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The Internet Idle

World's Fastest Net Link 'Used To Dry Laundry' 135

Posted by CmdrTaco from the it-gets-pretty-hot-in-there dept.
praps writes "Last summer a 75-year-old woman from central Sweden became the envy of the IT world with her scorching 40Gbps internet connection. 1,500 simultaneous HDTV channels or a whole high definition DVD downloaded in two seconds were hers for the taking. Now Sigbritt Löthberg could soon be treated to an incredible 100 Gbps link — but it may not be put to great use. According to the head of the ultra-fast fiber connection project, Sigbritt mostly used the gear 'to dry her laundry.'"
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World's Fastest Net Link 'Used To Dry Laundry' More

World's Fastest Net Link 'Used To Dry Laundry'

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  • First Post ? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by daveime ( 1253762 ) on Monday March 31, 2008 @08:43AM (#22920462)
    Am I the only one for whom this page's style sheet has comitted suicide ?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) *
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Wavebreak ( 1256876 )
        It's the idle layout. And yes, it's horrible.

        • Re: (Score:1, Offtopic)

          by fosterNutrition ( 953798 )
          I think you meant to say "the whole idle section is horrible." Seriously, I try to avoid this corner of the site as much as possible, but I mistakenly thought that since this article concerned genuine technology advances it might be real news. Please, for the love of God, get rid of idle. If I want juvenile bullshit, I'll go read Fark or just look at lolcats or something. I hate it I hate it I hate it.

          • Re:First Post ? (Score:5, Insightful)

            by sumdumass ( 711423 ) on Monday March 31, 2008 @11:26AM (#22922218) Journal
            I can think of at least 4 stories that made the front page in the last week or so that should have been set here instead of the category they where in.

            I really didn't even know this part of the site existed, or at least I didn't know it existed in this state. It is horrible.

            Who is the retarded monkey responsible for this crap? Surely this has to be a mistake. It looks like the bastard child of the anything that wants to die and anyone stupid enough to join it. It this concept of "no news" being news and page layout that can't even render the same in different browsers (FF, IE6, and old mozilla)continues, I think a lot of people will simply not come around. I would probably be one of them but I suspect that doesn't matter much.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by sm62704 ( 957197 )
              I really didn't even know this part of the site existed, or at least I didn't know it existed in this state. It is horrible.

              Well, you were warned. At the top where it says "you have 42 unread messages and 0 read messages" and "Did you know that subscribers can see into the future?" and "Have you metamoderated lately?" it often says "idle.slashdot.org is a total waste of your time. Never go there."

              Me? I'd never g... oh wait
              • You know what, Not that you mention it, I remember that. I just figured it was a joke I didn't get about people spending too much time on ./ while at work or something. I guess I should have known.

        • Re: (Score:1, Offtopic)

          by eht ( 8912 )
          In addition, Idle still has not shown up in the configuration options for me to minimize.
        • It must be an april fools joke.... Another one... I appreciate the effort but I don't like this kind of humor.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Nullav ( 1053766 )
            Unfortunately not. It was like this when I first saw it a few months ago. Also, this comment box is absolutely horrible. :(

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by 45mm ( 970995 )
        Not going to comment on the quality ... but it is "working" for me in FF 2.0.0.12
    • No, it looks weird for me too. Earlier the front page wasn't loading any CSS at all.

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Same here in IE6 (shut up, I'm at work.)
    • I kinda like it. Other than it makes the comment box tiny

      seriously.
      This tiny sentence fills it.
      • Checked in Konqueror; you are indeed correct, dear sir. I'm not sure whether I'd start to hate this style, I do find it somewhat interesting for the moment, but the squished comment box has to be dealt with.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by kc2keo ( 694222 )
      Ugh, I hate the idle layout too. I'm viewing it at 1280x1024 in FF.
    • There's still something severely broken with this topic ...

      I have my settings on -1 (I like seeing the Slashdot moderation system in action) ... and apparently there's 42 comments.

      Why can I only see 8 of them ?

      Is there a "-2 broken" setting ? Why wasn't I told ???

    • Remove the 'idle' (Score:3, Informative)

      by Eevee ( 535658 )
      Using plain old //slashdot.org/ for the article got rid of the problem for me.
    • No. It's fucking awful. On a 1024 high screen in FF, you can't even see the first comment. That's just insane. I daren't even try on my eee or 770 with their 480 pixel high screens (which usually manage an ad-free Slashdot just fine).

  • Euphemism (Score:5, Funny)

    by Enderandrew ( 866215 ) <enderandrew@gmSTRAWail.com minus berry> on Monday March 31, 2008 @08:43AM (#22920466) Homepage Journal
    If "drying her laundry" is a euphemism for the mass quantities of porn she is downloading, then I'd be doing the same thing.

  • bandwidth (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 68030 ( 215387 ) on Monday March 31, 2008 @08:44AM (#22920468) Homepage
    Is this really that big of a surprise? I seem to recall from the original story that prior to this she had never even owned a computer.

    I've never owned a space station, but I imagine if I suddenly came into control of one, I wouldn't get it put to as much use as someone with a clue.

    • Also (Score:5, Informative)

      by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Monday March 31, 2008 @09:49AM (#22921096)
      It has a couple other problems:

      1) Can she even get that kind of speed? I mean yes, she's got a big ass link. Ok, that's great. Does her ISP have the necessary upstream to support that? It is much easier to have a single connection running at a given speed than it is to have connections at that speed supported by the necessary upstream to the Internet to make them useful.

      2) Even if she does, that is way past the point of it mattering. There just isn't enough things out there that need that kind of bandwidth. You discover that at this point, even 10mbit is really damn fast for normal usage like web surfing (including video) e-mail and so on. It is only if you download large things that it becomes much of an issue. 100mbit is really fast for anything. At work I've downloaded a Linux DVD in like 7 minutes. Really, that is to the point where extra speed wouldn't make a ton of difference. In this case, we are talking speed in excess of what a harddrive can handle.

      3) There just isn't much, if anything, on the net that is going to have the kind of upstream to make any real use of that. Even if you are doing a ton of things at one, you'll be hard pressed to find enough fat pipes to start to fill up a link that large. There are backbones that aren't that fast.

      This whole thing was nothing but a publicity stunt, and this just proves it. Despite his claim that this showed how fast connections can be put in the home for cheap, it does nothing of the sort. It shows how it really isn't that useful at this point, and how the gear is so high end it produces enough heat to use as a dryer.

      As Slashdot is fond of saying: Nothing to see here, move along.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by davidkv ( 302725 )
        This isn't to prove how fast connections can be put in the home cheaply. It's to prove how you can build really fast connections (think backbones and such) way cheaper than before.
        That makes it really useful, actually.

      • Re:Also (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Captain Spam ( 66120 ) on Monday March 31, 2008 @10:07AM (#22921252) Homepage

        At work I've downloaded a Linux DVD in like 7 minutes. Really, that is to the point where extra speed wouldn't make a ton of difference.


        Obligatory Homer Simpson quote (modified): "7 minutes? But I want it now!"

        Though out of all seriousness, I think there'd be a Field of Dreams situation if everyone had a pipe like that. If we all had that speed, someone would make content to fill it. Might not just be an internet data line. Might be digital TV data, phone data, etc, etc. In fact, that's what the summary states, she has the capability for (not necessarily the need for nor is actually using) tons of HD channels with a line that fast.

        You can do more with a connection like that than just internet stuff, is what I'm saying.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Megane ( 129182 )

        4) Is her computer even capable of producing/using a sustained 40Gbits of data? Plain old 66MHz/32-bit PCI can handle a couple of gigabits, but not 40. And even if her computer could handle it, the computer on the other end would have to be able to give that much speed as well. Once you get past a gigabit or so, the actual performance isn't likely to increase for a single computer on the end of the link. These kinds of speeds are (currently) only good for connecting networks, not computers.

        (And crap, the c

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by element-o.p. ( 939033 )
          You probably can't d/l from a single source at 40G/s, but you could pull pieces from multiple sources at a combined total of 40G/s (isn't that essentially what torrent does?) or you can d/l multiple items from multiple sources so that, while you aren't getting any one download any faster, you could get a days' worth of downloads in the time it usually takes to download one file.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jabuzz ( 182671 )
          You would need four 10Gbps ethernet cards, which is going to set you back about 6000USD, then a suitable switch, probably double that.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kesuki ( 321456 )
        I'm not 100% sure but since her son set it up, they could well be saturating the network with filler packets, generated by one of the computers at either end of the 1,242.75 mile link. she has the hardware needed to satisfy a 40 gigabit link, and it's working without repeaters. but the thing is, this 'feat' is no better than OC-768 lines, which also can run 2000 KM between repeaters. the next theing he's going to do is give her a 100 gigabit/sec link Which is a big deal, it's better than the suggested(non

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Actually, I do RTFA ( 1058596 )

        . At work I've downloaded a Linux DVD in like 7 minutes. Really, that is to the point where extra speed wouldn't make a ton of difference. In this case, we are talking speed in excess of what a harddrive can handle.

        But when you can download the whole distro in seven seconds, then you can start seeing a return to dumb terminals in public places, as everyone can boot off their own hard drive over the internet.

        This preview window is horribly laid out, and I cannot continue my point.

      • There just isn't enough things out there that need that kind of bandwidth. You discover that at this point, even 10mbit is really damn fast for normal usage like web surfing (including video) e-mail and so on. It is only if you download large things that it becomes much of an issue.

        Sure 10 Mb is damn fast for normal usage, but what if you have more than one machine, add another computer, a net enabled video game machine, portable devices. It adds up, especially if your upload is slower than your download.

  • Mmm Dry Laundry (Score:4, Funny)

    by dmacleod808 ( 729707 ) on Monday March 31, 2008 @08:44AM (#22920470)
    Id like to come over and dry my laundry at her house!

  • Good move (Score:5, Funny)

    by niceone ( 992278 ) * on Monday March 31, 2008 @08:44AM (#22920478) Journal
    It does work - I used to use my high-end HP workstation to dry my biking clothes when it rained. I did feel a bit sorry for the people in the neigbouring cubes though.
  • As if thousands of voices cried out in agony....and were suddenly silenced.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Sethus ( 609631 )
      Sheesh, mod parent funny. He's making a joke about how we're all crying in agony on that bandwith probably being wasted. And combining it with a Star Wars reference.

  • Hey! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Kranfer ( 620510 ) on Monday March 31, 2008 @08:45AM (#22920492) Homepage Journal
    Hey I wanna dry my laundry too you know. I'll test this stuff out... I'd love to be able to download a full HD DVD of Porn in 2 seconds. Dammit.

  • In Sweeden ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by utnapistim ( 931738 ) <dan.barbus@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Monday March 31, 2008 @08:46AM (#22920512) Homepage
    ... only old people have 40Gbps internet connection.

  • Brain the size of a planet... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chrisq ( 894406 ) on Monday March 31, 2008 @08:49AM (#22920534)
    Brain the size of a planet, access to 1,500 high definition HDTV channels simultaneously, and she wants me to dry her laundry!

    .... depressing
  • ....is my Blue Gene L washing machine and I'll be ready set the record for the largest waste of computing resources in history.

  • Oh Noes Broadband (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ChadAmberg ( 460099 )
    Every time I hear everyone whining about "broadband adoption rates" I just think that they don't get it.
    Lots of people don't want broadband.
    Lots of people don't even care about Internet access.
    Sure it would be nice to have availability everywhere, but when the measurement is of how many people use broadband, that doesn't say much of anything.

    • Re:Oh Noes Broadband (Score:4, Insightful)

      by zappepcs ( 820751 ) on Monday March 31, 2008 @09:05AM (#22920668) Journal
      Well, the LOTS of people that you are talking about had ancestors that didn't care about cars, or even want cars. Times change. 40GB/s is a good rate for downloading while watching HDTV etc.Some people never saw the usefulness of a computer in the home either.. they too were wrong.
  • I once had the great idea to sell home exercise equipment that was very difficult to use as exercise equipment but had several long poles jutting out of it each long enough to hold a bath towel. I figured that since all my other home exercise equipment ended up being laundry racks anyway, that it would make sense to design some just for that purpose.

    Never really got off the ground with it, though.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Kyont ( 145761 )
      Slightly off-topic, but this would mesh really well with the idea I had - to sell home exercise equipment with the odometer pre-set to thousands of miles (or reps) and prominently displayed. That way, when people come over and see your stationary bike hung with towels, you can point to the odometer as proof that you've circled the earth several times on it already and the towels are clearly just temporary.

      The side effect of this product, though, would be "odometer inflation" in which our competitors would

  • theonion.com predicting the future again... (Score:3, Funny)

    by rekoil ( 168689 ) on Monday March 31, 2008 @08:59AM (#22920642)
    Bantu Tribesman Uses IBM Modem To Crush Nut [avdf.com]
    (linked to alternate site 'cuz I can't find it on theonion.com...)
  • If you're drying your undies and such, do you need to download porn to make them dry quicker? If so, this would be the first time I've heard of porn making clothes dry...

    • ... this would be the first time I've heard of porn making clothes dry...
      This is typically the lead-in required for someone to claim: "I take it you haven't met my ex!"
       

  • The terminal is probably good as a dryer too (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Zarhan ( 415465 ) on Monday March 31, 2008 @09:07AM (#22920686)
    I was introduced to the guy whose mother this lady is at IETF in Chicago. Working for a networking hardware vendor kinda gives perks.

    Anyway, even if the bandwidth is free I wouldn't call it cheap - the CPE device takes (I think) 3kW of power. So yeah, you can dry clothes on it quite easily..
  • On a few occasions, I have used a server cabinet with about 8 machines in it to dry my trousers (which got wet on the way in to work). Hey, you might as well do something useful with all that hot air!

    In a previous job, we used to have to test gas boilers by plumbing the boiler to a test rig with an expansion vessel and a plate-to-plate heat exchanger -- the secondary side of which was fed from the water main via a flow rate meter (I still remember the formula: 1 degree temp rise * 1 lpm flow rate = 70 w

  • got warm... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by sdumi ( 1247100 )
    "It was a big bit of gear and it got pretty warm."

    doing what... nothing?

  • Not the first time. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Oktober Sunset ( 838224 ) <sdpage103@yaho o . c o .uk> on Monday March 31, 2008 @09:23AM (#22920806)
    A friend of mine discovered that the washing line in the garden of his rented house was actually a very long Cat-5E cable. Sadly, he didn't find this out till it snapped, which was particularly annoying for him as he had just spend £30 on a massive bit of cable to reach all the way to his computer in the attic room of the house.

  • Slasperv (Score:3, Funny)

    by CmdrGravy ( 645153 ) on Monday March 31, 2008 @09:26AM (#22920844) Homepage
    Its strange that the link for what looks to be a highly informative photo documentary exploring the life and characters of Swedish nightclubs seems to be broken.

    I wouldn't have thought Swedish nightclubs held all that many attractions for basement dwelling ./ folk, especially since not many actually live in Sweden.
  • "We're considering giving her a 100 gigabits per second connection in the summer," said Hafsteinn Jonsson.

    "Then she'll be able to dry all her neighbours' laundry too."
  • Frink gets called in to help fix the internet connection of a Swedish girls dorm.
    Frink: Well here 's your trouble, you've got panties and bras all over your Web-o-Max 40Gb/s equipment, glaavin"
  • can you imagine what would happen to the overall internet speed if any of us had a 40gb connection? talk about slashdot effect...

  • April Fool? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by djsmeg ( 1178309 )
    Isn't this story a day early for April Fool's Day?
  • She thinks I love her for her good looks.
  • I had a Netgear wireless router I used to cook eggs on
  • What good is internet technology unless it's fundamentally pointless overkill? We just call this the OCDPOM program (one clothes dryer old woman)
  • I think this story arrived a day early.
  • Sweden is the 8th richest country in the world. Why would anybody there be doing her own laundry
  • My internet connection, however, is used for ' watching paint dry.. '
  • If you read TFA you'll see what I mean from the photo on the right.

  • And she's surfing this on what exactly? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by prisoner-of-enigma ( 535770 ) on Monday March 31, 2008 @11:06AM (#22922014) Homepage
    Having a 40Gbps connection is just dandy, but here's a question that's going completely unanswered:

    She's surfing this on what kind of PC?

    Last time I checked, your typical PC doesn't come with a 40Gbps NIC in it. It's usually GigE, with 10/100 for the cheap ones. Nevermind that most folks can't afford GigE switches to plug into in the first place, which means most folks are using 10/100 anyway.

    40Gbps NIC's can't exactly be cheap since they're only found in the high-end server space. In fact, I couldn't find pricing on a separate 40Gbps NIC in a quick and casual Google search. The only 40Gbps stuff I've run into is either on the switch itself or came with the server. I have a funny feeling that, if you can actually buy one of these things separately, it would cost several times more than any PC this lady is likely to own.

    Next, even if you get one of these NIC's, what exactly are you going to plug it into? The craziest PCI-X slot available (2.0, 533MHz) tops out at 4.3GByte/sec, which is 34.4Gbit/sec -- too slow! PCI-E 2.0 32x (not that you'll find this kind of connector on anything common, if you can find it at all) maxes out at 16GByte/sec, which is 128Gbit/sec -- fast enough, but again I don't think anyone makes anything with this kind of a connector yet. Your more-common PCI-E 1.1e 16x connector tops out at 4GByte/sec, or 32GBit/sec -- too slow for 40Gbps feeds.

    And then there's the issue of actually saving this wonderful content she's so busily downloading. Saving a full-length DVD-9 (9GB) in two seconds would require a bandwidth of 4.5GByte/sec. Most hard drives today have a max sustained write speed of 20-30MByte/sec. Some SAN's have a hard time with the bandwidth being tossed around here. Does grandma have an EMC array in the basement next to this magical fiber link?

    Lastly, exactly who is grandma doing to download stuff from that can actually provide her 40Gbps of bandwidth? Most small companies have DS-1's. Medium-sized folks have multiple DS-1's, fractional DS-3's, or full DS-3's. Your larger organizations have OC-3's and OC-12's, but it starts to get really, really rarefied if you go up above that. Suffice to say, unless grandma is getting stuff from the likes of Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, or Akamai, she's not going to be able to actually keep that 40Gbps pipe busy.

    Now, a good bit of the above takes a sarcastic tone, but there's a lesson in it: you're only as fast as the slowest part of the chain. There's a helluva lot of work that needs to be done on the entire information interchange infrastructure -- from the server to the PC and everything in between -- before stuff like this even begins to make sense for the average Joe. Data centers? Sure. Home 40Gbps? Not so useful.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Artuir ( 1226648 )
      You have to start somewhere, right?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by cjdkoh ( 991723 )
      combine that with the fact (read: high probability) that she doesn't even have a PC...
    • GigE switches are no more expensive here than a 100MB switch. (Consumer equipment wise),obviously if you go for Cisco or whatever that's mega bucks, but for a regualt home user you can get GigE (1000MB) switches for like 20 GBP or something silly.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Teron ( 817947 )
      Last I heard she had some sort of Cisco router worth roughly a million USD in her garage to support the connection. The actual point was to demonstrate a way to transfer data at 40 Gbps over a fibre originally intended for 10 Gbps.

  • Binary math and disk speeds: (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ridirich ( 1265104 ) on Monday March 31, 2008 @01:01PM (#22923250)
    Just so we're clear... This is a Gb connection. Gb is is short for Gigabit, emphasis on the bit. Software and hardware are measured in bytes. There are 8 bits in a byte and honestly I think ISPs put the bit rates in instead of the byte rates to confuse the average customer. Currently we have 4 types of drives: IDE/ATA, SATA, SCSI and Solid State. Their standard transfer rates are as follows: IDE/ATA: 133 MBps SATA: 300 MBps SCSI: 320 MBps SSD: 12.5 MBps Now, this connection was 40 Gbps. The actual speed is 5GBps. With those numbers you can see the transfer speeds are too slow for the hard drives to keep up with the faster internet connection. Max speed (given that a person has a SCSI raid) is 320 MBps or 2.5 Gbps, OC-48 is about as close as it gets.
  • ...she has Comcast, which limited her upload speed to 28.8K...

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