All very technical and interesting...
...but this is El Reg so who gives a toss? Does the heroine get her tits out and is the film worth seeing?
The Avatar storage effect
Avatar - James Cameron's 3D-enhanced sci-fi CGI space-western movie - is set to be a stunning success, and the storage industry is jumping on the bandwagon carrying its 10 feet tall, blue-skinned aliens. Avatar is being produced by California-based LightStorm Entertainment, which has contracted out much of the CGI (Computer- …
This topic is closed for new posts.
Dr
Film well worth seeing. Thin plot, shallow characterization, typical hollywood good vs evil. But visually and aurally, it will blow you away - pretty much like the original Star Wars, this is a bit of a game-changer.
Well, actually
yes (sorta) and yes (definitely). Hope that helps. :-)
Jumbo sneakernet
If they have the entire 45Mb/s pipe and their super-low overhea coms then they might be getting 5MB/s.
A flight LAX-NZ is about 9-10hours, so with checkin , say 40,000secs.
So while you are eating Air New Zealand's delicous scones with cream and watching Mr Bean for the 20th time, they can ship 200Gb over the wire
Assuming I can fit 20*1.5Tb drives in my hand baggage - I would say that sneakernet is winning by a factor of 100.
@Martin 6
Did u read the article ??
"FASP achieves 90 per cent of the targeted throughput with less than 1 per cent redundant data overhead."
Your calculations are miles off. And I'd love to see u trying to get through customs with 20 HD's in your hand luggage.
Yes, he did RTFA... did /you/ read his post?
His calculations seem close enough to me: 90% of 45Mb/s is 40.5Mb/s which is 5.0625MB/s. 10 hours is 36000 seconds so 40000 seems a reasonable estimate. 5 megabytes per second * 40 kiloseconds = 200 gigabytes.
Did you miss the significance of the lowercase 'b' in Mb/s standing for bits where the uppercase 'B' in MB/s stands for bytes?
@AC
The significance of the lower case 'b' in Mb/s was not lost on me, But if my maths were as bad as yours I'd make all ma comments anonymous to. Maybe your mummy will get u a calculator for Christmas.
Droooool on the hardware specs!
I bet the devs played world of warcraft on them!!! GRRRR lol
I'd still pick sneakernet
45Mb/s is a bit less than half a Terabyte a day*. Good for sending updates, but a courier with a shoulder bag of 2 TB hard discs is still a lot quicker and probably cheaper for bulk deliveries.
Are they using RUDP?
UDP
So, some fancy west-coast company starts packaging up and selling UDP bandwidth as the answer to everyone's bulk data transfer problem, and it's all wonderful high-tech happy time. Meanwhile, when BitTorrent starts talking about using UDP instead of TCP it's the end of the Internet as we know it.
@ 1st Post AC
In response to your questions...
Yes she does (In a national geographic kind of way)
and Yes it is!
Can someone other than Sony
please come out with a decent home 3D format? We all know Sony hate their customers and I dread to think what nefarious scheme will be inflicted on people who buy this stuff. I'll buy a new TV for it if I have have to, but I REALLY don't want to have to put a Blu-Ray player in my house.
maybe instead of...
bashing sony you could read the article? you DONT need a new TV. glasses will be fine. many of us wear glasses anyway so an overlay over them will be fine.
fine, dont get a BR player. who cares? i dont get the impression you are helping the media people too much are you, why so many luddites on a tech site? im sure sony et all are crying themselves to sleep as you wont buy a £100 br player.
I'm perfectly aware
that I don't need a new TV for Sony's 3D. I was saying I would be quite willing to buy one if necessary for SOMEONE ELSE'S format, if it meant I didn't have to put a DRM-infested Blu-Ray player in my house.
I'll keep bashing Sony, though, since I'm firmly convinced they hate their customers and would like them all to die. (BTW, that was hyperbole to make a point, in case you didn't recognise it).
I'm happy to buy plenty of media if it's from someone who doesn't try to rootkit my computer or otherwise fuck with my playing hardware, i.e. NOT SONY. The cost doesn't matter at all, the attitude does.
Re: @ 1st Post AC
Re: Robert Heffernan
But who's the heroine? If it's Sigourney Weaver, I'll pass on those tits. If it's the blue furry chick, I'm not really into that.
So the real question is: Are there any good, human tits in the film, and is it worth it?
-dZ.
Yes it's a must see film.
Okay the plot is very Dances with Wolves meets Ferngully. However the plot takes a back seat- It's just a device to hang some of the most immersive, spectacular and realistic visuals ever seen. This is a film that has to be experienced on a massive screen (pref. IMAX) in 3D. I liked one comment I saw online- "This film is for all those people who have ever bought a graphic card to replace the one their computer came with".
@use sneakernet
Anyone even considering this has not has to get more than 100 TB across a major ocean.
The numbers might be close on trip one, but each subsequent trip is going to throw your numbers and don't forget to mimic TCP/IP you will every bit of data twice for backup!!
Novelty value
Quite an impressive setup.
I can't imagine 3D t.v. taking off in any sort of mainstream way like HD to be honest. The 3D glasses will make sure of that no matter how comfortable they are. There is gimmick value to it for novelty things and it is fantastic if delivered properly ala Avatar, but I doubt it will become a part of the average couch potato's daily arsenal!
Gamers on the other hand may possibly suck 3D glasses up assuming there are outstanding quality games to back it up.
So very wrong
About the only right in the section about Weta Digital's storage and processing. is the fact that they arent an isilon customer. The rest is so distorted its effectively false
Future of 3D?
Where's the "Porn Drives Technology" angle?
Paris for obvious reasons.
45 Mbit is fast?
I'm not sure I was alive when 45Mbit was considered a fast circuit. It is my understanding that nowadays the big boys measure the size of a connection in lambdas.
Do you think it's possible Weta is running off of a Telecom NZ residential VDSL line or something.
Aspera FASP technology
I'm guessing that this is their "FASP technology" (WO2006/071866):
http://v3.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?DB=EPODOC&adjacent=true&locale=en_EP&FT=D&date=20060706&CC=WO&NR=2006071866A2&KC=A2
As for "It sounds like Aspera could have a new application ahead of it; transferring data files to the cloud.", try this one (WO2009/091580):
http://v3.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?DB=EPODOC&adjacent=true&locale=en_EP&FT=D&date=20090723&CC=WO&NR=2009091580A1&KC=A1
45Mbit = T3 line
Everything was T-this and T-that in the 90s!
Nothing groundbreaking
Interesting to read about the engineering obstacles but the data transfer problem is nothing new. TCP works very well as designed but comes with a large overhead.
I've written a distributed content delivery system not a million miles from this that uses a lightweight protocol, can zip files on the fly (if their content type suggests they might benefit from it), automatically adjusts bandwidth based on periodical sampling of lost packets, uses UDP and provides a means of resending lost packets either over TCP or UDP, it also can take advantage of multicast UDP if there are many parties receiving the same data.
As the quote goes however: "never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck load of tapes". For one off or infrequent transfers delivery by sneaker net would be a lot faster.
3D A Waste of Time
I've seen Avatar in 2D and 3D.
There is a noticeable reduction in picture quality, as you might imagine, when conjuring up stereoscopic images with today's technology.
For example, there's a scene near the beginning of the movie where the lead character slurps up a few stray weightless drops of water. It was entirely apparent what he was up to in the 2D version but those drops of water ended up as fuzzy blobs in the 3D version.
Personally, I'd sooner have great picture quality than 3D gimmickry.
Perspective
Actually, those droplets were his sweat (from the remembering/dream) when he woke up from "cryo-sleep". And the fuzziness was because it was intentionally out of focus so that you would see his face, and then bring your attention to what was in front of him - as he would as he was waking up.
I found the use of focus and perspective to be much better, and natural, tools in the 3D version to quickly bring your attention to the action in the movie. The 2D could only use speed and movement - which was also enhanced in the 3D. The human eye focuses on only one thing or area at a time...
Watching both 2D and 3D versions several times - I prefer the 3D because it seemed crisper; but then I wear glasses normally, and I don't know what kind of optical interaction might have been going on with my perscription, the 3D glasses, and my brain processing the two separately polarized images into a unified whole perspective "image".
@use sneakernet
Sneaker net maybe high bandwidth, but
The latency is horrible
The error checking is terrible :)
Not to mention the rubbish speed have you ever written 100TB to SATA drives?
This topic is closed for new posts.
Sign up, sign up for Blocks and Files, The Reg's weekly storage newsletter
Popular Whitepapers
- The BI Inflexion Point
Information is a right, not a privilege - Risk and Resilience
The application availability gamble - Register Research on: Agile development - is it right for you
Reaping the benefits of modern software practice - The Register Guide to managing spam
A primer on the implications for enterprise IT - The Register Guide to email security
A primer on the challenges of securing email and approaches to resolving them - High Performance for All
Responding to the needs of compute-intensive workloads
