> This new 128-bit Unicode code point space can be leveraged by the
IETF to address one of the lingering issues with IPv6: there's not
much left to standardize. With the changes described in this
document, the IETF will be kept busy for decades to come. It also
enables new features and market opportunities, to help the global
economy. This in turn will increase tax revenues for governments,
which eventually may lead to increased funds for combating global
warming. Therefore, the ultimate goal of this document is to reduce
global warming.
Considering I learnt this week bees have been shown to understand numerical symbols to the point of accociating them with quantity, using bees might be getting a little too close to Turing Complete for my liking. I mean, we all know how badly that turned out with PDFs, right?
I knew about postcript (who doesn't lock up office printers by rendering mandlebrot sents?) but was absolutely convinced PDFs were as well. They're not and it seems they quite deliberately weren't as well. [1] - thanks for setting me straight :)
I think more interesting than this RFC is the United States Army Pigeon Service. During WWII the force consisted of 54,000 pigeons. Over 90% of US Army messages sent by pigeons were received.
I wonder if someone fill the column and it is not empty say 1 bottle left. Then it is still not cold if someone else got say the 2nd one. Any source code available to check :-)
Only from clients supporting HTTP only. Note that RFC 2324 [0] defines the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol or HTCPCP, which is an extension of HTTP and implementors of clients for this are free to return 418 if necessary. Also, RFC 7168 [1] which extends the protocol as HTCPCP-TEA now fully supports teapots, and is probably a better choice for modern clients. Also of interest is the SNMP MIB for remote management of 'Drip-Type Heated Beverage Hardware' which is defined in RFC 2325 [2] although this does not appear to have been updated with teapot, samovar, urn or other non-filter-coffee management data...
Implementing tea making device remote management would probably be a good candidate for a GSoC project or even a startup if you can find a VC gullible enough to fund you!
Which is actually used in a few places. Google always return it from https://www.google.com/teapot, and Binance uses that status code if you've been IP-banned for exceeding rate limits.
I was at CMU '83 to '87. It saved us time to check if there was the proper kind of coke in the machine and if it was cold before we walked down to the room with the machine. It was cheaper than the University's vending machines. And it was in classy glass bottles.
Trivia: It was (I was told) using experimental 3Mbps Ethernet, the predecessor to the 10Mbps Ethernet that has grown to 10Gpbs+ now.
Our team got hit by that issue. I slapped by head when I saw the error code, having come across it before. How am I meant to debug something that's literally a joke and isn't meant to be used in production :(
The company I'm at hires a lot of interns, and it's always fun to see years old jokes make it into slack from people being exposed to it for the first time. The classic Little Bobby Tables XKCD was recently discovered. Makes me feel a little better about them trampling on my lawn.
Inspired by this, ~12 years ago we actually discussed encrypted reed solomon encoded Fedex UDP as a method for index updates instead of buying new fiber lines. Index update latency is a bit faster now.
> Rafting photographers already use pigeons as a sneakernet to transport digital photos on flash media from the camera to the tour operator.[7] Over a 30-mile distance, a single pigeon may be able to carry tens of gigabytes of data in around an hour, which on an average bandwidth basis compares very favorably to current ADSL standards, even when accounting for lost drives.
> Inspired by RFC 2549, on 9 September 2009, the marketing team of The Unlimited, a regional company in South Africa, decided to host a tongue-in-cheek "Pigeon Race" between their pet pigeon "Winston" and local telecom company Telkom SA. The race was to send 4 gigabytes of data from Howick to Hillcrest, approximately 60 km apart. The pigeon carried a microSD card and competed against a Telkom ADSL line. Winston beat the data transfer over Telkom's ADSL line, with a total time of two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds from uploading data on the microSD card to completion of download from card. At the time of Winston's victory, the ADSL transfer was just under 4% complete.
See also the famous quote about the bandwidth of a pickup truck filled with magnetic tape... The modern equivalent would be AWS Snowmobile [0] which is described as follows:
> Each Snowmobile is a secured data truck with up to 100PB storage capacity that can be dispatched to your site and connected directly to your network backbone to perform high-speed data migration
A Wired article [1] calculated the San Francisco to New York bandwidth of a full Snowmobile as just under 5 Tbps which is pretty damn impressive, although the offload network connection on the truck is (only) a 1 Tbps connection. And it gets quite pricey, a fully loaded Snowmobile is USD 500K per month, plus the 350 kW of electricity it needs.
According to the FAQ, if you need more bandwidth, you can operate the Snowmobile trucks in parallel to get multi Exabyte scale data transfers, but I have difficulty imagining any of the use cases that would require that as a solution...?!?
The IP datagram is printed, on a small scroll of paper, in
hexadecimal, with each octet separated by whitestuff and blackstuff.
The scroll of paper is wrapped around one leg of the avian carrier.
A band of duct tape is used to secure the datagram's edges. The
bandwidth is limited to the leg length. The MTU is variable, and
paradoxically, generally increases with increased carrier age. A
typical MTU is 256 milligrams. Some datagram padding may be needed.
Upon receipt, the duct tape is removed and the paper copy of the
datagram is optically scanned into a electronically transmittable
form.
This reminds me of the old saying "never under estimate the through-put of a station wagon full of hard drives". It looks like it has disappeared from the internet but at one time someone had a calculator where you could enter the number of hard drives your station wagon could hold, the size of the hard drives and the time it took to drive across town from data center A to data center B and would tell you what bandwidth you would need to transfer the same amount of data using FTP. I suppose you could make the same calculation if you could make the MTU size larger that the carrier pigeon was carrying.
I had an occasion 20-ish years ago to deliver a few DLT tape drives and a bunch of cartridges to a Customer. Before I left we calculated the capacity of a 1995 Geo Metro as a unit of backup media, and the effective throughput from our shop to the Customer at various driving speeds in bits-per-second. It was an odd trip thinking about my speed in Mbps.
Today, or course, it would be a Chevy Spark stuffed with micro-SD cards... >smile<
This is still true in astronomy. Data between radio telescopes for VLBI or the EHT is shipped in disk packs. I am not sure how Ice cube gets their data back from antartika, but I don't think it is over the thin and expensive satellite internet. Data from the gamma ray telescopes HESS and Magic are transported to their data centers on tapes.
During the last 20 years, the information density of storage media and thus the bandwidth of an avian carrier has increased 3 times as fast as the bandwidth of the Internet.
Well, at least sending data via flash-cards and pigeons isn't a joke.
"If 16 homing pigeons are given eight 512 GB SD cards each, and take an hour to reach their destination, the throughput of the transfer would be 145.6 Gbit/s, excluding transfer to and from the SD cards."
Today we have 1TB microSD cards, they only weight an 8th of an SD card.
If the capacity of a pigeon is 8 SD cards (1290,24cm³) then it can carry 64 microSD cards (1049,6cm³).
This means the capacity is now 64TB instead of 4TB. and the throughput would be 18,6 Tbit/s.
I found HN during Lent this year. I’m not religious, but had been toying with the idea of leaving R quite for some time. Your 5 words express my exact sentiment, and exactly why I find HN so refreshing.
At 170MByte/s that's another 100 minutes to get the data off a 1 TB microSD card using a Sandisk proprietary reader. You would need 64 of them working in parallel.
86 comments
[ 31.2 ms ] story [ 550 ms ] threadInternationalizing IPv6 Using 128-Bit Unicode
> This new 128-bit Unicode code point space can be leveraged by the IETF to address one of the lingering issues with IPv6: there's not much left to standardize. With the changes described in this document, the IETF will be kept busy for decades to come. It also enables new features and market opportunities, to help the global economy. This in turn will increase tax revenues for governments, which eventually may lead to increased funds for combating global warming. Therefore, the ultimate goal of this document is to reduce global warming.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20103292
Doom on bees. NetBSD on bees. Linux on bees. TensorFlow on bees. Software as a hive. Bees as a service.
All of that would be... the bee's knees.
https://m.phys.org/news/2018-05-farmer-hiveinside-world-rent...
[1] https://www.cs.odu.edu/~zeil/cs390/latest/Public/turing-comp...
Also, combining the two into a "birds and bees" protocol might be idea for some kinds of traffic.
2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14531252
2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818955
The same was noted 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5999813
https://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/writeup/
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=6165731.1 ms
-david waitzman author rfc1149 and rfc2549
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Pigeon_Serv...
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549
HTTP Status 418: I'm a teapot - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418
Wasn't there also a protocol for checking vending machines for cold drinks?
Implementing tea making device remote management would probably be a good candidate for a GSoC project or even a startup if you can find a VC gullible enough to fund you!
0. https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2324.txt
1. https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc7168.txt
2. https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2325.txt
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt
Trivia: It was (I was told) using experimental 3Mbps Ethernet, the predecessor to the 10Mbps Ethernet that has grown to 10Gpbs+ now.
Still remember the day 30+years ago using my 2400 baud to connect to internet and discovered FYI articles and the zen of internet.
Much better than reading ICL and IBM manual (red book ok but no fun) I supposed and debug 370 assembler Abend code etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17175960
npm implemented it in their server last year!
> Inspired by RFC 2549, on 9 September 2009, the marketing team of The Unlimited, a regional company in South Africa, decided to host a tongue-in-cheek "Pigeon Race" between their pet pigeon "Winston" and local telecom company Telkom SA. The race was to send 4 gigabytes of data from Howick to Hillcrest, approximately 60 km apart. The pigeon carried a microSD card and competed against a Telkom ADSL line. Winston beat the data transfer over Telkom's ADSL line, with a total time of two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds from uploading data on the microSD card to completion of download from card. At the time of Winston's victory, the ADSL transfer was just under 4% complete.
> Each Snowmobile is a secured data truck with up to 100PB storage capacity that can be dispatched to your site and connected directly to your network backbone to perform high-speed data migration
A Wired article [1] calculated the San Francisco to New York bandwidth of a full Snowmobile as just under 5 Tbps which is pretty damn impressive, although the offload network connection on the truck is (only) a 1 Tbps connection. And it gets quite pricey, a fully loaded Snowmobile is USD 500K per month, plus the 350 kW of electricity it needs.
According to the FAQ, if you need more bandwidth, you can operate the Snowmobile trucks in parallel to get multi Exabyte scale data transfers, but I have difficulty imagining any of the use cases that would require that as a solution...?!?
0. https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/faqs/
1. https://www.wired.com/2016/12/amazons-snowmobile-actually-tr...
```
```ACM DL: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2212785 Open PDF: http://stuartgeiger.com/papers/ipoxp-archive.pdf
Or not?
> Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
— Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1989). Computer Networks. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. p. 57. ISBN 0-13-166836-6.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/
Today, or course, it would be a Chevy Spark stuffed with micro-SD cards... >smile<
Cop: I clocked you at 532 Mbps, this is a 400Mbps zone.
EvanAnderson: Oh I didn't see the sign.
Cop: License and registration.
A talk I attended by Heino Falcke stated that each site is now recording data at 64Gbps. Astounding metrics. https://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/talk_archive/H...
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03aEf26YupY
"If 16 homing pigeons are given eight 512 GB SD cards each, and take an hour to reach their destination, the throughput of the transfer would be 145.6 Gbit/s, excluding transfer to and from the SD cards."
Today we have 1TB microSD cards, they only weight an 8th of an SD card.
If the capacity of a pigeon is 8 SD cards (1290,24cm³) then it can carry 64 microSD cards (1049,6cm³).
This means the capacity is now 64TB instead of 4TB. and the throughput would be 18,6 Tbit/s.