Friday, September 11, 2009

Pigeon with a Thumb Drive beats ADSL

In college we had a joke about "Sneaker Net." Back in those days, the joke was that it was faster to load a file onto a floppy, walk it down the hall in the dorm, and copy it off the floppy onto another computer, than it would be to transfer the same file over the school network. Of course, those were the days of dial-up and things have come a long way.

But perhaps not so much in Africa, where a carrier pigeon carrying a 4 GB thumb drive delivered a large file 60 miles faster than the local ADSL. By the time the pigeon arrived, the file had only transferred 4% across the network

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