

Coming soon: superfast Internet  - nickb
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article3689881.ece

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shawndrost
This headline bears no relation to reality: we're not using all the fiber
we've laid, and this isn't a last-mile solution or an ansible. The project
page itself (<http://lcg.web.cern.ch/LCG/overview.html>) makes it sound like
they've built some new computing centers and connected them to terminals at
universities: am I missing something?

The most interesting bit here was that CERN will produce 15 petabytes per
year, which by my rough calculations is within an order of magnitude of the
rest of the internet combined. The last time I thought about petabytes was
when I interviewed at Chevron's geological data analysis department.

~~~
shawndrost
I was way off about the scale of the internet: the US alone currently sends 5
exabytes of traffic per month over IP, or 60000 petabytes per year. Edit: or
~12000, depending on the study.

<http://www.discovery.org/a/4428>, <http://www.dtc.umn.edu/mints/home.html>

~~~
reitzensteinm
For a minute there, I was thinking I was 1/500th of the internet. :(

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lizherring
Is it just me, or does this feel like linkbait? The facts seem to be accurate,
but the style and the title make feels like a cheap shot to get attention to
the article.

~~~
tokipin
the quality of the writing is poor, too. didn't expect that in a british times
publication

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tlrobinson
I always cringe reading articles about technology that were clearly written by
people who know nothing about it.

Can anyone point us to a well-written article about the this "superfast
Internet"?

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josefresco
“It will lead to what’s known as cloud computing, where people keep all their
information online and access it from anywhere,”

Oh jees not this again. Doesn't this 'grand idea' come up every 5 years or so
and just die when people realize they don't want their photos, personal
documents and media stored on some corporate servers (where it can be
analyzed, and sold to the highest bidder)

Oh and with 50% of Americans still on dial up, I don't see this super fast
kick ass Internet taking over anytime soon (not when there's money to be made
selling small incremental speed bumps over many years similar to how cell
service has evolved here)

~~~
slapshot
I'm perfectly happy having 99% of my photos and media stored offsite. There
are a few things I'd want to keep local, but I couldn't care less if Smugmug
keeps the originals of my vacation photos. In fact, I'd much prefer that
because I can access it from any computer (work desktop, personal desktop,
iPhone), I don't need to worry about synchronization, and when done properly
they take care of backup far better than I ever could.

If I have the only digital copy of my photos then I need to worry about a hard
drive failure, fire, flood, power surge, theft, etc. I can certainly take care
of some of that by buying an off-site backup service, but then we're back to
square one (I will have sent all of my media to a corporate server, but
without any of the functionality). Or I can mail DVDs of my data to my trusted
friends, but that's also a giant pain.

If done properly, with the right privacy controls, there's no reason why all
data shouldn't live in the cloud, with a local backup copy only.

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technoguyrob
So when could I see something like this in my home?

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tokipin
i wonder if a city could attract nerds by laying out this infrastructure

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sabat
Coming soon to another country near you. US, you pirates destroying our legacy
profit streams, please continue to enjoy your rate-limited internet
experience.

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dkasper
Is this the real web 3.0? ;-)

