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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.
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
The internet doesn't 'see' anything
Routers do. They can see a loss of connectivity and alter their routes accordingly.
why do we need to attribute it to anything beyond simple 'redundancy and good planning'?
A redundant route doesn't do any good without the intelligence (either human or machine) to determine which routes are up and send traffic through them only.
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.
Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning.
Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning.