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]

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

Re:Snails?

[tomhudson]

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]

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?

[sumdumass]

i never had much luck catching catfish with snails. Do they realy work? I usualy use chuhbs or bluegill cut in half.

Re:Snails?

[tomhudson]

snails as bait

I used spaghetti (long story). It worked great.

Re:Snails?

[TFGeditor]

Are you that Marine in Iraq who used spaghetti from an MRE to fish in one of Saddam's palace lakes?

Re:Snails?

[tomhudson]

Sorry, can't claim that one. This was LONG ago. We were washing our plates in the lake, and noticed that all of a sudden there were TONS of fish around, after not being able to get a single bite all day.

So from then on, it was "screw the worms - got any leftover spaghetti?"

Two guys are fishing, and one is catching fish like crazy, and the other one isn't getting so much as a nibble.
Guy 1: How come you're catching so many fish and I'm not? What's your secret?
Guy 2: Ya mumble mumble your mumble mumble.
Guy 1

Re:Snails?

[shadowbearer]

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

Condiments at your option

LuxDSL: Slower than snails... and proud of it!

[ArsenneLupin]

Only in Luxembourg will you see this:

LuxDsl -- Slower than snails, and proud of it! [www.ept.lu]

Also, they think that expressing the subscription price per day will make it look cheaper (well, at least, it's less expensive than before: it used to cost double than the current, still outrageous prices...)

African VS European giant snails

[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

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you suggesting snails are miGRATory?

Re:African VS European giant snails

[Jabberu]

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

Re:African VS European giant snails

[lostwanderer147]

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]

But then African giant snails are non-migratory.

Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[jeremy_dot]

Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

The perfect line to see on my ADSL line...

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[dgatwood]

What's funny here is that, at least compared to my ADSL line, the snails are faster, not only in terms of raw bandwidth, but also in terms of latency. :-D

Maybe it's just me.

Today is April 26th

[nizo]

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]

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]

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

[Taladar]

Wouldn't "Back Bone Failure" be more appropriate for "Stepped on"?

Re:Today is April 26th

[strook]

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]

Yeah but the lag sucks!

Snail recipes...

[__aaclcg7560]

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.]

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]

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

Re:But of course...

[nebaz]

There are some latency issues though.

Re:But of course...

[Neurotoxic666]

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]

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

Re:Actually, that's easy to beat.

[ari_j]

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.

Re:Actually, that's easy to beat.

[Profane MuthaFucka]

I can beat that. How about a planet called Earth, with all of the hard drives, CDs, DVDs, memory sticks, grocery lists, and cuneiform tablets that are on it. Sort of a token ring. Maximum latency anywhere on the ring is one year.

Re:Actually, that's easy to beat.

[dangitman]

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

Yeah, but you'd have to load them into the cargo bay perpendicularly to get the highest bandwidth.

WRONG

[eobanb]

an Antonov AN-225 filled with blu-ray discs

No, the Antonov is the biggest

[commanderfoxtrot]

No, the Antonov An-225 [wikipedia.org] is larger than the new Airbus A380 [wikipedia.org].
The A380 is the world's largest passenger aircraft, but the Antonov is much bigger. Just look at those 32 wheels!

The Antonov can carry 250 tons; can anyone do the maths and see if 250 tons of CDs will actually fit in the hold!?!? The An-225's cargo volume is 1100m3 [airfoyle.co.uk].

Re:No, the Antonov is the biggest

[commanderfoxtrot]

In reply to my own post, apparently [entropia.com.mx] 384 50-disc spindles is 1 cubic metre. So that's 21,120,000 CDs/DVDs/fancy new Bly-ray type discs. Quite a lot.

CDs weigh arond 16 grams. The above number of disks would come to 337 metric tonnes; therefore you would not actually be able to get the whole lot in the plane. Unless you started taking out fuel &c.

Re:But of course...

[Junior J. Junior III]

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]

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...

[Junior J. Junior III]

That's what they get for putting the datacenter colo facility right friggin next to the original site. That whole thing was really poorly managed -- their server is STILL not back online, like 4 years later.

Re:But of course...

[hairykrishna]

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

Re:BAHAHAHHAHAHAHAAHAH

[sp0rk173]

Fuck, that should be "yet" not "yes"

Re:BAHAHAHHAHAHAHAAHAH

[sp0rk173]

I actually dind't mean to post anonymously the first time!

Re:Horrible Joke

[presroi]

Would you prefer a "That's how we slashdotted those Afghan villages"?

Re:Horrible Joke

[orasio]

Yes, "punching back", a la Larry McVoy's, hitting random targets.

Re:But of course...

[shutdown -p now]

... except, of course, an An-225 [wikipedia.org] filled with hard drives.

nothing, exept...

[N3wsByt3]

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

Exept an Airbus A380 filled with dual-layer DVDs sent hurtling at some destination.

So, clearly, a european airplane is better then an afri...I mean, american one.

Re:But of course...

[Virtex]

Yeah, but imagine the packet loss if the thing were to crash.

ping sucks

[nmosfet]

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

Re:ping sucks

[silicon not in the v]

The ping on that must suck really bad though.

Hmm, gaming over SNAP protocol...

"Dude, I just fragged that guy with my BFG!"
"BFG? Wasn't that in Doom?"
"Well what do you expect? I fired at him in 1995."

I don't know about you...

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

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]

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]

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)

Snails edge out ADSL?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, Time Warner Cable is right, Road Runner Broadband is much faster than ADSL, especially since snails can outperform ADSL. ;D

In the blog

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

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

[mrmojo]

Well that's what you get when you constantly 'harmonize' your country's IP laws with US laws in return for trade.

Re:In the blog

[Anonymous Coward]

Australia would like to that you for your Free Trade Agreement.

That is all.

Re:In the blog

[p0rnking]

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

Re:In the blog

[shadowbearer]

I'd like to read that one :)

I kind of like his idea of a different registration service for ideas, tho if something like that were to be done it would have to be completely open.

SB

SHIT!

[Anonymous Coward]

We slashdotted a snail!

Moores Law & other predictions.

[EmbeddedJanitor]

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.

[spagetti_code]

BillG: a 640K snail should be enough for anyone

Re:Moores Law & other predictions.

[commanderfoxtrot]

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

Re:SHIT!

[Afrosheen]

No, more like Smashdotted.

And to capitalize on my middle of the page treatment, here's proof that the article writer is probably a frequent /. poster. Quoted straight from the headline

"Snails are faster that ADSL"

That adsl? Awesome.

Too funny!

[Rick Zeman]

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

Not legal in US

[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.

Most need permit; Giant African banned outright.

[abb3w]

Karma-whoring Authoritative Source [usda.gov]; Giant African snails are banned in the US for being potential carriers for a parasite, as well as being a fast reproducing agricultural pest. People also require a permit to import any snail into the country, or move snails across state lines.

So, would the data carrier's illegal nature in the US prevent digital snails from being elligible for acceptance as a standard? It's not patented... it's just illegal.

What happens if the snail dies along the way?

[Xeo 024]

Does it say "dropped packet"?

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

[biryokumaru]

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

Hehe - first thought:

[starseeker]

Ig Nobel Prize!

Easy to DOS attack

[Anonymous Coward]

Just add a little salt and down goes the network.

Re:Easy to DOS attack

[utlemming]

Yeah, but that is more of a DOS. If you want to do malicious sniffing, then put out a dish of beer. The snails will be drawn to the beer, as opposed to being repelled by the salt. Then they get into the dish and drink themselves to death. This is a Garden Center trick which works very, very well.

yes

[soimless]

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]

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

Beware of Trojan Snails - You May be Infected.

[refactored]

Bilharzia [schisto.org], one of Africa's nastiest "payloads".

Best Quote?

[rjhall]

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]

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.

Re:Hang on, lets establish some standards here...

[eraserewind]

Maybe we can use the snails for shorter distance protocols, like bluetooth or wifi.

Re:Hang on, lets establish some standards here...

[spagetti_code]

one photon can have different energy levels (in my simple mind, lets call them colours).

Also 1/(3x10^14).

That expirement is flawed

[Chris Kamel]

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!

[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

Re:THAN, for the love of... THAN!

[shutdown -p now]

Than what?

Re:THAN, for the love of... THAN!

[silicon not in the v]

Strange. A similar thing is happening in the Dutch language.

In standard Dutch it's: "kleiner dan" (smaller than), but the current teen generation says: "kleiner als" (smaller as).

Oh, that sounds a lot like a very irritating turn of (incorrect) phrase I hear sometimes from native English speakers.

It comes up when referring to something being less than expected or maybe not as far as expected. People will use the phrase, "Is that all the farther you have to go?" or "Is that all the more you have to do?"

C

A mute point

[KingSkippus]

True story, posted so late now that it probably won't be read.

I was in a meeting at work one time, and we were discussing some serious issue or another. One of the guys referred to something as a "mute" point. I thought it was kind of funny, but I held the giggle in. After all, I was in an important business meeting. Well, you know what happens when you stifle a giggle, it comes back as a full-fledged laugh, and it's MUCH hard to stifle. Still, I'm pretty good, and I managed it. Well, then I felt kind of

weee

[katpants]

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]

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!

This has nothing

[GoClick]

This has nothing on an 18 wheeler full 300GB hard drives clipping down the highway. Or atleast a camel with some hard drives taped to it...

this guy is WEIRD

[moosesocks]

The person who conducted this reasearch is quite the character...

He posts anonymously, but leaves his E-mail address, not to mention the fact that he specializes in measuring the digital throughput of small animals

If DNA or Dave Barry were still writing, I'm sure they'd come up with something clever about this whole situation :)

Bygone era?

[rice_burners_suck]

Never underestimate the bandwidth carrying capacity of a station wagon loaded with backup tapes.

(I think that one, or something very similar, is attributed to Andrew Tanenbaum... Back in the day, when there was no easy way to UUCP stuff between America and Australia, there was a legend that newsfeeds were saved on magnetic tape, loaded into a station wagon, driven to the airport, and flown across the ocean. Personally, I don't believe it, as it would be much easier, cheaper, and faster to dial in via modem,

Re:Bygone era?

[Anthony]

And how fast were modems in the early 80s? You are right about the tapes though. Robert E;s used to get a tape delivered, but it wasn't the Usenet Feed for the week.

Over 100 posts

[Headcase88]

... And not a single comment that contains the string "Duke Nukem Forever"? Boys, I'm a little disappointed.

I am faster than t1!

[xgamer04]

So if I throw my CD case down the hall, do I set a data-transfer record?

Seriously though, read TFA, it's pretty funny.

african giant snails

[__aahlyu4518]

Not American giant snails because they are to fat ;-)

Mail control

[prjames]

Does this mean I've got to learn how to write "shell" scripts to run my mail now? And what a boon to tracking spammers. Just follow that slime back to source.

your math fu is weak

[chrish]

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:There's already a SNAPv2 coming out...

[PinkFreud]

Actually, I think that the technical difficulties happen at the compression step - once compressed, the data tends to go nowhere.

Re:Cool

[eno2001]

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.

Re:Cool

[eno2001]

Who is Nelson? What is this "schooled" you speak of? I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:Confucius say:

[wk633]

that was Andy Tanenbaum.

Re:From snails point of view, data rate ~= 0 bps

[Durandal64]

Greater transfer rates according to the snails. However, the time that matters is the time it takes for the data to reach the other end, which is not a part of the snail's reference frame.

Re:Not an April Fool's joke...

[m50d]

This seems to be a far more efficient protocol. The pidgeon one requires OCRing the packets, I'm sure you could use SD cards or similar to get better bandwidth and accuracy.

Re:Not an April Fool's joke...

[silicon not in the v]

This seems to be a far more efficient protocol. The pidgeon one requires OCRing the packets, I'm sure you could use SD cards or similar to get better bandwidth and accuracy.

At the risk of asking you to violate your Slashdot user agreement by reading the article, I might mention that they do refer to the pigeons carrying 1.3gigabits on flash cards.

Re:think of the latency!

[Soruk]

http://www.escar.go.com: Connection timed out.

High bandwidth, but could any TCP session survive the latency?