The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5) - PlanetLab, the SuperHyperMeganet... coming soon

PlanetLab, the SuperHyperMeganet... coming soon

In this article,

http://www.matr.net/print-8127.html

They claim that soon hard drives and CDRs will be "as obsolete as a 78 rpm record" because on the Internet 2.0, aka "PlanetLab", you will store all your files and documents, such as your "personal tax receipts" and "photo albums" "on the web itself" -- that is storage will not be needed because your information will be floating around 'on the web' -- not anywhere in particular mind you, but just 'out there'... somewhere.

Normally I'd say this is a bunch of hoo hah, but it does appear that a bunch of big name universities are sticking it to the government for Big Grants to pay for the development of this system.

Other claims:
-- you can download unlimited bandwidth such as full-resolution real time streamed movies no matter how bad the congestion is.
-- no more processors needed -- your programs will be run in parallel across the world on 'nodes'

Hold on to your wallets, it's a wild ride coming!

Smart money is on those who jump on the bandwagon to cash in on the "developing PlanetLab" boondoggle before the money dries up.

Hm... HR is looking for developers with 6 years of PlanetLab experience.

Dennis Atkins
Wednesday, October 22, 2003

Just want to say it again... you'll be able to "instantly" download an entire movie.

Yeah... that's the BEST part, everyone in the world simultaneously downloading entire movies 'instantly'.

What is 'instantly' in this context? 0.5 seconds to download 4.7GB?

Dennis Atkins
Wednesday, October 22, 2003

They'll still need hard drives though to store all the data in the first place.

Matthew Lock
Wednesday, October 22, 2003

The recent CERN example was an equivalent of streaming a DVD movie in 5 seconds.

Quite how you do that for the whole planet, or a reasonable subset of it I don't know, nor do I know how you manage to pay for it.

Simon Lucy
Wednesday, October 22, 2003

When reading about the vaporware, remember that the internet was designed AND built so that "it detects damage and routes around it."

...unless MAE East is down. Then the east coast of the US is offline. Or if a fishing trawler cuts a transatlantic cable in the Pacific, then Australia, NZ & Co are gone. And if your ISP's single DNS server is down, you're on your own.

Blue sky designs often fall victim to budget realities.

Philo

Philo
Wednesday, October 22, 2003

>>When reading about the vaporware, remember that the internet was designed AND built so that "it detects damage and routes around it."

That was ARPANET (and to a limited degree NSFnet), not the internet. When the internet was commercialized, redundancy/realiability went out the window.

RocketJeff
Wednesday, October 22, 2003

Actually we do use the Internet as a storage medium to a certain extent already.

Can you remember when you last downloaded a page from the internet for storage later. I bet it was probably quite some time ago. Unless it's something massive like a 200 page manual then I find I can get if off the net using Google qucker than I can find it on my own hard drive.

I still save certain pages, but that's more as a back up in case the whole site stops being maintained and disappers than because I have any thought of actually searching for it on my HD if I need to read it again. And I'd never dream of archiving stuff from the big sites like the BBC, or CNET - or JOS :)

Stephen Jones
Thursday, October 23, 2003