Did the men in black suits come for you?
on
Ask Donald Becker
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· Score: 2
Rumor has it that when you were initially working on the Beowulf project (pre-infancy, while at NASA maybe?) and released some initial code on the web, some government entities were none-to-happy at the prospect of having foreign countries use that code to construct powerful clusters from commodity PCs.. in essence, to side-step export controls. You may also have been abducted and/or charged with "heinous" crimes while they were investigating Beowulf (black-bmw shady government style abduction).
Can you lend any insight as to what these rumors may be based on? Do you have any advice for budding programmers as to how the government might react if we just release world-altering software into the open, like you did?
... than is readily apparent. Some stuff, like Windows 3.1, will be completely useless in another 60 or so years. Do you think anyone will even be able to find the source code then?
I'm not even sure the law is such that you are encouraged to release computer program source code-- but wouldn't that be something? But a kind-of long copyright term on other stuff, like.. great works of society (a tiny percentage of books, etc) deserve a longer copyright term. But what about The A-Team. The copyright on the A-Team should have long since expired, the same as Windows 3.1. www.archive.org contains a lot of early films.. but they complain that movie studios destroy the originals when a movie is about to expire... effectively hampering its descent into public domain. Extend this into a DRM enabled future, where it is unlikely that many people will have an "unauthorized" work, and media companies can revoke all DRM liceses just before something expires and then (digitally) destroy the only copy. This is highly irritating, wouldn't you say? But the examples here suggest that yet more complex laws need to exist to deal with (a) copyrighted works that suck need not be copyrighted long (b) two-part copyrighted things (i.e. programs and program source code (c) legal recourse for companies that knowingly inhibit works entering the public domain.
IPSec and NAT do not seem to mix well, for those of us that like to share their broadband not through windows. I'd appeciate any documentation you know of getting this to work.. it was a real pain. Also, ISPs that do transparent proxying seem to "eat" the IPSec packets.. they make it in.. but never get outside the isp. Finally ended up doing ppp over ssh.:(
no really... why? Because he is struggling with his overpowering, debilitating self-pitty for his loss which ultimately results in his own loss of life?...
Seems like man vs. himself to me. One possible plot of many, yes, but there is always a reason.
Think about it: It wouldn't be much of a story if there were no reasons or relations between events in the story.. You'd be at the end of the story, feeling empty handed.
... hearing... OHH you guys had the talkie version. I didn't get it until later. I was like.. damn, all these replies how is two lines of dialogue from a 10 year old game not obscure?? haha I see.
This artcile summary was hard to read. I kept seeing Double Dance Rate and Dance Data Revolution. I kept thinking things like.. the digital equivilent of playing a record at 75 rpm vs. 42. Or something. Double Dance Rate, for increased throuput!
I'm using NT4 under VMWare with Exchange 5.5. We opted to do this instead of an upgrade W2k adv. server for several reasons: 1. cost. 2. speed. Having the NT4 system in the sandbox means I can just copy a file here and there to move it around. No more paranoia on whether I'll get a blue screen chaning the revision of the scsi controller, or whatever. Did I mention samba works soo fast with network profiles and file sharing?
You can probably pick up exchange 5.5, NT4 and VM ware for cheap. (Old servers on Ebay, etc, often come with NT4 and Exchange 5.0 or 5.5) VMWare was about $300. And use this in the interim until a more mature linux version comes about;)
I buy a cert from Verisign.. and I'm trusted. And I issue certificates to my friends based on mine.. because I trust my friends. But Verisign isn't supposed trust my friends necessarily, because I do.
My parent story had several links that (eventually) show otherwise. One also has a link to a scan of the check. Its difficult, it takes months, but it doesn't seem to be quite as impossible as you claim. Just. Frustrating.
Yes, it sure does say that. But it it has been shown in court that the Sherman Act of 1890 in this particular case did not apply, it was found, because of the agubility of the definition of "not esseintial to the operation" of a PC without an OS. To use your poor analogy, It would be buying a car without an engine, with the intent of installing your own engine. (How well can you make use a PC with only the bios? Hmm? Can you provide a link to the case you're talking about? Seems like it was for "no" OS and not an alternative OS, anyway.) And if you actually think about what you're saying for a second, you will see that the sherman act wasn't meant to apply quite that broadly (allthough, it is somewhat disappointing it wasn't in the MS case). For example, AMI and Award produce bioses. There are several motherboards based on VIA and Ali refernce designs that can use either bios interchangably. Yet, I cannot buy a motherboard without a bios. Which, in your world, is illegal. Right?
You're confusing bundling of goods with outright fraud. Clearly, a spare tire is "bundled" with your car, just as windows is bundled with PCs. But do you get an agreement in writing from your auto dealer stating that you can get money back if you don't want the spare tire? If you actually ask your auto dealer, they say "Oh, yeah, we can't actually unbundle the tire, but if you buy the car this clause here in our contract with you says you can return the tire for a full refund." And sure enough, in the contract, it states exactly that. And then you apply for a refund? Under contract, you are entitiled to refund. Not upholding the terms of the contract is outright fraud.
Like a spare tire that comes with a car? Please! Be sure you know what it is you're aruing about, next time.
Okay, sure, the EULA on Microsoft stuff has a specific clause:
If you do not agree to the terms of this EULA, PC Manufacturer and Microsoft are unwilling to license the SOFTWARE PRODUCT to you. In such event, you may not use or copy the SOFTWARE PRODUCT, and you should promptly contact PC Manufacturer for instructions on return of the unused products(s) for a refund.
Except that it seems to be difficult, if not impossible, to get a refund. Almost three years ago, I replaced a dead NT server (lightning, so, no, just a few parts won't do)with a white-box Win98 machine and sent Win98 away to be refunded. I was told to send it directly to M$, by M$. I'm still waiting! A lot ofother people seem to be, too. It seems to be damn near impossible to get a refund, in fact. And this the DoJ all heard before, as part of the anti-trust trial Also, it seems now that OEMS must "eat" the cost of returned copies of windows, this is no longer passed back to microsoft.
Look, I'm not some fanatical Linux Zealot on the fringes of society. I'm a programmer, system administrator, IT manager, whatever you want to call it. I use Linux and other free OSs, and I really hate being treated like some psycho zealot on the fringe when I try to avoid doubly (and sometimes triply) licensing microsoft software for Clients' PCs. ("You want what? We don't do that? Whats a EULA?" HP, Compaq, Gateway and now Dell. its all the same.) I mean, honestly, where is my FTC? Where is my consumer protection? It goes beyond frustrating.
How do we get this information to (legal) people that might be interested in doing something about it? Perhaps the group that was prosecuting microsoft in the anti-trust trial would like a community effort to discover these sorts of things, to use as evidence.. ?
Linux: Install hdparm & smart-ctl (apt-get install smartsuite for debheds out there)
I get 40 mb/sec sustained uncached sequential read on Maxtor D7xxX and about 20 mb/sec writing.
Windows 2000: Windows 2000 Ultra DMA doesn't actually work right in pre-sp2 environments, most
of the time. You can see if your drives are in
DMA mode in device manager.
Note that DMA / PCI Bus mastering involves a *LOT* of overhead. For example, Striping across onboard controllers and external controllers will create a nightmare for the bus controller. Even striping two Maxtor or Seagate drives on different PCI slots will hurt your bandwidth.
I think this will probably all be covered reasonably though, in other replies. My question is this: On 35 or 40 servers with a myriad of drive brands, types, interfaces (scsi and IDE) I seem to get a lot of errors. Even pre-built new-in-box $10,000 dell servers generate lots of errors that seem to be non critical. I do not understand:
I'm not sure I understand? No udma CRC error count, but hardware ECC recovered?? Is this normal ??? At least there have been no relocations. But anyway, I frequently copy 100 mb files between drives (on different controllers) at a rate of about 60-70 mb/sec. In a dual CPU setup or P4 setup (with PCI irq transform) I get *much* better. I can literally copy 160 mb files from one Raid 0 set to another in about 3-4 seconds with some of those maxtor drives. The PCI bus maxes out at about 120 mb/sec. And in, say, a network environment, you'd have disk controller and network fighting over PCI bus mastering-- creating a lot of overhead.
Surplus sites and auction sites like Ebay are good for this sort of thing. Myself, I have a Computone Executech II key system with nice lcd speakerphones and programmable button consoles. I got the PBX and 15 phones on ebay for $65+s/h. While it is true you can't plug in a plain old telepohone (POTs), Even these old proprietary phone systems have some "auxilary" jacks on them for regular analog devices (fax machines, etc) you may want to use at an extension. I was able to use google groups to find all the pertinent wiring information before I even bid on it.
I use this phone system in conunction with vgetty and this. If someone calls in and the VOCP system answers, you can do all the standard voicemail stuff, you can issue a page to my email pager, send a fax(which can be forwarded to email) or I can even dial into the system and get a PPP dial-up connection if I'm on the road and otherwise don't have internet.
Re:Cyberphobia strikes again
on
WarTalking Arrest
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I want to go to lawschool for this very reason. I had an interesting debate a few months ago, which has expanded onto several threads of thought. Consider the following:
1. Is it legal if someone hires you to kill them?
2. Is it legal if someone hires you to destroy some of their property?
3. If someone hires you to simply annoy them, what then? (i.e. a "crime" that does no measurable damages)
4. What happens if observe that a crime could easily be commited, and yet you do nothing?
5. What if you have advance knowledge of a crime, and do nothing?
There are two things working against techies: 1. Social engineering (direct or indirect) works on law enforcement with reguard to technology issues because they simply aren't trained. If the head of IT for a city or other "important" person calls and tells the law to arrest someone based on some obscure log printout, the law will probably be able to do so. 2. No one understands technology, except you, and well, no one will listen to you when you stand accused. Unlike other scuffles, the cops can't examine the situation and determine for themselves the severity and how to handle it.*
Clearly, #1 is illegal. Based on many cases in CA, VA it would seem that even if you have papers signed by the CTO and CEO , and you do a full security audit you can still be arrested. (Remember the case in CA where the guy did social engineering and took pictures of the server room -- thats it. He's serving a 1 year prison sentence. The board of directors and the President of the company sent him up -- the CTO and CEO resigned.) "Breaking the law is still breaking the law, irregardless of intent..." is what the prosecution successfully ordered. But whats the analogy for wireless? An english school boy standing on your lawn with a bell yelling about how you never lock your house when you leave that only some people can hear? Or is the better analogy like going up to someone's door, rattling it, then discovering that there is no lock? Its all a matter of politics and twisted truths -- not really the crucible that should burn all that away.
20m/s was perhaps true several years ago, but I promise this is no longer the case. Buggy, crappy file systems may cause slower speed, but if you're serious about these sorts of things.. make a 1 gb partition and copy the cd image to the FS or directly to a CD image. This drive *should* be seperate from the Host OS but, as long as the host OS supports a proper program scheduler and the CD burning software sets itsself up with higher than normal priority, this isn't a problem. A commodity $99 Maxtor D740X can and does sustain 40 mbyte/sec on 80% of the drive. In fact, this drive is based directly on designs from Quantum's enterprise A/V rated SCSI line, with an IDE interface board. Its *minimum* sequentail read speed toward the end of the disk is 28+ mbyte/sec. With an 8 mbyte buffer on the 40x CD-R drive, and a burst read on the IDE, the ide drive doesn't have to respond for (about) a full three quarters of a second to prevent buffer underrun.
Also, only striping raid works as you think. Reliability aside, RAID(and most raid in general) is only good for dealing with multiple concurrent processes reading/writing* to disks. Not a single process using all the disk bandwidth. This makes sense, if you consiter that you don't want one rogue process consuming all the i/o bandwidth to the disk. Its technoligically easier (in say, raid 1, raid 5) to implement this. (consider the queueing algorithm for raid 1:::
support two concurrent read ops (one for each drive, independently with raid vs. serializing multi-reads across drives to get the data efficiently/rounding up all those parity stripes) The 3ware cards of which you speak, in fact, do this exactly. Try hdparm sometime.. it uses a single I/O thread for reading/writing.. and your raid will appear painfully slow. But other benchmarking apps, like bonnie, will show it fast fast fast. I have personally maxed out the PCI bus with a 3 ware card and 3 Maxtor D740X drives on raid 5 using Bonnie.
*Well not so much writing, unless you have those nice raid cards with the battery-backed ram that delays writes/parity updates until the buffer fills or there is a window of no activity on the drive needing updating.
...My point being that as things are right now, IDE hard drives are not quite fast enough even with an 8MB buffer to keep up with the data transfer required (and yes, I am running my 7200 Maxtor 27GB as Primary master, and LG 32X CD-RW as Secondary Master on an Intel 815EEA2 board)...
uhh... what? Maxtor D740X transfer rates (uncached) -> min/avg/max 27282kb/38572kb/41123kb per second. Seagate ATA IV 10 gb -> 21800kb/26280kb/29980kb per second. (128mb test file size)
one X is 150k/s.. 32x is 4.8 mb/sec. one CD is say, 650mb. Burn time is therefor a minimum of 2:25. TOC and leadout tracks add time, though. 40x is 6000 kb/sec. Right, however, is The difference in 32x and 40x "feels" negligible.
There is something horribly wrong with your setup if you can't manage 6+ mb/sec from your maxtor hard drive. I think I managed 9 or 10 mb/sec from my old quantum fireball udma/33 drive way back on my Pentium 233.
If you could prioritize ACKs then, by virtue of the protocol, Uploads (and their downstream acks) would be the first to be throttled. Also, TCP, by design, has the underlying assumption point-to-poing bandwidth is symmetric. It is not in this instance.
Anyway, How can you use the QoS thing to give Acks a higher priority? You can install QoS in control panel on Win2k/WinXP, but you can't actually install the QoS management snap-in except on W2k Server. I *doubt* they'd throw in ack management into this QoS, but they may.
I'm not trolling but, honestly, this thread has an unusual number of people posting information like "dsl is half-duplex!" or "gee, mine isn't like that, what gives?" whatever. Sigh.
I can't speak to the complexities of the Windows TCP stack, except to say its based on some BSD tcp stack. There are a lot of options you can set in the registry, and you can read more about it here. It is unlikely you will be able to do this "properly" (read: RFC ) on the W2k/WXP default TCP service. there *might* be a different TCP/IP service for XP Pro or server to address this, but its unlikely. No, QoS has *nothing* do do with this. Let me explain.. as few posts seem to get it...
In TCP you have acks for the data you have recieved. Acks can go back to the sender within data packets (Its just a sequence number, really, sliding window.. protocol 5 I think... use Google if you're lost) or ACKs can go back by themselves. There ARE parameters in W2k for affecting how long W2k will Queue Acks while waiting for a data packet it can piggy-back the ack on. You can decrease this parameter, which may help (or it could backfire). You can also change the protocol window size, so that windows will wait longer*, but this could also backfire as it may overflow the queue in the DSL router (I suspect this in combination that Acks are just plain being choked out). The poster seems to understand exactly why their connection becomes throttled, even though most of the replies here don't seem to.......
Now, there might be hope yet. If you use PPPoE, it is a bit more likely you can find a packet scheduler/prioritizer to give Ack packets higher priority. I believe there are a number of PPPoE packages that probably address this problem as part of their design (this sort of thing is somewhat more common than most of the other threads lead you to believe.) I believe WinPoET does, though I can find no information of this on their page. There is also a truly excellent, free, PPPoE package available at (google snapshot) here. though you might have to talk to the author to find out more about its ack-priority algorithm...
If you don't have PPPoE, you might also look at Nat32 though it only thinly refrences TCP Ack traffic shaping for DSL/Cable asymmetric connections in its documentation.
I'm not being a zealot, but the *best* thing is probably to use some crappy P133 linux or BSD machine as traffic shaper. You can set up port forwarding for when NAT can't figure out what box to send stuff to, to avoid the downsides of being behind a firewall. The reason for this is that you would probably have to have a special implementation of the TCP/IP service that knows about your upstream and downstream, and prioritizes accordingly. The Registry parameters I mentioned earlier might help, but it won't truly fix the problem.
*This would be good if you get out of order packets. If network traffic is sporadic, this tends to help. So, windows can re order from a batch of, say, 30 packets vs. 15, windows will wait for a missed packet longer.. this missed packet (which hopefullly won't expire) is more likely to make it in because there is more time for it to do so.
I apologize for over symplifying... but you get the idea.
Yes, other patent systems seem less broken. Like, in the EU, I think you can't be a patent squatter....Which is why I said, US patent systems.
Anyway,
You prove my point for me. Analogies like this one can be a double edged sword. The defense might make an argument like yours, but the prosecution could also say something completely different and relevant. This particular patent might be harder than others, but there was a case not long ago that made the analogy that scanning a host on the internet with nmap is like going up to someone's house, rattling all the windows, doors, walls, etc. for any "vulnerabilities" that would let them into the house without "breaking" in. Basically, it comes down to who has the most money to put time into a thoughtful argument, as I said, once it is in the court system.
Patent trolls make a good living, it seems. Yeah... Findlaw is a good source for court transcripts of cases involving patents.
Like many of you, I'm a (lifetime) student, a CS Major and a hobbyist. I love computer science, physics and math (in that order). I write software for grocery money (independent of some corporate entity..), do network administration and high-level training (i.e. teaching an IT department how to use samba.. etc). I'm also into hobby electronics, amateur robotocs, etc.
As an individual inventor/hobbyist it is hard to see the US patent system as a means of anything but reinforcing corporate interest. There are only four possibilities, really:
1. Hobbyist has patent, Company has patent.
This one plays out in court. Likely, who has the most money wins. At the very most for the hobbyist, I'll bet you the ruling says the hobbist and the company developed the same thing independently.
2. Hobbyist has patent, company doesn't but is granted patent. Again, this one will probably play out in court. The hobbyist is more favored, but legal representation matters.
3. Hobbyist has no patent, Company has broad umbrella patent. Again, it plays out in court. What are the chances the court would decide that the hobbyist independently invented?
4. No one has patents. This one is tough, though usually the company in question applies for a patent then initiates legal action with the hope that by the time it comes to trial, they will have been issued a patent. (findlaw)
See a recurring theme? As a hobbyist, I worry about being brought into court, for no good reason, based on some good idea I have. I can't afford that. Its a drain on the soul as well as the coffer. I also get the feeling that I have to prove I'm innocent of alleged patent violations. It tends to make me bitter, and no longer a jubilant inventor. Whats worse, I'm told that if I invent something independently and realease it to the community I can be held accountable for abitrary amounts that represent "losses" in revenue of the patent holder if they make a strong enough case. Review the Ogg vs. Mp3 initial corporate statements that were tantamount to "Yeah, they may have worked independently, but this mathmusic thing is so complex, they must have ripped us off. No one would think of that!" Fortunately, I'm still a poor student and have nothing anyone could take.
Baubles to you and I, in the hobbyist electronics/software algorithm sense, are incomprehensible to the court, and just about any argument can be made as to what they are, how complex they are, and how reasonable it would be to argue that a particular patent is a logical conclusion of other thoughts or a completely original thought.
Walmart. 12:34 am. Tuesday. "Hey, do you guys have warcraft iii?" "Yeah, but we're not supposed to sell it, yet." "Today is Tuesday, and its after midnight." "Ohh, it is after midnight!! here you go then!! " ka-ching. I got my copy 24 hours early. Bitchin.
Slashdot Mirror
Rumor has it that when you were initially working on the Beowulf project (pre-infancy, while at NASA maybe?) and released some initial code on the web, some government entities were none-to-happy at the prospect of having foreign countries use that code to construct powerful clusters from commodity PCs.. in essence, to side-step export controls. You may also have been abducted and/or charged with "heinous" crimes while they were investigating Beowulf (black-bmw shady government style abduction).
Can you lend any insight as to what these rumors may be based on? Do you have any advice for budding programmers as to how the government might react if we just release world-altering software into the open, like you did?
... than is readily apparent. Some stuff, like Windows 3.1, will be completely useless in another 60 or so years. Do you think anyone will even be able to find the source code then?
I'm not even sure the law is such that you are encouraged to release computer program source code-- but wouldn't that be something? But a kind-of long copyright term on other stuff, like.. great works of society (a tiny percentage of books, etc) deserve a longer copyright term. But what about The A-Team. The copyright on the A-Team should have long since expired, the same as Windows 3.1. www.archive.org contains a lot of early films.. but they complain that movie studios destroy the originals when a movie is about to expire... effectively hampering its descent into public domain. Extend this into a DRM enabled future, where it is unlikely that many people will have an "unauthorized" work, and media companies can revoke all DRM liceses just before something expires and then (digitally) destroy the only copy. This is highly irritating, wouldn't you say? But the examples here suggest that yet more complex laws need to exist to deal with (a) copyrighted works that suck need not be copyrighted long (b) two-part copyrighted things (i.e. programs and program source code (c) legal recourse for companies that knowingly inhibit works entering the public domain.
IPSec and NAT do not seem to mix well, for those of us that like to share their broadband not through windows. I'd appeciate any documentation you know of getting this to work.. it was a real pain. Also, ISPs that do transparent proxying seem to "eat" the IPSec packets.. they make it in.. but never get outside the isp. Finally ended up doing ppp over ssh. :(
B) The king dies because the queen dies... why?
no really... why? Because he is struggling with his overpowering, debilitating self-pitty for his loss which ultimately results in his own loss of life?
Seems like man vs. himself to me. One possible plot of many, yes, but there is always a reason.
Think about it: It wouldn't be much of a story if there were no reasons or relations between events in the story.. You'd be at the end of the story, feeling empty handed.
... hearing...
OHH you guys had the talkie version. I didn't get it until later. I was like.. damn, all these replies how is two lines of dialogue from a 10 year old game not obscure?? haha I see.
Am I upstairs? I got lost.
Whats a tentacle?
(its a really obsucre reference)
This artcile summary was hard to read. I kept seeing Double Dance Rate and Dance Data Revolution. I kept thinking things like.. the digital equivilent of playing a record at 75 rpm vs. 42. Or something. Double Dance Rate, for increased throuput!
I'm using NT4 under VMWare with Exchange 5.5. We opted to do this instead of an upgrade W2k adv. server for several reasons: 1. cost. 2. speed. Having the NT4 system in the sandbox means I can just copy a file here and there to move it around. No more paranoia on whether I'll get a blue screen chaning the revision of the scsi controller, or whatever. Did I mention samba works soo fast with network profiles and file sharing?
;)
You can probably pick up exchange 5.5, NT4 and VM ware for cheap. (Old servers on Ebay, etc, often come with NT4 and Exchange 5.0 or 5.5) VMWare was about $300. And use this in the interim until a more mature linux version comes about
Why does the larger friend not eat the other four friends? eh, this is a joey heavy episode anyway.
I buy a cert from Verisign.. and I'm trusted. And I issue certificates to my friends based on mine.. because I trust my friends. But Verisign isn't supposed trust my friends necessarily, because I do.
Care to provide a link?
My parent story had several links that (eventually) show otherwise. One also has a link to a scan of the check. Its difficult, it takes months, but it doesn't seem to be quite as impossible as you claim. Just. Frustrating.
Yes, it sure does say that. But it it has been shown in court that the Sherman Act of 1890 in this particular case did not apply, it was found, because of the agubility of the definition of "not esseintial to the operation" of a PC without an OS. To use your poor analogy, It would be buying a car without an engine, with the intent of installing your own engine. (How well can you make use a PC with only the bios? Hmm? Can you provide a link to the case you're talking about? Seems like it was for "no" OS and not an alternative OS, anyway.) And if you actually think about what you're saying for a second, you will see that the sherman act wasn't meant to apply quite that broadly (allthough, it is somewhat disappointing it wasn't in the MS case). For example, AMI and Award produce bioses. There are several motherboards based on VIA and Ali refernce designs that can use either bios interchangably. Yet, I cannot buy a motherboard without a bios. Which, in your world, is illegal. Right?
You're confusing bundling of goods with outright fraud. Clearly, a spare tire is "bundled" with your car, just as windows is bundled with PCs. But do you get an agreement in writing from your auto dealer stating that you can get money back if you don't want the spare tire? If you actually ask your auto dealer, they say "Oh, yeah, we can't actually unbundle the tire, but if you buy the car this clause here in our contract with you says you can return the tire for a full refund." And sure enough, in the contract, it states exactly that. And then you apply for a refund? Under contract, you are entitiled to refund. Not upholding the terms of the contract is outright fraud.
Like a spare tire that comes with a car? Please! Be sure you know what it is you're aruing about, next time.
Look, I'm not some fanatical Linux Zealot on the fringes of society. I'm a programmer, system administrator, IT manager, whatever you want to call it. I use Linux and other free OSs, and I really hate being treated like some psycho zealot on the fringe when I try to avoid doubly (and sometimes triply) licensing microsoft software for Clients' PCs. ("You want what? We don't do that? Whats a EULA?" HP, Compaq, Gateway and now Dell. its all the same.) I mean, honestly, where is my FTC? Where is my consumer protection? It goes beyond frustrating.
Wendell
How do we get this information to (legal) people that might be interested in doing something about it? Perhaps the group that was prosecuting microsoft in the anti-trust trial would like a community effort to discover these sorts of things, to use as evidence.. ?
Linux: Install hdparm & smart-ctl (apt-get install smartsuite for debheds out there)
/dev/hda
I get 40 mb/sec sustained uncached sequential read on Maxtor D7xxX and about 20 mb/sec writing. Windows 2000: Windows 2000 Ultra DMA doesn't actually work right in pre-sp2 environments, most of the time. You can see if your drives are in DMA mode in device manager. Note that DMA / PCI Bus mastering involves a *LOT* of overhead. For example, Striping across onboard controllers and external controllers will create a nightmare for the bus controller. Even striping two Maxtor or Seagate drives on different PCI slots will hurt your bandwidth. I think this will probably all be covered reasonably though, in other replies. My question is this: On 35 or 40 servers with a myriad of drive brands, types, interfaces (scsi and IDE) I seem to get a lot of errors. Even pre-built new-in-box $10,000 dell servers generate lots of errors that seem to be non critical. I do not understand:
#smartctl -v
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: Revision Number: 10 Attribute Flag Value Worst Threshold Raw Value ( 1)Raw Read Error Rate 0x000e 116 062 025 101838729
( 5)Reallocated Sector Ct 0x0033 100 100 036 0
( 7)Seek Error Rate 0x000f 056 037 030 127734127
(194)Temperature 0x0022 056 065 000 59
(195)Hardware ECC Recovered 0x001a 072 063 000 2448078
(198)Offline Uncorrectable 0x0010 100 100 000 0
(199)UDMA CRC Error Count 0x003e 200 200 000 0
I'm not sure I understand? No udma CRC error count, but hardware ECC recovered?? Is this normal ??? At least there have been no relocations. But anyway, I frequently copy 100 mb files between drives (on different controllers) at a rate of about 60-70 mb/sec. In a dual CPU setup or P4 setup (with PCI irq transform) I get *much* better. I can literally copy 160 mb files from one Raid 0 set to another in about 3-4 seconds with some of those maxtor drives. The PCI bus maxes out at about 120 mb/sec. And in, say, a network environment, you'd have disk controller and network fighting over PCI bus mastering-- creating a lot of overhead.
Surplus sites and auction sites like Ebay are good for this sort of thing. Myself, I have a Computone Executech II key system with nice lcd speakerphones and programmable button consoles. I got the PBX and 15 phones on ebay for $65+s/h. While it is true you can't plug in a plain old telepohone (POTs), Even these old proprietary phone systems have some "auxilary" jacks on them for regular analog devices (fax machines, etc) you may want to use at an extension. I was able to use google groups to find all the pertinent wiring information before I even bid on it.
I use this phone system in conunction with vgetty and this. If someone calls in and the VOCP system answers, you can do all the standard voicemail stuff, you can issue a page to my email pager, send a fax(which can be forwarded to email) or I can even dial into the system and get a PPP dial-up connection if I'm on the road and otherwise don't have internet.
I want to go to lawschool for this very reason. I had an interesting debate a few months ago, which has expanded onto several threads of thought. Consider the following:
1. Is it legal if someone hires you to kill them?
2. Is it legal if someone hires you to destroy some of their property?
3. If someone hires you to simply annoy them, what then? (i.e. a "crime" that does no measurable damages)
4. What happens if observe that a crime could easily be commited, and yet you do nothing?
5. What if you have advance knowledge of a crime, and do nothing?
There are two things working against techies: 1. Social engineering (direct or indirect) works on law enforcement with reguard to technology issues because they simply aren't trained. If the head of IT for a city or other "important" person calls and tells the law to arrest someone based on some obscure log printout, the law will probably be able to do so. 2. No one understands technology, except you, and well, no one will listen to you when you stand accused. Unlike other scuffles, the cops can't examine the situation and determine for themselves the severity and how to handle it.*
Clearly, #1 is illegal. Based on many cases in CA, VA it would seem that even if you have papers signed by the CTO and CEO , and you do a full security audit you can still be arrested. (Remember the case in CA where the guy did social engineering and took pictures of the server room -- thats it. He's serving a 1 year prison sentence. The board of directors and the President of the company sent him up -- the CTO and CEO resigned.) "Breaking the law is still breaking the law, irregardless of intent..." is what the prosecution successfully ordered. But whats the analogy for wireless? An english school boy standing on your lawn with a bell yelling about how you never lock your house when you leave that only some people can hear? Or is the better analogy like going up to someone's door, rattling it, then discovering that there is no lock? Its all a matter of politics and twisted truths -- not really the crucible that should burn all that away.
20m/s was perhaps true several years ago, but I promise this is no longer the case. Buggy, crappy file systems may cause slower speed, but if you're serious about these sorts of things.. make a 1 gb partition and copy the cd image to the FS or directly to a CD image. This drive *should* be seperate from the Host OS but, as long as the host OS supports a proper program scheduler and the CD burning software sets itsself up with higher than normal priority, this isn't a problem. A commodity $99 Maxtor D740X can and does sustain 40 mbyte/sec on 80% of the drive. In fact, this drive is based directly on designs from Quantum's enterprise A/V rated SCSI line, with an IDE interface board. Its *minimum* sequentail read speed toward the end of the disk is 28+ mbyte/sec. With an 8 mbyte buffer on the 40x CD-R drive, and a burst read on the IDE, the ide drive doesn't have to respond for (about) a full three quarters of a second to prevent buffer underrun.
Also, only striping raid works as you think. Reliability aside, RAID(and most raid in general) is only good for dealing with multiple concurrent processes reading/writing* to disks. Not a single process using all the disk bandwidth. This makes sense, if you consiter that you don't want one rogue process consuming all the i/o bandwidth to the disk. Its technoligically easier (in say, raid 1, raid 5) to implement this. (consider the queueing algorithm for raid 1:::
support two concurrent read ops (one for each drive, independently with raid vs. serializing multi-reads across drives to get the data efficiently/rounding up all those parity stripes) The 3ware cards of which you speak, in fact, do this exactly. Try hdparm sometime.. it uses a single I/O thread for reading/writing.. and your raid will appear painfully slow. But other benchmarking apps, like bonnie, will show it fast fast fast. I have personally maxed out the PCI bus with a 3 ware card and 3 Maxtor D740X drives on raid 5 using Bonnie.
*Well not so much writing, unless you have those nice raid cards with the battery-backed ram that delays writes/parity updates until the buffer fills or there is a window of no activity on the drive needing updating.
...My point being that as things are right now, IDE hard drives are not quite fast enough even with an 8MB buffer to keep up with the data transfer required (and yes, I am running my 7200 Maxtor 27GB as Primary master, and LG 32X CD-RW as Secondary Master on an Intel 815EEA2 board) ...
uhh... what? Maxtor D740X transfer rates (uncached) -> min/avg/max 27282kb/38572kb/41123kb per second. Seagate ATA IV 10 gb -> 21800kb/26280kb/29980kb per second. (128mb test file size)
one X is 150k/s.. 32x is 4.8 mb/sec. one CD is say, 650mb. Burn time is therefor a minimum of 2:25. TOC and leadout tracks add time, though. 40x is 6000 kb/sec. Right, however, is The difference in 32x and 40x "feels" negligible.
There is something horribly wrong with your setup if you can't manage 6+ mb/sec from your maxtor hard drive. I think I managed 9 or 10 mb/sec from my old quantum fireball udma/33 drive way back on my Pentium 233.
If you could prioritize ACKs then, by virtue of the protocol, Uploads (and their downstream acks) would be the first to be throttled. Also, TCP, by design, has the underlying assumption point-to-poing bandwidth is symmetric. It is not in this instance.
Anyway, How can you use the QoS thing to give Acks a higher priority? You can install QoS in control panel on Win2k/WinXP, but you can't actually install the QoS management snap-in except on W2k Server. I *doubt* they'd throw in ack management into this QoS, but they may.
Wendell
I'm not trolling but, honestly, this thread has an unusual number of people posting information like "dsl is half-duplex!" or "gee, mine isn't like that, what gives?" whatever. Sigh.
I can't speak to the complexities of the Windows TCP stack, except to say its based on some BSD tcp stack. There are a lot of options you can set in the registry, and you can read more about it here. It is unlikely you will be able to do this "properly" (read: RFC ) on the W2k/WXP default TCP service. there *might* be a different TCP/IP service for XP Pro or server to address this, but its unlikely. No, QoS has *nothing* do do with this. Let me explain.. as few posts seem to get it...
In TCP you have acks for the data you have recieved. Acks can go back to the sender within data packets (Its just a sequence number, really, sliding window.. protocol 5 I think... use Google if you're lost) or ACKs can go back by themselves. There ARE parameters in W2k for affecting how long W2k will Queue Acks while waiting for a data packet it can piggy-back the ack on. You can decrease this parameter, which may help (or it could backfire). You can also change the protocol window size, so that windows will wait longer*, but this could also backfire as it may overflow the queue in the DSL router (I suspect this in combination that Acks are just plain being choked out).
The poster seems to understand exactly why their connection becomes throttled, even though most of the replies here don't seem to....
Now, there might be hope yet. If you use PPPoE, it is a bit more likely you can find a packet scheduler/prioritizer to give Ack packets higher priority. I believe there are a number of PPPoE packages that probably address this problem as part of their design (this sort of thing is somewhat more common than most of the other threads lead you to believe.) I believe WinPoET does, though I can find no information of this on their page. There is also a truly excellent, free, PPPoE package available at (google snapshot) here. though you might have to talk to the author to find out more about its ack-priority algorithm...
If you don't have PPPoE, you might also look at Nat32 though it only thinly refrences TCP Ack traffic shaping for DSL/Cable asymmetric connections in its documentation.
I'm not being a zealot, but the *best* thing is probably to use some crappy P133 linux or BSD machine as traffic shaper. You can set up port forwarding for when NAT can't figure out what box to send stuff to, to avoid the downsides of being behind a firewall. The reason for this is that you would probably have to have a special implementation of the TCP/IP service that knows about your upstream and downstream, and prioritizes accordingly. The Registry parameters I mentioned earlier might help, but it won't truly fix the problem.
*This would be good if you get out of order packets. If network traffic is sporadic, this tends to help. So, windows can re order from a batch of, say, 30 packets vs. 15, windows will wait for a missed packet longer.. this missed packet (which hopefullly won't expire) is more likely to make it in because there is more time for it to do so.
I apologize for over symplifying... but you get the idea.
Wendell
Yes, other patent systems seem less broken. Like, in the EU, I think you can't be a patent squatter.
You prove my point for me. Analogies like this one can be a double edged sword. The defense might make an argument like yours, but the prosecution could also say something completely different and relevant. This particular patent might be harder than others, but there was a case not long ago that made the analogy that scanning a host on the internet with nmap is like going up to someone's house, rattling all the windows, doors, walls, etc. for any "vulnerabilities" that would let them into the house without "breaking" in. Basically, it comes down to who has the most money to put time into a thoughtful argument, as I said, once it is in the court system.
Patent trolls make a good living, it seems. Yeah... Findlaw is a good source for court transcripts of cases involving patents.
Like many of you, I'm a (lifetime) student, a CS Major and a hobbyist. I love computer science, physics and math (in that order). I write software for grocery money (independent of some corporate entity..), do network administration and high-level training (i.e. teaching an IT department how to use samba.. etc). I'm also into hobby electronics, amateur robotocs, etc. As an individual inventor/hobbyist it is hard to see the US patent system as a means of anything but reinforcing corporate interest. There are only four possibilities, really:
1. Hobbyist has patent, Company has patent. This one plays out in court. Likely, who has the most money wins. At the very most for the hobbyist, I'll bet you the ruling says the hobbist and the company developed the same thing independently.
2. Hobbyist has patent, company doesn't but is granted patent. Again, this one will probably play out in court. The hobbyist is more favored, but legal representation matters.
3. Hobbyist has no patent, Company has broad umbrella patent. Again, it plays out in court. What are the chances the court would decide that the hobbyist independently invented?
4. No one has patents. This one is tough, though usually the company in question applies for a patent then initiates legal action with the hope that by the time it comes to trial, they will have been issued a patent. (findlaw)
See a recurring theme? As a hobbyist, I worry about being brought into court, for no good reason, based on some good idea I have. I can't afford that. Its a drain on the soul as well as the coffer. I also get the feeling that I have to prove I'm innocent of alleged patent violations. It tends to make me bitter, and no longer a jubilant inventor. Whats worse, I'm told that if I invent something independently and realease it to the community I can be held accountable for abitrary amounts that represent "losses" in revenue of the patent holder if they make a strong enough case. Review the Ogg vs. Mp3 initial corporate statements that were tantamount to "Yeah, they may have worked independently, but this mathmusic thing is so complex, they must have ripped us off. No one would think of that!" Fortunately, I'm still a poor student and have nothing anyone could take.
Baubles to you and I, in the hobbyist electronics/software algorithm sense, are incomprehensible to the court, and just about any argument can be made as to what they are, how complex they are, and how reasonable it would be to argue that a particular patent is a logical conclusion of other thoughts or a completely original thought.
Walmart. 12:34 am. Tuesday. "Hey, do you guys have warcraft iii?" "Yeah, but we're not supposed to sell it, yet." "Today is Tuesday, and its after midnight." "Ohh, it is after midnight!! here you go then!! " ka-ching. I got my copy 24 hours early. Bitchin.
Wendell