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Topic: Pigeon Anyone? (Read 661 times) |
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towr
wu::riddles Moderator Uberpuzzler
    
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Re: Pigeon Anyone?
« Reply #1 on: Jan 11th, 2005, 8:44am » |
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Quote:The IP datagram is printed, on a small scroll of paper, in hexadecimal, with each octet separated by whitestuff and blackstuff. The scroll of paper is wrapped around one leg of the avian carrier. A band of duct tape is used to secure the datagram's edges. |
| Clearly they haven't thought this through, a digital data carrier medium works much better than paper for by-pigeon data-transfer. It can easily beat dial-up modems on small to medium range. Especially considering the amount of data you can stow away on small flash memory cards these days. 256 MB in a rediculously small card is no exception. Take the speed of a pigeon to be, what, 10 m/s. Let's say we're looking at a transfer over 10 km. That's 1000 seconds, for 256 MB, is 25.6 kB/s (over 200 kilobits per second) Responsa time isn't good though, but for batch data-transfer on medium range it's pretty good, certainly compared to dial-up.
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« Last Edit: Jan 11th, 2005, 8:45am by towr » |
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Grimbal
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Re: Pigeon Anyone?
« Reply #2 on: Jan 12th, 2005, 4:31am » |
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Ahhh yes, but 14+ years ago, you would have been happy to have a single Mb of non-volatile memory on a chip. And if you had, you wouldn't like to risk loosing it. This reminds me of a professor in computer science who asked what was the fastest way to send one GB of data overseas. At that time, the fastest medium what to send a tape archive via air mail.
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« Last Edit: Jan 12th, 2005, 4:34am by Grimbal » |
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towr
wu::riddles Moderator Uberpuzzler
    
 Some people are average, some are just mean.
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Re: Pigeon Anyone?
« Reply #3 on: Jan 12th, 2005, 5:16am » |
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on Jan 12th, 2005, 4:31am, Grimbal wrote:Ahhh yes, but 14+ years ago, you would have been happy to have a single Mb of non-volatile memory on a chip. And if you had, you wouldn't like to risk loosing it. |
| Even then there were better ways to send data by pigeon than writing it on a pice of paper. Even microfilm beats it by miles. And a small magnetic tape could have worked as well.
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TenaliRaman
Uberpuzzler
    
 I am no special. I am only passionately curious.
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Re: Pigeon Anyone?
« Reply #4 on: Jan 12th, 2005, 7:49am » |
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After i read this, i could only think of ways to snoop around in this network. Hackers can think of truckload of different ways. Newsflash : "Mating calls is being employed as a successful way to hack the message over CPIP" -- AI
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