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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

Time for the ever golden quote: Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum

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When I was working in vfx we employed a guy who's sole job was to fly back and forth from LA to Melbourne with pelican cases full of hard drives.

It was faster and more secure since we were working on air gapped networks.

That feels like a dream job for a temporary amount of time. And very effective too. I assume the VFX studio is in Melbourne?

Maybe if they’re flying first class? Otherwise that sounds like a nightmare that would require an insanely high paycheck.

If you're flying back and forth on that route that often, you're going to get upgraded quickly, I would imagine. I've done 6 flights a month domestic and have been upgraded to first class for free fairly often.

Depends on the rewards program I suppose. A US airline I’m familiar with does not upgrade frequent fliers on international flights.

You're allowed to say their name here.

>Otherwise that sounds like a nightmare that would require an insanely high paycheck.

If the courier in question is 6'2" that might be the case, but I suspect if the person was much smaller and is a heavy sleeper, that it wouldn't be too bad.

He was a writer, and seemed to enjoy the job

As a person of 6’0” I found the flight from LAX to SYD, and return, miserable in coach. I slept a lot and watched some movies but any way you cut it that is a long time to be sitting in a very uncomfortable seat.

In the before times I flew Auckland to Doha over 20ish hours. I can’t believe anyone likes flying, every bit of it is awful.

I’m 1.97m or so and it’s really not designed for me. I suspect it’s optimised for those at 1.6-1.7m.

1.75m here and coach sucks for me too. For that reason and social distancing I just bought a car that can drive me to places I’d usually fly, in much more comfort.

It's an ideal job if all you need is hours of concentration, reading, and writing or drawing. A writer, a PhD student with a laptop, a comic book author, etc.

Or, maybe, even a Zen monk who spends time meditating.

Yeah one location in LA and another in Melbourne so that we had 24 hour coverage.

Dream job to spend hours and hours in a plane? Then more hours clearing customs? Thanks but no thanks.

But Americans going to Australia just pass through a computerized system. You don't even have to talk to anyone.

I agree with OP, if this was a first class flight, it wouldn't be a bad gig.

Hopefully this was cabin baggage and not something left unattended for minutes on the baggage belt

Unattended for 14+ hours you mean. A baggage handler on the departing side could be bribed to steal it and you would have half a day of unfettered access before the courier on the plane even knew it was missing.

Of course you don’t check it if it’s that critical.

Transport security wasn't as big a concern as consistent delivery.

Network volitility is a huge problem when transferring huge files.

Is the internet in Australia really less reliable than airline on-time performance?

Time is one factor, it's also surprisingly easy to corrupt vfx master files with just a few missing bits.

Checksums will identify something went wrong, and then you need to redownload the file to a quarantine network and scan it. Takes time.

Much easier to go from trusted source to trusted source and verify the files on drive prior to shipping.

Amazon just released a device (forget the name) for exactly the same use case. We developed it in house.

Not to mention most major studios will contractually prevent you from exposing anything to the web.

FYR Amazon has the AWS Snow Family with the largest being a 45ft TEU, while Microsoft does Azure Data Boxes that are somewhat smaller.

Apologies for all the questions, I'm just curious about this.

>Checksums will identify something went wrong, and then you need to redownload the file to a quarantine network and scan it. Takes time.

Surely a sensible file transfer algorithm would compute checksums on small and easy-to-retransmit chunks? Does rsync not do this? Isn't it already happening in TCP?

>Not to mention most major studios will contractually prevent you from exposing anything to the web.

I understand that workstations with media on them are not going to have internet access, but do they really prohibit site to site VPNs?

>Amazon just released a device (forget the name) for exactly the same use case. We developed it in house.

Snowball and Snowmobile? IIRC these are primarily meant for one-time migration from on-prem storage to S3. Do people really use them on an ongoing basis?

Or you encrypt it.

If it could be checked, then it could have been shipped. I would assume hand carry.

I wonder if tapes are more prone to some form of driveby attack, whereby instead of requiring physical or remote access to a location, a strong enough magnetic field within a certain distance of a datacentre could penetrate bricks and mortar and render them useless

I'm envisioning a huge device in the back of a van which pulses a powerful beam, similar to typical movies (Oceans 11?) cutting the power to a bank / casino prior to a raid

Are you familiar with the story of the force field generated at the 3M plant apparently in 1980?

It would probably take more power than that to do what is being suggested from the distances that are being suggested.

I'm not sure it's feasible.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ElectroBOOM/comments/9jig1l/can_you...

Doing some guestimation, it seems like you could fit an exabyte into an AWS snowmobile. That's insane

Why guess? https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ says 100PB.

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