Snails Edge Out ADSL

Anonymous writes "Dear Sirs, Following our experiment last year, and after long preparations, we have successfully proved that certain gastropods called African giant snails can be faster then ADSL and ... pigeons. The system we have used, called SNAP (SNAil-based data transfer Protocol), uses biological carriers (snails), and, for the first time, taking advantages of the unique merits of the wheel for data transfer. More details can be found here."

Snails?

[PunkOfLinux (870955)]

So... we can expect new snail-mail any day soon?

Re:Snails?

[tomhudson (43916)]

I'm ready for mine - got the garlic butter and everything.

Guess you all will have to put up with significant "carrier losses".

Re:Snails?

[i.r.id10t (595143)]

Naw, you need a hammer and some corn meal. To fry the catfish with. The ones you catch using the snails as bait.

Re:Snails?

[shadowbearer (554144)]

Snail over Satellite; Cooked In Transit with the finest microwaves.
Fresh at Your Door

Condiments at your option

African VS European giant snails

[by Anonymous Coward]

Soldier 1- African giant snails CAN be faster then ADSL.

Soldier 2- Oh, yeah, an African giant snail maybe, but not a European giant snail. That's my point.

Re:African VS European giant snails

[by Anonymous Coward]

Are you suggesting snails are miGRATory?

Re:African VS European giant snails

[Jabberu (738908)]

Pish posh! I still contest nothing beats the african swallow. Snails? Now that's just crazy talk...

Re:African VS European giant snails

[lostwanderer147 (829316)]

What is the ground-speed velocity of an unladen snail?

Is that an African giant snail or a European giant snail?

The answer may have deep implications on the future of snail-mail.

Re:African VS European giant snails

[Eccles (932)]

But then African giant snails are non-migratory.

Today is April 26th

[nizo (81281)]

But I bet it is April 1 in some universe somewhere [slashdot.org]. I wonder if a grain or two of salt increases throughput or causes more transmission errors?

Re:Today is April 26th

[SuneSpeg (662034)]

Yes it will make a transmission error, but due to the nature of tcp/ip it wont be a big problem.
However it means that each time you step on a snail from now on, you will have to pick it up, look at the source adress, and send back an icmp code 11,0 (time to live expired in transit).

Re:Today is April 26th

[shadowbearer (554144)]

Given the density of today's communications, that would give a new meaning to the term "Dancing as Fast as I can". Man,the latency would suck worse than AOL in '99, and the data flow would generate lawsuits (Hey, you mowed a swath thru my porn stream, asshole! I missed the best part!)

Event_Lost_Packets(Stepped_On:code[Omega])
Event_Lost_Packets(Pesticide_Application:code[Bac k Bone_Failure][Omega])
Event_Lost_Packets(Bird_Swarm:code[Random_Noise][O mega])


oh, nm, I'm drunk :)

thanks for the la

Re:Today is April 26th

[strook (634807)]

Given that snails explode when you put salt on them, it would probably cause some lost packets.

Or to use the technical term, the snails slime to death [answerbag.com].

Damn Lag!

[eriksmithtex (658265)]

Yeah but the lag sucks!

Snail recipes...

[creimer (824291)]

I didn't see any snail recipes. Are they cooked French- or African-style? Are there any stores in the U.S. that sell these snails?

I didn't know that /. was turning into the Food Network. :P

Re:Snail recipes...

[Bad D.N.A. (753582)]

Pretty soon we will hear all about how the kids-these-days have figured out that when the anus of the snail is properly licked it will induce a fantastic high.... Thus this new technology will be banned by the department of homeland security.

But of course...

[Tuxedo Jack (648130)]

Nothing beats the sheer bandwidth of a 767 filled with dual-layer DVDs sent hurtling at some destination.

Re:But of course...

[nebaz (453974)]

There are some latency issues though.

Re:But of course...

[Neurotoxic666 (679255)]

Honnestly, between packing the plane with dual layer DVDs or 300gb+ hard drives, the latter's got more bandwidth. And I'm sure an Übergeek will come up in a few minutes with something even nicer

Actually, that's easy to beat.

[melted (227442)]

Just load the same 767 with 500GB Hitachi hard drives.

Re:Actually, that's easy to beat.

[ari_j (90255)]

Or a 747 or A380. For that matter, an oil tanker converted to haul hard drive platters would give far greater throughput, although even worse latency and, if you take the platters out of the drive cases to increase throughput, you may get some increase in data loss.

WRONG

[eobanb (823187)]

an Antonov AN-225 filled with blu-ray discs

Re:But of course...

[Junior J. Junior III (192702)]

Nothing beats the sheer bandwidth of a 767 filled with dual-layer DVDs sent hurtling at some destination.

That's how they slashdotted the WTC back in '01.

Re:But of course...

[RaguMS (149511)]

That's how they slashdotted the WTC back in '01.

That's not cool, man. Some of those people lost a lot of data.

Re:But of course...

[hairykrishna (740240)]

Ah ha! Enough time has passed that people can get away with jokes about the WTC

ping sucks

[nmosfet (770062)]

The ping on that must suck really bad though.
If you want a really high bandwidth, get a truckload of hard drives.

I don't know about you...

[0x461FAB0BD7D2 (812236)]

I just don't trust anything that starts with "Dear Sir" from Africa, especially when it concerns something quite unbelievable.

Re:I don't know about you...

[WonderSnatch (835677)]

This is from Israel [cia.gov]. Israel is not in Africa, it is in Asia. Please see a map for further details.

Re:I don't know about you...

[Nf1nk (443791)]

Africa, Asia, europe, New York, Israel, Texas all of them are a long ways east of me and outside of walking distance, I'm not planning on visiting any of them in the near future, so as far as I am concerned they all might as well be in the same place (not the peoples republic of california).

(painfully stolen from a surfer friend of mine who commented that if it was more than three miles from a good surf break he could'nt care less where it was)

In the blog

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA (619114)]

He talks about an Australian lawyer who patented the wheel.

"In particular, Mr. John Keogh, a Melbourne lawyer, was issued in 2001 a patent for "a circular transportation facilitation device", more commonly known as a wheel.

And people talk trash about America's patent system. Looks like we're not the only ones with problems.

Re:In the blog

[p0rnking (255997)]

Man seeks square deal, patents wheel [cnn.com]
/. article [slashdot.org]

SHIT!

[by Anonymous Coward]

We slashdotted a snail!

Moores Law & other predictions.

[EmbeddedJanitor (597831)]

Moores Law: Next year's snails will be faster and carry 2GB.

IBM: The world will only need five snails.

DEC: Nobody wants a snail in their home.

Microsoft: The new Longhorned snail is shipping.

Re:Moores Law & other predictions.

[commanderfoxtrot (115784)]

I think he's right on this one: eating 640K of snails would probably be enough for me.

Too funny!

[Rick Zeman (15628)]

In some regions, most notably France, culinary habits may pose a denial-of-service (DOS) risk.

Not legal in US

[by Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you are allowed to bring African Giant snails in the US without a special permit. They reproduce very quickly and are quite destructive to vegitaion.

Though I though African giant snails were the size of a fist.

What happens if the snail dies along the way?

[Xeo 024 (755161)]

Does it say "dropped packet"?

Re:What happens if the snail dies along the way?

[biryokumaru (822262)]

Whenever those pigeons fly over me, I'm always afraid of getting hit by dropped packets... =/

Hehe - first thought:

[starseeker (141897)]

Ig Nobel Prize!

Easy to DOS attack

[by Anonymous Coward]

Just add a little salt and down goes the network.

yes

[soimless (651224)]

I for one welcome our new african snail overloards. But I wonder how the email service you get with our snail overloars would compare to my curent ADSL provider

Beware

[Jeremi (14640)]

Oh sure, it sounds good at first, but beware of the Curse of the Fast Snails [angryflower.com]!

Best Quote?

[rjhall (80887)]

I think:
"In particular, French users will have to choose whether they want to be served data-ex-cargo or an escargot."
comes near the top of the list.

Hang on, lets establish some standards here...

[spagetti_code (773137)]

The problem is that they were comparing snails travelling over very short distances (cms) to pigeons travelling 100km. To take that to its illogical conclusion, a photon (carrying, say, 8 bits of color information) travels 1um in 1/3x10^14 secs. Therefore this is carrying 3x10^14 bytes/sec or about 300Tbytes/sec. That rivals the 747 carrying DVDs.

I think if we are going to establish bandwidth records we need to establish distance too. I suggest 100kms is probably a pretty good minimum measure to make sense.

That expirement is flawed

[Chris Kamel (813292)]

Shouldn't the time to burn the dvds be calculated and added to the transfer time?

And I'm trying so hard to take this seriously

THAN, for the love of... THAN!

[by Anonymous Coward]

Dear Editors:

Faster THAN. Faster THAN. Faster THAN.

Same as:

Smarter THAN. Better THAN. Other THAN. Fatter THAN. Uglier THAN. Costs more THAN. Performs better THAN. More difficult THAN. Takes more effort THAN. Tastes better THAN. Prints more clearly THAN. More structured THAN. More anonymous THAN. More cowardly THAN. More falsely THAN.

Basic idea:

THAN - used in comparison statements.
THEN - used to demonstrate cause-and-effect

weee

[katpants (879242)]

I can now proudly say that my school [uah.edu]'s internet connection is literally slower than a snail (10Mbps).

Now, that's is a helluva fun

[Tamerlan (817217)]

But let's see...

• Trained dog with a 400GB HDD on neck
• A cat with a bunch of Blu-rays glued to her back (Yay!)
• A goose with SD cards attached to rings
• Pony with a wagon full of microdrives (whoa!)

will easily beat that!

your math fu is weak

[chrish (4714)]

Do the numbers in the article include time to burn the snail DVDs and then read the data back off of them at the end point? What about the time required to attach the DVDs to the snail harness (I'll assume they've got a harnessed snail ready while burning the DVDs)...

Probably still several orders of magnitude faster than dial-up.

Re:Cool

[eno2001 (527078)]

Oh. For a second there, I thought you might have had something important to say. But apparently I was mistaken. Of course, as they say, only time will tell.