Slashdot Mirror
Net Sees Earthquake Damage, Routes Around It
davidwr writes "Japanese internet outages mostly healed themselves within hours. While some cables remain out, most computers that lost connectivity have it again. From James Cowie's blog: 'The engineers who built Japan's Internet created a dense web of domestic and international connectivity that is among the richest and most diverse on earth, as befits a critical gateway for global connectivity in and out of East Asia. At this point, it looks like their work may have allowed the Internet to do what it does best: route around catastrophic damage and keep the packets flowing, despite terrible chaos and uncertainty.' Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning."
Reader Spy Handler points out another article about how redundancy and good planning are preventing disaster at Japan's troubled nuclear reactors, despite media-fueled speculation and panic to the contrary.
These are two characteristics America is not known for.
That's because both redundancy and planning are properties of Communism. Please make a note of it.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
These are two characteristics the human race is not known for.
Fixed.
Gone!
I'd amend that to say two characteristics Corporate America is often not know for; as for America and Americans, they get the job done. From rescuing Chilean miners to landing on the moon, if American ingenuity is unencumbered, then let's rock and roll. I'm not saying America is perfect everyone, but the parent post is a ridiculous marginalization of a people and country unless it was meant in jest - hard to determine on the 'net.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
Even though the Japanese reactors did their job to contain against a meltdown, it looks like nuclear power progress will be set back another 20-30 years due to the fearmongers pointing to this.
The loss of life can't be ignored. For people that were not affected by loved ones killed by it, the rest of the world will also be feeling this disaster in Japan for generations to come. Especially the fact that the anti-nuke crowd now possesses another "kill point" to keep nuclear power dead. This essentially clinches the fact that our kids and grandkids will still be having their lights powered by coal, and their cars by oil.
As illustrated by Chernobyl ?
Communism irradiated everyone on the planet, including a number of locals lethally, and produced the largest nuclear disaster in history because ... politicians wanted to save a few bucks in the plant's construction. Malformed children were born because of this communist cost reduction for almost a dozen years.
Additionally, communist leaders did not see fit to warn rescue workers adequately of the dangers of the site. This was not through incompetence, but through malice. Better to kill a few workers and have a cheaper cleanup.
Of course, "communist" is an American word. Russians, or Chinese, use "socialist" for that concept. So do Americans, except that half of them still deny it.
"Net Sees Earthquake Damage"; "[internet] routes around it"; "outages mostly healed themselves"
Why do we insist on speaking of the internet as some mythical being with the ability to observe, act and heal? It's true that there is a remarkable robustness to the network, as shown in this case, but why do we need to attribute it to anything beyond simple 'redundancy and good planning'? It's a network of electronics and fiber-optics, maintained by people --- infrastructure and connections.
The internet doesn't 'see' anything, and information doesn't 'want' anything.
Network traffic has moved 8 feet to the east.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The network architecture isn't the only reason why we are still able to *mostly* communicate(I live about 60 km north of Tokyo, still no water though they haven't implemented the rolling blackouts....yet...), the advances in distributed systems also have made a huge impact. Simply put the amount of information to is essentially automatically mirrored(it's not really mirrored, but its easier to think of it like that) in Japan has really cut down on the amount of bandwidth necessary to communicate with the outside world.
I have noticed that for things that almost certainly aren't mirrored and require a direct connection to the US the bandwidth is probably 1/10 of what it usually is. While some of that may be due to increased traffic, I cannot help but think given the location of the quake that some of the cables between the US and Japan have been damaged. However services like Facebook and Google are as fast as they ever were. The reason for this is simple, both Google and Facebook have data centers in Japan that are designed to be eventually consistent. Instead of each individual request being routed to the states and back almost all the requests are routed to local data centers with only the updates coming from elsewhere being pushed through the cables. This obviously saves tons of bandwidth and allows for much better communication with the outside world. Now if you'll excuse me I gotta throw out most of my stuff and get the hell out of here. Tata!
Monstar L
Everyone loves to blame somebody else for problems with America. I do agree that corporate American, and our government, to a large extent are responsible for many of our problems. If faced with a possible meltdown an American company, marketing idiots would decide, "releasing information makes us look bad" and would keep it secret until things had gotten totally out of control. But long before that point, the idiots with business degrees would have decided it was too expensive to do things the right way and would have skimped during construction.
But as I've said, it isn't just the fault of corporations and government. The American people are also at fault. If you haven't been to Japan you don't know what work ethic is. Has anyone seen the footage inside the supermarkets during the earthquake? The first thing store employees did when it was over was make sure the products were secure and started cleaning the place up. In the US, they'd run for the doors and probably wouldn't go back to work. If there was a mess on the floor they'd say it was someone else's responsibility. Japanese are dedicated to their jobs on a level many Americans can't imagine.
How about the people waiting in lines to be able to buy food and supplies? Everyone's respectful, courteous and follows the rules. In America there would have been a mad rush with everyone grabbing what they could. Worse than that, there would be looting.
Too many Americans have this obnoxious sense of self-righteousness and an obsession with being iconoclasts. No sense of pride and no sense of respect or responsibility.
And the thing is that these attributes aren't unique to Japan, although it's definitely much more concentrated there. Travel to South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore or even China and you'll see this. Walk into any convenience store, and there are hundreds of them in any Asian city and the aisles are nearly stocked and the store always clean. I've been to malls where employees were on their hands and knees scrubbing the threshold of an entrance to the mall. I don't recall ever being in a bathroom in a shopping center that wasn't pristine. Good luck seeing that in an American mall.
Employees are almost always courteous and do a consistently good job. They don't need managers breathing down their necks, but they also know that management isn't going to tolerate bullshit. Walk into a supermarket in the States and employees are routinely whining that they've had to work 5 minutes late. Or they're chatting with friends. Or moping. Or simply jerks. Then there are the patrons who don't have a respect for anyone, including employees who do work hard to keep things clean and organized. The problems are everywhere.
I didn't really appreciate any of this until I lived in Asia. And now I find it frustrating to no end; at times I question why I continue to live in the States. The problems exist at every level. But then you can't feel self-righteous if you acknowledge your own part in all this.
"The bureaucrat on the other hand is only interested in making it as expensive and labour-intensive as possible"
Until we transition our economy to some better balance between subsistence/gift/planned/exchange/theft more appropriate for a high-tech civilization.
See also my comments here:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning.
Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning.
See also my comment here that got modded "troll". :-)
"Mother Nature can still really kick ass... (Score:2, Troll)"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2033910&cid=35464554
"Like with Hurricane Katrina where the USA lost a city, this event will be a test of the Japanese character. The good news is, you can see in Japan aspects of what a healthy society looks like (unlike the USA during Katrina or before). Japan prepared a lot for this (good building codes, to begin with). Their leadership has responded immediately. People are helping each other. News is being posted right away through their advanced social networks. (Many individuals wanted to help with Katrina, and were turned back, and parts of the New Orleans area descended into violence and fear...) You can be sure, as a society, Japan will come through this even stronger and healthier and better prepared for the next event. I wish I could say stuff like that about the USA these days? I don't know, even as I have a lot of faith in US individuals in a crisis. But in the USA, government is painted as the enemy. We don't know what good government would feel like anymore, sadly -- government that is accountable, or plans well, or prioritizes human needs over short-term profits to a few."
Although, with that said, there was stuff in the news about the towns around the nuclear plants not having planned for this specific sort of nuclear incident, so we'll see what future reports say about all that. And no doubt one can point to incidents of corruption in any government.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
We have a customer in Japan operating a data center in Tochigi Prefecture, only about 200 km or so from Sendai. They lost power after the earthquake, and were running off UPS until their data center gensets kicked in, so their servers did not experience any outage immediately after the earthquake. Our people on the scene reported that television and radio were out, and their only source of news was from the Internet: their connectivity seemed almost entirely unaffected. However, their generators only had enough gas for six hours of operation, so we still had to shut everything down before the juice ran out, and there was no power for eight more hours after that... I was surprised that there was no serious network service interruption: no major undersea cables were damaged like what happened after the earthquake in Taiwan in 2006, and their network performance seems just as it normally is: they still seem to be getting their advertised gigabit speed, at least to other sites also in Japan, so it seems that their net backbone was scarcely affected.
We'll have problems maintaining service uptime in the face of the rolling blackouts that they're experiencing, but those are the breaks...
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
That theory looks nice on paper. But let's take a closer look at reality.
Power supply, i.e. having a huge infrastructure of power plants, power lines and all the little tidbits that keep them together, is not something you can start in a mom&pop style. In other words, it's a game for big money and big industry. Or, in yet other words, a game for few. Going into the market comes with a huge financial risk attached.
On the other end, you have the customer who doesn't really care about your power grid or how redundant it is. What he cares about is power. And since power is standardized (by its very nature, since you can only use 110V or 230V, depending on the area you live in, there's no leeway for "fancy power"), the only difference visible to the average customer is price.
Redundancy costs money. Not only a one time investment but recurring costs for maintenance. In other words, you will produce at higher cost.
Hence the only supplyer that will prevail is the cheap one without redundancy and without investment unless absolutely necessary.
Here's a little food for thought for you: Our power supply was state owned until the 90s. No "alternatives". It wasn't exactly more expensive than the "free market" power we get today. But the blackouts were fewer.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What did I say about race? I talked about US vs. Japanese culture.
Consider: ... One huge bottleneck in the evacuation â" the New Orleans airport. Officials say flights were delayed while screeners and air marshals were flown in to comply with post-9/11 security requirements, and then further delayed because screening machines werenâ(TM)t working. ..."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9231926/ns/nightly_news-nbc_news_investigates/
"Some 200 New Orleans school buses sit underwater in a parking lot, unused. That's enough to have evacuated at least 13,000 people. Why werenâ(TM)t those buses sent street by street to pick up people before the storm?
The AC post can be seen as another example of US cultural problems. Shirley Sherrod was forced to resign for making a speech that ironically included mentioning how racism was being created by elite-pushed policies in the USA for centuries to cause poor blacks and poor whites to be at each other's throats to keep them all divided and powerless:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2010/0722/Shirley-Sherrod-debacle-why-Obama-stumbles-on-race
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9NcCa_KjXk
See also:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
"How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scarce by an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred-by economic inequity-faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices."
That said, Japanese people can be pretty xenophobic, which is why they are creating a lot of elder care robots instead of importing "guest workers" from other countries like Western Europe or the USA.
http://www.jref.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-7650.html
http://www.globalaging.org/elderrights/world/2004/japaninvention.htm
So, soon Japanese-designed household and nursing robots are going to take a lot more low paid jobs in the USA... A Japanese anime about that complex issue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roujin_Z
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.