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Am I the only one for whom this page's style sheet has comitted suicide ?

If "drying her laundry" is a euphemism for the mass quantities of porn she is downloading, then I'd be doing the same thing.

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.

Id like to come over and dry my laundry at her house!

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.

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.

... only old people have 40Gbps internet connection.

Brain the size of a planet, access to 1,500 high definition HDTV channels simultaneously, and she wants me to dry her laundry!

.... depressing

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.

Bantu Tribesman Uses IBM Modem To Crush Nut [avdf.com]
(linked to alternate site 'cuz I can't find it on theonion.com...)

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..

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.

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.

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.