Warning: irrelevant information below :) On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 8:14 AM, Rich Shepard<[email protected]> wrote: > > Was the animation with a parachute? That would slow it down. >
As we all know, non-visual binaries have higher density than text files, or images. Executables and libraries are much like a 2x4: unhampered, they fall like a rock. (video, of course, falls at a rate between images and executables, having the surface area of the individual frame's resolution, but with a whole *stack* of them.) Anything with higher density than a bitmap naturally needs a parachute when being delivered from the Cloud, lest they be corrupted on landing. (Really big images, while not needing a parachute, take a long time to transfer because of that whole "drifting around like a feather" thing.) (Sidebar on damage-detection: md5 effectively extract the "black box" (the md5sum) out of the delivered data, and detect the presence of any anomolous activtivity during touch-down. shai, pgp, etc. simply provide different kinds of blackbox--some are more robust than others. If the md5 box gets banged up, it *might* not be reliable anymore, but the pgp boxes are a lot more resistant to damage. At the very least, you'll always know if a pgpbox was broken on landing, whereas with a md5box, you're never *certain* that the box survivde while the binary failed, but it's still a pretty good assumption.) Advanced systems pair enormous images *with* the binaries -- cutting out the necessity for the parachute entirely -- of course, if you're unaware, your local system may not realize that the 'chute is actually important, and not grant it the care required. This is why you sometimes download a game and see visual glitches in the splashscreen--they're just holes in the 'chute. Finally, fibre networks are substantially faster because they are effectively transfering files in a vacuum: nothing but light is involved (no atmosphere from WiFi/3G, nor any pesky copper), and without resistance, everything falls at the same rate -- 'chute or no. :) --Rogan _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
