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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

How do people in Japan use their current 1 Gbps connections today? Are the ISPs making money or are they in some kind of government-subsidized fiber bubble?

1 Gbps is faster than a hard disk and 10 Gbps is faster than an SSD; this could change app design.

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To be fair, network latency is both much higher and much more variable than hard disk latency, even if the bandwidth is higher. Design can change, but it's hard to get away from needing enough local smarts and storage to make an interface feel snappy.

Edit - To back up my otherwise unsupported assertion:

  --- ycombinator.com ping statistics ---
  5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4105ms
  rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 80.985/112.433/163.591/29.114 ms

So a little over 100ms with significant variance for the open internet, results fairly typical. (Edited to add: I can't reproduce these results; later attempts give closer to 450ms, so this is biased in the network's favor.) Hard drives (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE..., for lack of a better source) have latency around 5 ms.

You can solve bandwidth problems by buying more lines, but latency, once introduced by a slow network hop, can never be recouped by any amount of hardware.

And it will. I signed up for the speedier FIOS (20/20) just so that future comes to my house a little quicker than others. This should give me a better shot at inventing the next bandwidth hog like YouTube.

Right now I'm thinking if it's worth it to buy a home server or just put everything into S3/JungleDisk. We're not quite there yet, but it's getting awfully close.

EDIT: read here on the emerging application paradigm http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2009/05/quick-history-...

Thanks for that link. Nothing really new, but really well crystalized and named.

I can't get more than 25/2 here. :(

Michael's works are remarkable. Many things he writes about seem obvious in retrospect, yet I find myself thinking differently after reading his wording.

It's also awkward talking to people who haven't read him as I end up coming from different perspective and grasping for common references. Hence why I plug him everywhere I can. :-)

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