty on the Internet and our society.

    On a free Internet, piracy is going to become easier and easier, and more people ARE going to do it. There is no solution to this bar wing clipping the very nature of the Net or trying to make the punishments high enough, and lock up enough kids, that people will keep away from it by fear.

    As such, we have to start looking for options. When I talk about the endless Backstreet clones of the music industry it is not because I think that is reason enough to kill it: but because I think people need to be reminded that the current system is not perfect. Many people simply take IP for granted to the point where they believe it to be a right: it is not a right, it is a construction, and far from the ideal solution to its problem (fostering creation and innovation) at that.

    Of course we will need to feed our artists. But there other ways to do this. I cannot tell the future, but I am convinced that as long as there is demand for their art in society they will be fed. Perhaps it will be sponsorship (if an artist endorses Pepsi, it is there interest that as many people be listening to him as possible), perhaps it will be along the lines of opensource (where art evolves independant of one single person needing to be paid), or perhaps artists will be more at the mercy of benevolant fans (if 500,000 people download your album, and 10% send you one dollar, you are making a decent living). Perhaps it will be all of the above. Or none. But whatever we do, we need to recognize that not stepping on our liberties in the process is the most important thing of all.

    -
    We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
  • WTF would you want to put a Gigabit connection into ANY intel box? That's the kind of thing for routers to handle and split up.
  • BUT NOT for dynamic content, where NT falls flat on it's face.

    Now name me a mainstream site that uses no dynamic content.
  • Perhaps someone can explain why 2.4 Gbps is such a feat here. As has been pointed out many times before many networks are faster. So why is this considered the fastest? How does this differ from, say, the Gigabit ethernet I have on my machine?

    -- Moondog
  • Win2k could handle it, but it would spend 99.95% of its CPU time handling the IO, with that .05% of CPU time left, maybe you could use edlin...
    BSD can already handle it, check out the Juniper Networks M40. Its FreeBSD based, and can already handle a terabit, pretty snazzy stuff.
    To be honest, when testing Linux Gigabit stuff, it couldn't touch my BSD systems for throughput or PPS. I had 6 boxes (all exactly the same) plugged into a Cisco 3500 Gig-switch, Two with Linux, Two with FreeBSD, Two with OpenBSD. Doing a lil bit of throughput testing between the FreeBSD/OpenBSD boxes left Linux in the dust. Kinda dissapointing see how much CPU the Linux boxes were using too.
    Not nearly as bizzare as mounting a Linux ext2fs file system as 'sync' rather than the default. Get bonnie to write out a 1GB file and you'll be waiting for *HOURS* on a U2W 10k 9GB drive.

  • Microsoft Rocks (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Maybe the naysayers who are so prejudiced against Microsoft can now admit that sometimes Microsoft does something really cool. I suspect that if this was an "open source thang" it would be considered the bee's knees. Let's give credit where credit is due, and say nice job, Microsoft.

  • Re:I risk my karma for this (Score:3)

    by Booker ( 6173 ) on Saturday November 20, 1999 @07:38AM (#1517522) Homepage
    You argue that copyright law has nothing to do with the creation of art, and point out Linux as an example... but even the GPL'd code in Linux is copyrighted. I don't think the problem is with copyright in and of itself. It has more to do with how the copyright holder uses that copyright. Yes, the RIAA and MPAA use their copyrights to make vast sums of money and limit access to the material, but it doesn't have to be that way.

    All the people attacking the concept of copyright would do well to back up and make sure they've got the right target in their sights.
    ----
  • I expect good books will still get written, great art will still get made, great software will still be engineered, with or without this IP crap.

    If you are "lucky", the economy will generate something much more efficient than the "free market" defined by copyright law and patents. There will be gobs of cash available for those who know how to direct focus groups and shift paradigms: don't worry, you'll be able to watch more great, soul-searching films like "Titanic", "Jurassic Park", and "Lion King" and listen to great, ground-breaking music like N-Sync, BackStreet Boys, Menudo, and Brittany Spears.

    Have no fear. There will be plenty of great ways to make your mind turn to tapioca and make millionaires and billionaires out of people willing to tell the public what they need, quality be damned.
  • Actually, we talked about it ;) They had a couple of technologies that I only briefly passed over that would have allowed that sort of thing, at least beowulfing the beowulfs (although careful application of net cards and ip's can do that too). It's really too bad that Quake servers are not designed to handle being beowulfed and use it effectively.
  • I have noticed that anytime someone posts a pro-Microsoft post like this that they almost always post as an Anonymous Coward. Is this because they're too afraid of slashdot "retribution"? Or is it perhaps because a certain percentage of them are Microsoft employees?

    And I've also noticed that the tone of these pro-Microsoft posts are almost always along the lines of, "See, you Linux zealots. Microsoft does turn out some good thing *after all.* That ought to show you! Microsoft rulez!" Even despite some serious evidence that whatever is being commented on can be debunked by more than one other story.

    In other news, my corporation now has a Microsoft employee in our building who is helping us with an evaluation of Windows NT. I met him and shoot his hand, but I didn't really know how to react. As a representative of my company, I was cordial. But I honestly had a lot of questions that I wanted to ask him. Lots of questions ranging from pointed to downright insulting.

    I wonder what I'll say come Monday.
  • NGI side of things, there's a faster (2.5Gbps) pipe between San Fransisco and LA built by our friends at MCI as part of their vBNS+ network.

  • (though you are wrong when you speak of the margins being used for unprofitable artists, music companies only sign artist for profit, though sometimes the gamble turns out wrong (and trust me, you will get dropped)).

    You are forgetting that all of the major record companies also support classical and jazz music (in addition to pop). Most of these records sell in very, very small quantities -- fewer than 10,000 copies per title. On an title-by-title basis, they lose money off of classical and jazz, except for the VERY occasional title which sells 100,000 copies (Gorecki Symphony #3, for example). Part of the importance of pop music is that it funds classical music and jazz for the major record companies.

    As for the occasional gamble: MOST of the gambles turn out to be wrong. I forget the statistics, but they say that about one in ten new artists makes it big time. For every Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails, there are ten other artists (which receive equal investment) which turn out to be losses. YES, they are dropped, but that doesn't mean the record company gets their money back.

    Basically, a record companies catalog looks like this (proportionally):

    • One established superstar artist (e.g. Pearl Jam) who is guaranteed to sell millions of copies. Investment: $5 million. Units sold: 5 million
    • One new artist "gamble" who makes it (e.g. Christina Aguilera). Investment: $1 million. Units sold: 5 million.
    • Ten new artist "gambles" who don't make it. Investment: $1 million per artist. Units sold: 10,000 copies per artist.
    • 2 jazz albums. Investment: $500,000 per album. Units sold: 10,000 per album.
    • 3 classical albums. Investment: $500,000 per album. Units sold: 10,000 per album.
    • Etc.

    Most people just loook at the Pearl Jam and assume that the company is raking in money OFF OF THAT ARTIST. But it's not true: no record company consists soley of Pearl Jam calibre selling artists. These high profile artists make up perhaps about 5%-10% of the companies catalog. The other 90%-95% of projects fail to make money. Most of the money which is made from the pop superstars is used to fund the unprofitable projects.

    People will say to the companies: cut costs. This means cutting the less selling genres (e.g. classical and jazz) which is detrimental to serious aesthetics (which is bad for consumers). Alternatively, it means cutting "gamble" artists: but this essentially means no new artists will get exposure (which is also bad for consumers).

    The record industry is nearly as rosy as it looks. There were times in the not so distant past that the industry was not doing well at all, and was considering quitting. If piracy continues, we will no doubt see that again.

    I am of the firm belief that the relatively high margins on CD's (for superstar artists) has more aggressively promoted new music than ever before, and I point to the absolutely thriving music scene of the 90's as evidence. In the 80's, vinyl was the primary format, which was more expensive to manufacture, but sold for less. The 80's was a relatively quiet period for music, and fewer new artists got the chance to record. There were fewer ambitious projects, many fewer independent labels, and certainly fewer new and exciting genres than in the 90's, which has been the biggest renaissance in music in a long, long time. I believe that electronic distribution will bring us back to the essentially more conservative 1980's, with a lower manufacturing cost, but also a lower profit margin. With a lower profit margin, the companies have less of a chance to recoup money lost on risky projects, and will undertake fewer risky projects, which means that us consumers will have to live with fewer music choices, and music which is more and more homogenized.

  • Microsoft/AOL created the internet therefore they are king of it.

    Excuse me? I've been using the Internet since long before AOL existed.

    If you don't like it then get your god damned head out of your ass, and kneel to King Microsoft.

    Don't like it? It's not even true.

    They have done everything for you and you spit in their face.

    They have done nothing for me. I had the misfortune of having to use Windows on my primary computer from early 1997 to mid 1998. Those were the unhappiest months of my computing life. I just thank the gods I never used Windows at all before then and haven't needed to use it too much since. I pity those of you who've had to use Windows for years...

    Microsoft is the reason you're here.

    Hardly. I started using the Internet in 1987, 10 years before the first time I started using a Microsoft OS...

    --

  • AT&T fired up the OC-192 POS about a week ago. The first segment is Cambridge MA to New York. We're also running OC-48 POS across the country. The OC-192 boards for the Cisco GSR are brand new, - OC-48 support is much more mature in both the Internet and fiber mux markets, and even OC-48 is still a very large pipe. But internet traffic keeps doubling every 15 minutes or so, so it'll fill up soon enough :-)

    The offical PR is at http://www.att.com/press/item/0,1 354,2228,00.html [att.com]


  • No, you are totally wrong here. If the record companies were knowingly putting out music that they don't expect to profit off, I will go buy a stock in Sony and then sue the fuck out of them. Public companies do not, should not, and can not act benevolently.

    The reason for the companies agressively funding new bands is just the high level competition: they are always scared shitless to pass up on the next thing. I love your example of using Christina Aguilera as the new artist, since she is the perfect example of the bad side. Everything but a young creative talent who got a chance, she is more the result of record company thinking "Hey, we ought to put out a star like Britney Spears since that worked so well."

    As far as classical and jazz recordings go, they simply budget the very, very low. Producing cds is so cheap (and even studio technology nowadays), that minus promotion putting out album that only sells 10,000 copies can still be a good idea. Here in Sweden there is a thriving Swedish language music scene, yet only a little under 9 million people in the world are possibly interested in that. They generally sell as little or less than American classical cds, but it is still possible to make a profit off that.

    Interestingly, many people consider Beck to be one of the most important artists of the ninetees. You know why? Because he had a hit with "Looser" before he signed a record deal, and then afterwards played the companies against one another (instead of falling for the spiced up rip off offers most new artists get, for example TLC who got so little they went bankrupt the year that "Crazy, Sexy, Cool" sold 10 million copies) and got complete control over his music from square one. NiN and Pearl Jam are, interestingly, other examples of bands that were lucky enough to get good deals (NiN are on their own label) that have allowed them a lot more freedom then most bands have. And your right about these bands not making the most money (Pearl Jam haven't had a monster hit since Ten, and NiN have never been real profitable) for the studios. Artist like N'sync and Britney Spears, who the companies can sell 10 million bland albums by, throw them a few scraps (cars and fucks and glittery parties), and then throw them back in the studio to record more music on the companies terms are.

    We are moving into the information age. Making information, replicating information, and spreading information is not so remarkable any more. The companies that have done the latter two can not expect that they can keep a profitable monopoly over it any more (as someone at the base of this string said "they'll have to wake up and realize its all just bits"), and the people that have done the former have to understand that the dynamics of their role is about to change: greatly.

    You cannot stop the world, no matter how much you like it.

    -
    We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

  • If the record companies were knowingly putting out music that they don't expect to profit off, I will go buy a stock in Sony and then sue the fuck out of them. Public companies do not, should not, and can not act benevolently.

    They do not KNOWINGLY put out music that won't sell per se. They put out LOTS of music in the hope that ONE will sell well. They understand that in order to develop one superstar artist, they need to bring up ten artists, one of which will succeed. They invest millions of dollars in each one, but only one brings back any profit at all. As far as the classical and jazz is concerned, it is a little bit less clear about why they do it, but they don't show any signs of stopping.

    Risk is inherent in the music industry considerably more than any other industry. A record company has absolutely no idea if a product will succeed when it is produced. The market is essentially irrational.

    I love your example of using Christina Aguilera as the new artist, since she is the perfect example of the bad side. Everything but a young creative talent who got a chance, she is more the result of record company thinking "Hey, we ought to put out a star like Britney Spears since that worked so well."

    But, again, I can name about three dozen girl singers off the top of my head who came out in the last year and failed. Aguilera is the one who succeeded. The profit made of Aguilera is not (profit_made_from_aguilera - cost_of_producing_aguilera), but rather (profit_made_from_aguilera - cost_of_producing_a_dozen_girl_acts) -- and that it not a huge sum.

    I am not interested in qrguing aesthetics of pop music, but if you don't like her, the industry similarly brough up Pearl Jam, Metallica, etc., etc. These artists would not have existed if the record industry did not have excess capital to spend on new/risky artists.

    And your right about these bands not making the most money (Pearl Jam haven't had a monster hit since Ten, and NiN have never been real profitable) for the studios. Artist like N'sync and Britney Spears, who the companies can sell 10 million bland albums by, throw them a few scraps (cars and fucks and glittery parties), and then throw them back in the studio to record more music on the companies terms are.

    Here you seem to be admitting the existence of the subsidizing phenomenon I described above. And your position seems even more extreme than my take on it.

    Pearl Jam is a mega-successful band. They are one of the very best selling acts of the 90's, and "Ten" in particular, is one of the best selling albums of any genre, of all time. I am not convinced that they do not make much money (as you suggest above), but if you think they don't, that emphasizes my point even more.

    Even if you don't like Backstreet Boys and N*Sync, and the like, you admit that they help the artists you are interested in. So, basically you admit, that without them, there couldn't be more serious artists. This is why it's important to support the system: because it works so well. Complex music such as most classical and jazz will never reach a mass audience; but that's OK, it still thrives under the current system.

    I personally am not interested in either Backstreet Boys or Pearl Jam, but the music which sells few copies -- fewer than 100,000 copies. This is the music which is at most risk in the new information age. In the new market, I am afraid that any music which does not sell 1,000,000 copies will not exist. Our only choice will be Backstreet Boys and Pearl Jam, both of which, in my opinion, are watered down, simplistic, and not very musical.

    Producing cds is so cheap (and even studio technology nowadays), that minus promotion putting out album that only sells 10,000 copies can still be a good idea.

    What gives you the idea that producing CD's is cheap? A classical CD costs $250,000-$500,000 to produce. It sells 2,000-3,000 copies in its lifetime. The profit comes from the Pearl Jam and N*Sync albums.


  • Yes, you said that already. I understand all this: profits from sure selling artists are used to fund risky artists, the companies do this because most of their sure selling artists were risky artists at one time or another. The current system does work to produce new music, some of it even innovative, no doubt, only its effiency can be doubted (and we really have no reference to compare it too).

    Now you understand the core question here: the current system is not sustainable in the information society. Anyone who advocates for the continued use of copyrights is going to have to answer to how you are going to police them in the connected future without turning the Internet into a police state. You can argue yourself silly about how well the current system works today in it will do you no good: instead you should be asking yourself how well it will work in 10 years when most people have broadband connectivity and will be able to download an album illegally in minutes...

    -
    We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
  • ...was built between the University of Washington and Microsoft's Redmond campus...

    Waa! Why do they get the cool toys first? Slashdot.org or cdrom.com would be the logical first place to install this... ;-)

    --

  • but, saying things like "Cool, MP3's and DECSS'd DVD movies at the speed of the light." doesn't really help our credibility. I mean, the greatest fear of the MPAA is that bandwidth will get to the point where entire DVDs can easily be pirated from computer to computer...

    Ok, the comment was probably tongue in cheek, but still... do you *enjoy* taunting lawyers? :)
    ----
  • Who has no credibility? Sooner or later they need to wake up and realize its all just bits. They are still living in denial if they think their business model has any future.

    When cars replaced horses, its was good bet that changing tires was a more viable business than changing horseshoes.

    Wake up and smell the coffee: if you rely on the law to restrict/control information transmission for an income, you may want to consider a different line of work.

    20 years from now I have this feeling there won't much left of copyright/patent law.

    Dinosaurs all of them, and good riddance.
  • but, saying things like "Cool, MP3's and DECSS'd DVD movies at the speed of the light." doesn't really help our credibility. I mean, the greatest fear of the MPAA is that bandwidth will get to the point where entire DVDs can easily be pirated from computer to computer...

    Maybe it's time they woke up and smelled the digital age. If they sold the movies for reasonable rates, it'd be easier to pay for them than pirate them. If bandwidth becomes that cheap and easy to use, I'd happily log into MGM's website, give them my credit card number, and download some movie for $1.99. They'd probably make more money selling them this way than by going through the expensive of pressing DVD discs and shipping them to Best Buy. Frankly, I don't think I'd spend any less on movies than I do now, I'd just have a larger collection. (Actually, with the "just another $2 for another title" going, I'd probably spend more on movies than I do now.) They'd make more money, I'd have more movies, everyone would be happy! Except video rental stores...

    do you *enjoy* taunting lawyers?

    Of course, but only if I know they can't bite me...

    --

  • >but, saying things like "Cool, MP3's and DECSS'd
    >DVD movies at the speed of the light." doesn't
    >really help our credibility. I mean, the greatest
    >fear of the MPAA is that bandwidth will get to
    >the point where entire DVDs can easily be
    >pirated from computer to computer...

    What credibility? Also, the MPAA, the RIAA, BSA and FAST need eye openers like this. They're fighting against an overpowering force now, someone should point out to them that it's just a matter of time before it rolls straight over them.

    What will it mean? Will people stop making movies, music and software? Nope. Will the paradigm for how distribution works, and who takes the profit, change in profound ways? Yes, most definitely.

    The more you "pirate" (share), the faster this will happen. It's inevitable, let's bring the dinosaurs down as fast as possible, and see what else emerges in their place.
  • all I need now is a NIC that will 2.4 gigabits, not to mention some splicing tools and a very long cable. I'll be cheesed if it is not hooked up to the internet backbone.

  • What kind of hardware? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Does anyone have any information about what kind of routers and multiplexors can make use of this cutting edge technology? I'm guessing that it's not your standard Cisco router hooked up to an Adtran fiber MUX. On a related note, does this technology work over the standard glass fiber that we're all used to, or does it use a brand new fiber?

  • They used W2K (Score:3)

    by Ice Station Zebra ( 18124 ) on Friday November 19, 1999 @08:07PM (#1517557) Homepage Journal
    With 24 100MBs cards and 128 processors serving up 20,000,000 static pages a second to a little old lady who was having problems getting the mouse to work.

  • We already have the fastest (for now) (Score:3)

    by blanalex ( 85657 ) on Friday November 19, 1999 @08:10PM (#1517558)
    Here in Canada we already have the fastest real-life internet-like network [slashdot.org], with 80gbps of bandwidth (and still getting faster), thousands of kilometers of fiber, 9 access points, AND MSFT didn't put a penny in it!

    This demoed network is like a 14.4 access to internet compared to CA*Net3.

  • I noticed that were several comments floated by some of the Microsoft mouthpieces stating that this demo proved the viability of Win2000 as an OS that can handle broadband networks/applications. Exactly what does Win2000's TCP/IP stack have anything to do with this demo? Are they trying to imply that any other OS' stack wouldn't fare well in a similar demo? It doesn't sound right to me but I don't know much about Win2000's stack.
  • I've proposed nothing..... but thought of it :)
    Lastest rip.. 6.15 gig
    I rented Suicide Kings and didn't have time to watch it before I had to return it..... So I ripped it to my hard drive and watched it tonight.
    For all you lawyers out there... Yes It's since been deleted now.

    I think just as CDs over a modem was a 2.5 day affair DVDs over DSL/T1s is a multiday affair as well. I was crazy enough to do it then... I'm crazy enough to do it now! Actually I am crazy enough, but don't see it as being worth it. Even if there was a site with DVDs to download I'd probably already own most of the good ones anyway and they are pretty cheap. A DVD-RAM Drive might solve all the storage problems, but for now I don't have a need for a DVD site :)

    Bring on the 40+ gig hard drives!
  • Considering that the company I work for maintains a national 2.5Gbps POS ring, I don't see how 2.4Gbps is faster. Maybe 2.4>2.5 for sufficiently large values of 2.4, but I doubt that this is the case. While many areas do indeed have multi-gig circuits coming in, they are usually broken up into smaller circuits. In our case, we keep it at 2.5Gbps all the way around the ring. And, since we use packet over SONET, there's almost nothing lost to overhead. I really don't see how 2.4Gbps can claim to be the fastest.
  • Go to http://www.nortelnetworks.com/products /data/ [nortelnetworks.com] and check out the Versalar 25k core network switch/router.

    The Versalar feeds IP-on-ATM or IP-on-fibre direct into the OPTera core switch fabric.

    I don't think there's any of the Bay Networks gear involved here. This is definitely backbone carrier stuff, which is Nortel's heartland.

  • The answer is 'Yes, and planning to move to OC-192'.
  • *cough*
    a [freebsdcon.com]
    b [sciencedaily.com]

    of course, they had to fastroute the packets through the system because it can't handle processing at that speed..

  • The GPL is a copyright workaround. It does require the existance of copyrights, but it is only necessary because intellectual property exists.

    Yes, without copyrights I couldn't keep Microsoft from using my code in propriatory software, but do you think Microsoft would be around if there were no copyrights? And if they did, would they have any reason not to open their software that they couldn't charge for anyways?

    -
    We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
  • Bah, that's nothing compared to my dual OC-712s. At 9227.52MBps, I can kick your ass anyday in the bandwidth arena.
    Chris Hagar
  • Yeah, but that's a telco box and the GSR is an ISP box. Different market segments entirely.

    Avici's box is essentially a bigass frame relay switch. That doesn't take care of high-speed IP infrastructure any better than a bigass ATM switch. The GSR rocks because I can run BGP 4 and a variety of IGPs on it, making it an ISP device rather than a telco box.

    While the idea of a bigass frame relay switch is intriguing, I really couldn't give a shit about it. I am more interested in something I can run pure packet over sonet on, like a GSR. When I can plug a DWDM circuit into the avici box and ROUTE ip over it, dealing only with the layer 1/2 signalling overhead of SONET (and not FR or ATM), I will pay a little more attention to it ... but it looks as if the company is going to market itself to the telcos exclusively, which means the box will always be a switch.

  • I believe there is not 100 gbps fiber running anywhere in a production telco network. The fastest box I have seen anything plugged into is OC-192, at 10 Gbps. I am not sure if they have jacked the signalling above 10 on undersea links, but that is as fast as I have seen switching hardware.

  • so I'll just make a test :)

    hope nobody cares :)
    --

  • Sooner or later they need to wake up and realize its all just bits.

    This assertion demonstrates that we technical people should have as little say as possible when it comes to legislation of these matters. To us technical people -- to a CPU designer, a network administrator, a software engineer -- these are simply bits flowing through the device, but we do not have understanding of what this bits represent. Some other things which are "just bits" are personal medical histories, credit card numbers, credit reports, electronic money, and other things, which clearly should not be made public.

    Wake up and smell the coffee: if you rely on the law to restrict/control information transmission for an income, you may want to consider a different line of work.

    It is easy for you to say this and easy for me (a professional chip designer) to say this, as we having nothing to lose in the economy you propose. However, I would be interested in talking especially to producers of the content which you propose be free such as authors and musicians.

  • Every time I hear "this will kill the music industry" I tend to think "good riddance". I'm simply not sure that there should be a music _industry_, I tend to prefer the idea of music as art. At worst, we may see Stephen King, Jackie Collins, Backstreet Boys, and Britney Spears, replaced by say (the horror) another Sophocles, Shakespeare, Mozart, and Bach. Watch me weep.

    One thing to keep in mind is the difference of economy today as back then. Today, art is almost completely capitalistic. The NEA is getting smaller and smaller. However, both Bach and Mozart (I don't know about Shakespeare and Sophocles) were funded by the government. Artists have to make money somehow. If we stop supporting them through the current system (mainly records), we will have to support them through other means (such as government subsidies). To us, the consumers, it won't make much difference in the amount we actually pay. It will be unfair because it is harder to judge who should be compensated in a non-captialistic music system.

    While the current music industry isn't perfect, it is absolutely thriving. There has been by far more music produced (and, perhaps more importantly, more variety of music produced) in this decade than any decade in the past, largely due to the CD technology (which absolutely saved the independent labels). I am not convinced that electronic distribution would scale to this, since it will tend to sigficantly lower the profit margin (which is currently used to subsidize unprofitable music), and make music much, much more commoditized (because it will raise the risk, and only artists such as The Backstreet Bots which are guaranteed to sell fifty gazillion records will be produced).

  • Isn't the already-existing OC-256 backbone 13.271 Gbps? Source: Whatis.com [whatis.com]

    "There are no shortcuts to any place worth going."

  • Wait till you see what's down the road. 1.6 Terabit networks are already being built using cutting edge DWDM technology.
  • As other readers have pointed out, this is hardly the fastest network in the world. The point of the article as I read it was that they demonstrated (arguably) useful single application usages for all that bandwidth in the realm of peer-to-peer workstations. This is subtly different than using backbone bandwidth to deliver mp3s to thousands of dialup users.

    Going to risk the karma to say its actually impressive that Windows 2K could handle this. My somewhat educated but unfounded guess would be current stable Linux kernels couldn't do it, but the *BSDs have a pretty good chance.

  • If they sold the movies for reasonable rates, it'd be easier to pay for them than pirate them.
    At US $15-25 for the typical DVDs I buy from an online store, it is much easier to pay for them than to digitally pirate them.

    Most of the discs are either two-layer or two-sided. Where are you going to find 9 gigabytes of random-access storage for under $25? It's actually fairly hard to even find tape for under that price, considering that the MPEG files won't compress further. Almost all of the tapes are now rated by "2:1 compressed capacity" rather than native capacity, so you'd need at least an 18G tape. Last I checked, it was hard to find DDS-3 tape (12G native, 24G at 2:1 compression) for much less than $25.

    Someday there will be cheap rewritable (or even write-once) optical discs with that kind of capacity, but they aren't here yet. The closest things at the moment are DVD-RAM (2.6G per side) and DVD-R (4.7G), and the media is expensive.

  • 80gbps? so whats that mean? 8 nortel networks OC-192 bays maxed out at every gigapop? The article said there was 11, 11 x 8 = 88. What do they cost $500k each?
    What I am getting at is I don't think this adds up.
    Don't you need a regen every little bit (300 miles or so)? Is that where these gigapops are?
    The article mentioned that it was all optical, so what do the use to regen the signal over all of Canada? I thought the only way to regen that signal over long distances was optical/elec/optical in an OC-192 bay?
    This just doesn't seem realistic to have 8 bays at every gigapop, maybe I am wrong...If so I am sure someone will tell me.
  • I've read in a norwegian mag that the canadians already have that kind of bandwith for their university/state backbone. According to the article, the Canadians were putting final touches on a upgrade to 40Gb capacity. Sorry, but I have no references. Any Canadians who can confirm/dismiss this?

    I know I wanted to emigrate when I read about it. Heck, Canada's much further south as well. Practically tropical climate for me :)

    - eivind

  • I'm just wondering, how do you plug this into a PC?
    Are there like OC-48 cards for PC's?
    Or would they use gigabyte ethernet? ATM?

  • Now, I REALLY wish people would try and make one even faster than this one so that this one mould then be "old" therefore "obsolete" aka "hell of a lot cheaper." First I gots ta get me one of those hard drive refrigerators with 500 gigs of space!


    If you think you know what the hell is really going on you're probably full of shit.

  • People were making art before there was copyright law, and they will continue to do so after it is gone. The situation is different in every industry (music, books, software), but Linux stands as proof that it is possible to create great informational entities for motivations other than appropriation.

    Every time I hear "this will kill the music industry" I tend to think "good riddance". I'm simply not sure that there should be a music _industry_, I tend to prefer the idea of music as art. At worst, we may see Stephen King, Jackie Collins, Backstreet Boys, and Britney Spears, replaced by say (the horror) another Sophocles, Shakespeare, Mozart, and Bach. Watch me weep.

    -
    We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
  • OK, so it probably wouldnt have worked, but "imagine playing quake on that thing"
  • I was impressed that they got that sort of performance out of the Windows NT 2000 TCP/IP stack. The Windows NT 4.0 TCP/IP stack was infamous for running like a crippled pig on 100Base-T. They must have made some major changes to the TCP/IP stack.

    Does anyone have any performance figures for Linux or *BSD on 1000Base-T?

  • Misinformation... (Score:5)

    by Raleel ( 30913 ) on Friday November 19, 1999 @09:13PM (#1517599)
    SLight bit of misinformation here...The fastest net in the world was at supercomputing, but it was not the oc-48 between MS and SC99. It was the LAN, which was multiple OC-192's, each wavelength multiplexed with 10 wavelengths. They could have gone higher, but as one of my coworkers stated, "they didn't need to and were feeling lazy". It was fricking insane (I was there). BTW, this wasn't some theoretical net, this was actually implemented complete with routers. As my coworker, who helped implement it said, "It's the hottest network on earth."

    In addition, many other things that were at SC99 will be of interest to the Slashdotters. One was the incredible number of Beowulfs. The real world computing partnership had a ~30 node one, SGI had a 32 node one, VALinux had a 16 node one, Argonne, LBNL, and LNL all had VaLinux clusters as well. Dell had parts of one to go to PNL. Lots of clusters. There was a Cray T3, many Onyx 2's and several other large systems.

    One of the neatest things I saw was a Sun e450 w/ 2 gigs of ram and 4 processors. It powers 26 Sunrays with netscape, StarOffice and Smart cards. It ran extrememly fast, as it took all 26 going hog wild before I noticed a slowdown.

    Another neat thing was this thing that all I can remember is the software, called DomeGL. Basically, they take a wide angle lens that can project without focal loss across a 180 degree hemisphere, project it inside a hemispherical dome in a darkened room and it gives a strong illusion of 3d, even without shutter glasses.

    Lets see...lots of stuff for the big computers (ASCI Red, Blue Pacific, etc), a robot name sprocket controlled rather directly that spoke ina rather saucy voice, IBM's new display that has 200 pixels per inch and displays at (cannot remmeber exact, but this is close) 2640x2048, which, I was told, is just inside the visual accuity range of a 20/20 vision adult, demos of everyones stuff, compaq's alpha clusters with their optimized gcc, Alta's clusters, and all sorts of other stuff. If you ever get a chance to help set up, I highly recommend it. I got the opportunity because my employer is an exhibitor, but they do have volunteers

    As for some of the nontechnical stuff, IBM threw a party in the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. Very nice, and lots of fun for geeks. On Wednesday night, VALinux threw a party at the Lucky Labrador, a brew pub. Good grub and free beer. SGI and SUn also had parties but they were the same night as IBM and I didn't go. I also did not get to go to any of the technical program, but I hear it was very good .

    I was gonna write up an official report and send it in, but someone beat me to it ;)
  • 20 years from now I have this feeling there won't much left of copyright/patent law.

    I hope not. I am looking forward to reading more books and watching more movies in my life. I may even pay for them once in a while.

    If copyright law did not exist, then I doubt authors, movie makers, ect, would bother producing movies and publishing books.

    The issue of copyright has nothing to do with the horse/car thing. Horses were replace by cars because cars were more effiecient. I don't see written work/films being replaced by anything soon.

    And you have been on the coffee too much, all markets and products (except maybe the black market), require law to operate effeiently.
  • That's why all the best warez sites are in Canadian dorm rooms.
    Oops, uh, ignore that :)

    Pope

  • There is some insane bandwidth across Canada but can't remember what it is. I believe it is more of a theoretical "if we had the cash to buy everything" network. As you said it is rather pricey. Then again Nortel is one of the private sponsors

    As far as amplification goes you can do it all optically. A specially doped fiber optic is used. A laser is spliced onto the fiber and the laser light "pumps" electrons in the fiber up to a higher energy state. When a passing signal photon collides with one of the higher state electrons a second identical photon is produced. The signal is amplified. This is the paraphrased version from my fiber optics notes. Either JDS Fitel and/or Lucent is doing this.

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