Written in response to this article.
Recently researchers at Alcatel-Lucent were able to transmit data at 16.4 Tbps over an optical connection. As another reader of the article pointed out, that's fast enough to transmit the entire contents of the library of congress (20 TB) in under ten seconds. The applications have not yet been written and the hardware not yet created that can take advantage of such speeds. Possible applications would be telepresence, streaming video in its original format, massively multiplayer action games, and remote robotics. Unfortunately the dark side of the Internet would also be taking advantage of the new speeds to distribute spam and launch attacks. Like all good tools, the better our Internet connection is, the more of both good and evil it can accomplish.
2 comments:
Thumbs up for evil!
Breta was surprised that the library of congress "only takes up 20 terabites"
I bet Chuck Norris has read it, thrice.
If I type at 80WPM, it would take 79,274 years to type 20TB of text. Audio and video fill up space fast, text does not. For instance, the data in a standard JPEG image from a camera takes 3MB, which would take 26 days to type at 80WPM. That's why a TB doesn't seem so big these days. It really is though. 1TB = 1 trillion bytes. For contrast, 1 trillion seconds ago it was 29,701 B.C. However, your facts on Chuck Norris are entirely accurate.
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