This gave me pause, althoug in a non-FedEx way: in my world, driving into the office is usually an unnecessary evil; I can typically download anything less than a gigabyte in the time it would take me to drive there, download and drive home.
Digg pointed me to "FedEx still faster than the internet". From the post:
When you need to transfer very large amounts of data over the internet, sooner or later you will hit a limit where it will actually be faster to send that data on disks over regular mail (often called sneakernet). Internet transfer rates are simply not enough for large data sets.
This makes me ponder: at which point (i.e., data size) does it make sense for me to stay at home, versus drive to the office? Factors to consider:
- Time (duh); but broken down into active time (time spent doing other things on my laptop) versus passive time (time spent sleeping whilst the download continues)
- Mileage / gas expense
- Failure ratio (always copy the entire file tree; don't try to execute a large install over the internet when connection could disrupt installation)
My commute is 90 minutes (assuming no traffic), plus download time: if it takes less that two hours to download what i need, it's better for me to stay at home (even if not sleeping).