You have 1.44 MB of outgoing traffic. You can use it however you like. You can send data anywhere you wish.

Your task is to make as much money as you can. What would you do?

1.44 MB like a floppy disk?
You could give me any amount of outgoing traffic, I would still not know what to do.

Watch memes maybe.

I would send you a blackmail email asking for a ransom for not publishing what nasty things you do when you're alone.

@cafecortado it's... it's outgoing...

@electrineer nice try, but my devices don't have working webcams, and videos of me doing nasty things are readily available and can be purchased

@ScriptCoded I assumed 1.44MB outgoing but unlimited ingoing.

@ScriptCoded meme requests

"you can send data anywhere you wish"

anywhere?

literally "anywhere"?

then i'd send 1.44 MB of random data to every single planck volume in the observable universe.

since information basically equals energy, this would turn the whole universe into a practically infinite amount of black holes, destroying everything.

meaning the definition of "money" becomes completely and utterly pointless (as does everything else).

which means, technically and relatively speaking, i will then be as wealthy as the wealthiest individual in the universe.

@tosensei “anywhere” in context of computer data (hence megabytes) means any network device on the internet. It doesn’t have to respond though.

@kiki boooooooooooooring.

especially with the "it doesn't have to respond"-bit.

i can do that now already, with a lot more than 1.44MB.

In this scenario is time travel allowed? Either direction?... what about repercussions afterwards?... what's storing/moving this data? What fs?...
I'm a neuro-divergent with tons of networking exp, Hacking exp and odd innate cryptology skills.

I need parameters!

I'd use only a fraction of it and send a 25 year old version of myself a text file with some investments tips like bitcoin, Tesla and Apple plus some pointers to when I should cash them in.

Yeah, I'm in it all for myself. Not sorry.

I'll send it to 1984

Nuclear codes are probably smaller than that. Couldn’t make money with it (though I suppose I could place bets) but I could have a lot of fun making countries extort other countries. 😇

To make money? Easy: make some blockchain transactions from whale wallets to my own. 300 BTC would be a great start, though ofc I’d go for something less traceable instead. I can’t imagine these transactions would take 1.44mb, or really anything more than a few kb. I could empty several whale wallets given the limitation.

Another idea: transfer controlling interest of JP Morgan Chase, Black Rock, Vanguard, etc. to myself. That would be a bit more difficult because it’s not just a few http requests; I’d also need to print and mail legal documents, use saved signature png’s, etc.

I think the blockchain bit is the best bet.

I would send a polite message to person from future that hides among us and ask him to send me portable quantum item cloning device in 24 hours or one of his relatives dies.

@vane are you aware of the "no cloning theorem" in quantum mechanics?

@Lensflare you are either that guy or you work for him

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

@vane what guy? 🤨
Oh you mean the one that you want to blackmail? Yeah, no. Maybe. But probably not.

This post was a social experiment to determine the percentage of active devRant user base that is aware of 1.44 MB not being an arbitrary value but rather a typical size of a 3½-inch floppy disk. This gives an accurate approximation of your age, and thus generational alignment. Thank you for participation.

@kiki i assumed it was just sparked by the recent thread of the multi-floppy OS install packs... of which I totally showed off my DOS 5.0 still in the plastic

I wonder how many trucks full of floppy disks would be the equivalent of 1 GB/s bandwidth.

@Lensflare thatd clearly depend on how long the bandwidth was needed/used for...

I just had to explain to someone why 1GB wasnt simply 1000MB....then how Gigabit wasnt simply a typo of Gigabyte ... 20min later... "well then whats the name for 2 bits and 4 bits then???" -.-

@awesomeest nibble

@electrineer yea... for 4-bits... but thatd have likely gone down to more annoyance

@awesomeest I meant you should have started nibbling their face

@awesomeest I thought about that and had a similar doubt first. But I think it should be doable: In order to compute the number of trucks needed we would need to know the amount of data that one truck can store and then we would need to calculate how many trucks would be needed to transfer 1GB in one second, based on the truck’s movement speed.

@Lensflare

So here's the ironic part... A good deal of my background is actually in international business consulting, including supply chain logistics... so between that, my natural affinity for all things algorithmic and over 20yrs of networking exp... that type of nonsense is exactly in my wheelhouse.

I feel like I should list this newly identified combo skill on my list of other rare ability/talent/etc that'd be super useful... in an apocalypse or alternate dimension... right along with intense practical knowledge of original digital data systems, fortran, manually bootloading windows from grub, various chemistry, advanced medical knowledge illegal to practise without a degree creating/making shit from raw materials for glass and metal alloys... etc

@awesomeest okay… good to know

@Lensflare
Now I can't stop thinking about ways to convert moving trucks full of floppys to essentially bandwidth... thanks...

I'm already a few jumps past knowing it's technically possible due to the fact that floppies are very similar to the magnetic strips of hotel cards (most credit cards too but those are slightly more advanced)... so technically we do have the ability to read them by the truck load if there was something along the lines a large, weak, MRI, or something even simpler as it wouldnt need to produce its own waves of metallic polarisation... yet a weak version of that and non ferrous metals used for the trucks could made rewriting them all much easier...

@awesomeest I‘m only concerned about the throughput. Reading the floppies is a completely different can of worms 😆

@Lensflare and writing. How many floppy drives do you need for writing at 1GB/s?

@electrineer 8000 or 1 floppy disk and a very, very fast truck

@vane floppy disks can be written to at 250 kbps

@electrineer that‘s about my internet speed here in Germany

@Lensflare German! I knew I liked you.

While german isn't my first language I've used it quite a bit... nowadays I tend to think in german, often when coding. Though it makes no sense, as code certainly isn't german, my poor commenting skills are even worse if I try to put them in english... I currently have a friend in Österreich who's gonna translate my poor abbreviated german comments to somewhat legible english

@electrineer technically you dont need floppy drives to write floppy disks... a well programmed wide area MRI could do that, and extremely fast as long as the floppies were securely placed in the same configuration as it was programmed to.

It's simply magnetising/unmagnitising

@electrineer so 32000 or a spacecraft with that can manipulate magnetic field from distance

@vane might as well put some fibre in the ground and prepare the floppies at the destination. Wait, what?

@kiki
Seems we have hijacked this thread for over-engineering something has a very low plausibility of ever being useful... im curious if this contributes to you resulting data at all

@electrineer btw, any device capable of generating(and reading) a large static or magnetic field, with fine specificity, would be able to read/write any floppies in a couple milliseconds.

I wonder if there's a mass grave somewhere with all those AOL floppies in it.

@awesomeest wasn’t AOL CDs?

@Lensflare eventually yes, but in the beginning it was free floppy disks everywhere. I had piles of them i would use for keeping an organised code base and any scripts i wrote... also things I made in mspaint...late 90s early 00s... you could get AOL floppies everywhere, in grocery checkouts, movie rental stores, the library...etc. i even made some AOL trojan disks (nothing really bad, just annoying af like including a script that made the "you've got mail" noise at random times.