That attitude might fly in the boonies - but in the corporate world, we're not gonna hire someone who's not open to using *any* tool available to get the job done. Leave the religion / close-mindedness at home, there is no one best tool out there.
Heh, that attitude wasn't a company policy, it was a job description suited for some. Besides it depends quite a bit on what the company is doing wether getting hands dirty with proprietary software is necessary, needed or even suitable. In our case, it is not.
There's no need for me or anyone who's main expertise is oss related to participate in some Visual M$ whatever related tasks, no more than I sould take part in marketing or executive decisions.
Besides keeping fingers away from closed source proprietary sw with malformed interfaces and unknown amount of bugs has little to do with "using any tool available". Even now I could easily get a job which would right about double my salary, but which would involve everything you just said there. I was talking about personal job comfort, just as I wouldn't accept any job with mandatory 80h/week, sit on floor or any other ridiculous measures. Increased salary just doesn't cut certain things.
What I stressed out in the previous post was just that. NOW all that is possible. Ten years ago there was nothing but what you just described with "we in the corporate world". OSS success has spawned all sorts of commerce that targets or utilizes OSS to a point that one doesn't have to see M$ except here in YRO articles or virus/worm reports.
Things are getting pretty scary in the open source world, particularly with the lawyers getting involved...
(This may be redundant and obvious to most, but I never get tired of pointing this out to myself whenever I read a Your (lack of?) Rights Online article that upsets me yet again.)
Lawyers are actually a sign of OSS's success. Where there's shit there are bound to be flies, and it's even more so with money and lawyers. When money comes into the equation downsides are many, e.g. lawyers, marketing, all sorts of other parasites and ofcourse publicity with all it's further downsides. BUT there are also good sides! I for one am especially grateful for having a job where I can use and write GPL'd code AND more importantly that's what I'm also supposed to do.:)
Being also able to make abundantly clear in the job interview that I will not touch anything M$ related even with a lone icmp echo request on an avian carrier and still get the job also counts on my scale. Doubt that was possible 10+ years ago for a programmer that hadn't ascended to the demigod hood except in nethack.
Good point... I thought Sweeden was with the rest of Europe at +1 GMT.
I don't quite follow what you mean with "rest of Europe", but if you're talking about CET (Central European Time) which Sweden also belongs to it's currently GMT+2 (due to daylight-savings time).
Even Greenwich is currently GMT+1, because GMT does not make daylight savings changes...
"Obviously this isn't fair, but what are the alternatives in this down economy, where jobs are hard to find?"
Know what you're doing. Learn and study to become able to do the stuff your supposed to. In this "down economy" there are plenty of jobs for people that aren't still thinking javascript is a key to a six figure salary. Just because a decade ago anyone that had seen a computer was able to get a job means that now that they can't is a "down economy".
This industry is the only one where a people knowing what a clutch is used to be able to find a job as a car mechanic. Shame on all of you boom-spawned-know-nothings that give us capables a bad name.
A company forcing you to work for 12 hours a day 7 days a week and you're not up it or don't want to? Find another company! There are companies and contracts always available for those of us that can do our job well.
Exactly, I've ascended few times since and knowing how the end game goes, it's pretty crucial not the let the bastards such you even once.
Not only items, but also whole levels. I remember the first time I fought my way up from the depths with the AoY. Two thirds of the normal dungeon levels had to be rediscovered, which is, shall we say bitching, concidering the wizzy keeps spawning there every few hunded rounds...
With nethack one stumbles onto some really surprising situations, but this one remains unforgettable.
Several years back, when I hadn't ascended any of my characters, I had a really really good game going on, the kind of game you though might take you all the way. Multiple Amulets of Life saving paving the way. Accidental step into a polymorph trap had caused that I wasn't waring my helmet. Met a mind flayer that started eating my brain. I didn't realize I didn't have my helmet on and my intelligence startted dropping rapidly. Didn't know exactly what that was about, I figured some "restore ability" and that's it and thought "fsck it, here, take some". Intelligence dropped to 2 or 3 and then...
"You die of brainlessness. But wait. --more--"
(I knew I had several amulets of life savings, so no worries)
"Your medallion begins to glow. Your life has been saved. --more--"
(but little did I know...)
"You still have do brain. You die."
"Do you want your possessions identified y/n ?"
I can't begin to describe my astonishment there...
Can't those files on the cd be accessed in any way?
I mean wolfenstein is quake3 based game and it's maps and all are.pk3 files, which is a normal.zip file that can opened up easily and seen what's in there. That map would have to be in one of the.pk3 files of the xbox edition.
In many cases there are some interesting file inside the.pk3 files, not only in mods, but also in the shipped.pk3 files (developers configs and such stuff for example).
Thenagain I'm not at all familiar with xbox or what one can do with it's cds or whatever, I only know quake3...
Handwriting experts fear that the wild popularity of e-mail and IM, particularly among kids, could erase cursive within a few decades.
Good god, you should really show Linux to those kids. Opensource email clients and instant messengers have been able to erase both cursive and noncursive for quite some time now...
> I don't see the problem in them [kids] seeing these materials
Dunno, don't have them of my own, but I do have serious problem with me seeing that crap. If I only could go back to the day I let my sensors down and was tricked to accidentally pressing the tubgirl link some./ poster had so cleverly presented as a mirror for the article.
Are you suggesting that U.K. spammers should be beaten with a baseball bat if they send explicit material to an 18 year old in the USA, despite it being perfectly reasonable material for somebody of that age in their own country?
Well, at 18, not a baseball bat so much. I think they should be legally culpable for breaking the laws of the US, just as someone in the US should be culpable for advertizing Nazi memorabilia across the internet to someone in France (if I remember my google / ebay precedents right). [BTB, I agree with American policy there: it may be bad to sell Nazi memorabilia, but I don't think it's the government's call.]
Are you aware that you US was just about the only country that didn't agree on their soldiers being accountable for war crimes in international court.
It seems that you don't notice how you're ok playing the police, but when it's you that's being accused, well, you want to have the right to do anything.
(another example? this goes to flaming, but still. How about biochemical weapons treaty? US revoked their participation yet attacked iraq for weapons of mass destruction...)
Even if Linksys complies after some cajoling, this demonstrates the practical "loophole" we have been witnessing for the past 2 years: companies use GPL'ed stuff, and if they get caught, they (often) comply. For each violation that gets caught, there might be several that get away.
So what? I mean, I'm all pro GPL and also a GPL sw coder. I work for a company that manufactures slot machines that run linux and loads of other GPL'd software aswell as our own apps. Technically we don't distribute the slotmachines so we're not bound by GPL, and if we were, we'd just put a simple ftp server that would have the.tar.gz's because I do everything possible to be able to use the stock products. Why? These are long term products, life spans of about 10 years. Living with a set of patches for every damn tool we need... I have better things to do. If there's a way to avoid changing the origian sources, we'll go ahead with that one.
And what's the real beauty is that when we discover bugs or make future enhancements or such changes, we try real hard to get them into the actual sw package, again just to avoid having to maintain a large set of patches.
And for example Linksys failing to offer a stock kernel tar ball in their site doesn't sound that serious to me. A proprietary sw mogul using gpl'd code in their product, now that would be a serious violation.
Unfortunately what all the peaceniks always forget is step 3.5 "Then they annihilate you". You can never get to step 4 anymore than the underpants gnomes can profit.
Are you the gunzoid that new the Oklahoma bomber from "Bowling for Columbine"? "Gandhi? Who? I'm not familiar with that?"
As a replacement to RMS, I suppose, but why? Is that standardized somehow? I don't see esr getting along any better with the other units present in lkml, especially the main units Torvals (fame), Cox (hacking skills).
That's a slam dunk. Don't get me wrong, I'm a mozzy user myself, but this guy nails the "ironic discussion" with post that is, like another poster said, both funny, insightful and informative.
They are more best explanations for which no counterevidence exists yet or explanations that describe the problem as good as needed
That can be called a), but you really shouldn't forget: b) they give predictions that can be measured
For any scientific theory it's equally essential that it both explains and predicts. Otherwise we wind up into the domain of undisputable explanations, e.g. "it was God's will".
Perhaps you refered to that as best explanation, but atleast it seems that many people tend to forget the importance of explanations having to be predicting or falsifiable or something like that. Why else would we have so many gollable releigious people around?
Newtonian mechanics was run down by the theory of relativity.
Moreover you mix approximation and special case. The special theory of relativity is correct in relativity framework although it only applies when there are no accelerations involved, i.e. constant velocities.
Newtonian mechanics however is not a special case of anything. It's a good approximation for small velocities and macroworld, but even then it's erroneous from a theory of relativity point of view.
How the future will show that the quantum and relativity theories were both in fact just good approximations in their own domain remains to be seen, but neither is likely to be a special case of anything. Or atleast other cannot be, heck, they're contradicting theories, yet undisputed in their domain.
Not that easy to make it brief, but I'll give it a shot.
The sent bit is polarized as either vertical(1)/horizontal(0) or the two diagonals as 1/0 in a same way. If you try to measure weather it's vertical/horizontal, but the sent bit was one of the diagonal polarities you get randomly 1 or 0. And naturally if you try to measure the correct polarities you get the intended bit 1 or 0.
The receiver can measure the polarity in of those two different ways. Upon receiving he picks the polarity measurement of choice in random, because he cannot know of which method he should use. Naturally he'll select about 50% correctly. For those his measurements are valid.
He can then simply call the sender and tell which polarity directions he used in each bit and the sender can then afterwards tell which were correct.
The essential thing here is that a man-in-the-middle hacker cannot receive and retransmit because prior to knowing of which polarity the original qubits in the stream was he cannot be certain any of his received bits, thus making it impossible for him to resend it to the originally intended receiver.
that sounds silly, you can't possibly need 125 fps, most monitors only update the picture with a frequency of 80Hz or so, so 1/3 of your frames will just never be drawn. Anything above 80fps is just useless.
If this is about Quake 3 again, the 125 fps is not about graphics, but physics. Exactly 125 (and 43 and 76 IIRC) maximises the rounding errors that occur in player physics simulation, this allow people to pull off a tad higher rocket jumps and other such trickery. This was an accident, but it's being widely used by using com_maxfps to cap the fps to either 76 or 125 and making sure your 3D card can sustain that in all situations.
I do understand. And truth be told, the same minute I had posted complaining sortage of pictures available and not being able to see jack sh*t, the sun popped into the pictures. I guess over in Finland the eclipse started somewhat sooner than in Norway, thus when I already saw the eclipse gotten to one third it must have been only just starting there.
Cheers for the effort though. Your live pic hosting might have worked out quite a bit better had it not gotten slashdotted...:)
Erm, isn't this just a problem of tuning the various parameters?
Not much to tune in TCP.
802.11b, as far as I know, does not provide a reliable transport, thus the TCP over it runs nicely.
The problem arises then you run TCP over a reliable transport (e.g. ppp over another TCP). And then only then there congestion underneath, i.e. packet loss, this results in lower TCP to cutting down it's send window. This appears as huge latency increase to the upper tcp, but not packet loss occurs there, thus the timer gets all messed up and it falsely assumes it has a _lot_ smaller bandwidth than it does.
As people have stated here, saying "I run ppp over ssh without problems", if you have no packetloss then things should go smoothly, but if you run that ssh over the internet especially when there's traffic or over a transport for which packetloss is something you have to learn to live with (say, cable modems or mobile networks) you will experience problems.
I'm not talking about minor overhead here, I'm talking about the upper TCP getting totally messed up.
Packetloss becomes your worst enemy. Lan or well provided ADSL, no problem. Cable modems, jammed isps or mobile solutions, have you tried with any of these?
Naturally there's no problem regardless of how many times you stack TCP, as long as there's no congestion. But when you start dropping packets, actual IP ones underneath, your lower TCP reacts to that by killing it's send window and on the same time the ppp data being run on top of that gets queued, which causes timers to bang their heads in there. Results is untolerable lags and even connection breakage.
However, that problem is just as relevant when tunneling a single port over ssh as it is when you vpn your whole connection.
No it's not. in simple port forwarding only the data is tunneled via encrypted tcp as opposed to vanilla tcp, but if you run ppp on top of that then the vpn ip packets travel in the ppp data and thus on tcp.
It is deffinitely not the same and there's nothing wrong with simple ssh port forwarding as long as you don't mix IP encapsulation there with slip or ppp.
I run NFS over VTUN over SSH. Is it fast? nope (actually, if I'm local (airport), the performance is OK). Does it work? Yup. Is it convenient? Hell, yes.
Sure it runs ok on top of ethernet where packetloss is extremely rare.
Have you actually ran tcp on top tcp over the internet, across distances? Even 5% packetloss lags the upper tcp to unbearable sluggishness. And 5% is not that much, especially with congested ISP , cable modems, mobile solutions... you name it. Running tcp over ssh outside lan typically becomes a problem. I think your airport being largish lan based vpn is an exception...
I'm not ranting about minor sluggishness here either, I'm talking about lags so bad that you do really start to actively look for other alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Hah. Doesn't intelligent have enough hype anymore? What's next? selfconscious? superhuman?
That attitude might fly in the boonies - but in the corporate world, we're not gonna hire someone who's not open to using *any* tool available to get the job done. Leave the religion / close-mindedness at home, there is no one best tool out there.
Heh, that attitude wasn't a company policy, it was a job description suited for some. Besides it depends quite a bit on what the company is doing wether getting hands dirty with proprietary software is necessary, needed or even suitable. In our case, it is not.
There's no need for me or anyone who's main expertise is oss related to participate in some Visual M$ whatever related tasks, no more than I sould take part in marketing or executive decisions.
Besides keeping fingers away from closed source proprietary sw with malformed interfaces and unknown amount of bugs has little to do with "using any tool available". Even now I could easily get a job which would right about double my salary, but which would involve everything you just said there. I was talking about personal job comfort, just as I wouldn't accept any job with mandatory 80h/week, sit on floor or any other ridiculous measures. Increased salary just doesn't cut certain things.
What I stressed out in the previous post was just that. NOW all that is possible. Ten years ago there was nothing but what you just described with "we in the corporate world". OSS success has spawned all sorts of commerce that targets or utilizes OSS to a point that one doesn't have to see M$ except here in YRO articles or virus/worm reports.
Things are getting pretty scary in the open source world, particularly with the lawyers getting involved...
:)
(This may be redundant and obvious to most, but I never get tired of pointing this out to myself whenever I read a Your (lack of?) Rights Online article that upsets me yet again.)
Lawyers are actually a sign of OSS's success. Where there's shit there are bound to be flies, and it's even more so with money and lawyers. When money comes into the equation downsides are many, e.g. lawyers, marketing, all sorts of other parasites and ofcourse publicity with all it's further downsides. BUT there are also good sides! I for one am especially grateful for having a job where I can use and write GPL'd code AND more importantly that's what I'm also supposed to do.
Being also able to make abundantly clear in the job interview that I will not touch anything M$ related even with a lone icmp echo request on an avian carrier and still get the job also counts on my scale. Doubt that was possible 10+ years ago for a programmer that hadn't ascended to the demigod hood except in nethack.
Good point... I thought Sweeden was with the rest of Europe at +1 GMT.
I don't quite follow what you mean with "rest of Europe", but if you're talking about CET (Central European Time) which Sweden also belongs to it's currently GMT+2 (due to daylight-savings time).
Even Greenwich is currently GMT+1, because GMT does not make daylight savings changes...
"Obviously this isn't fair, but what are the alternatives in this down economy, where jobs are hard to find?"
Know what you're doing. Learn and study to become able to do the stuff your supposed to. In this "down economy" there are plenty of jobs for people that aren't still thinking javascript is a key to a six figure salary. Just because a decade ago anyone that had seen a computer was able to get a job means that now that they can't is a "down economy".
This industry is the only one where a people knowing what a clutch is used to be able to find a job as a car mechanic. Shame on all of you boom-spawned-know-nothings that give us capables a bad name.
A company forcing you to work for 12 hours a day 7 days a week and you're not up it or don't want to? Find another company! There are companies and contracts always available for those of us that can do our job well.
Exactly, I've ascended few times since and knowing how the end game goes, it's pretty crucial not the let the bastards such you even once.
Not only items, but also whole levels. I remember the first time I fought my way up from the depths with the AoY. Two thirds of the normal dungeon levels had to be rediscovered, which is, shall we say bitching, concidering the wizzy keeps spawning there every few hunded rounds...
With nethack one stumbles onto some really surprising situations, but this one remains unforgettable.
Several years back, when I hadn't ascended any of my characters, I had a really really good game going on, the kind of game you though might take you all the way. Multiple Amulets of Life saving paving the way. Accidental step into a polymorph trap had caused that I wasn't waring my helmet. Met a mind flayer that started eating my brain.
I didn't realize I didn't have my helmet on and my intelligence startted dropping rapidly. Didn't know exactly what that was about, I figured some "restore ability" and that's it and thought "fsck it, here, take some". Intelligence dropped to 2 or 3 and then...
"You die of brainlessness. But wait. --more--"
(I knew I had several amulets of life savings, so no worries)
"Your medallion begins to glow. Your life has been saved. --more--"
(but little did I know...)
"You still have do brain. You die."
"Do you want your possessions identified y/n ?"
I can't begin to describe my astonishment there...
Can't those files on the cd be accessed in any way?
.pk3 files, which is a normal .zip file that can opened up easily and seen what's in there. That map would have to be in one of the .pk3 files of the xbox edition.
.pk3 files, not only in mods, but also in the shipped .pk3 files (developers configs and such stuff for example).
I mean wolfenstein is quake3 based game and it's maps and all are
In many cases there are some interesting file inside the
Thenagain I'm not at all familiar with xbox or what one can do with it's cds or whatever, I only know quake3...
Handwriting experts fear that the wild popularity of e-mail and IM, particularly among kids, could erase cursive within a few decades.
Good god, you should really show Linux to those kids. Opensource email clients and instant messengers have been able to erase both cursive and noncursive for quite some time now...
> I don't see the problem in them [kids] seeing these materials
./ poster had so cleverly presented as a mirror for the article.
Dunno, don't have them of my own, but I do have serious problem with me seeing that crap. If I only could go back to the day I let my sensors down and was tricked to accidentally pressing the tubgirl link some
Are you suggesting that U.K. spammers should be beaten with a baseball bat if they send explicit material to an 18 year old in the USA, despite it being perfectly reasonable material for somebody of that age in their own country?
Well, at 18, not a baseball bat so much. I think they should be legally culpable for breaking the laws of the US, just as someone in the US should be culpable for advertizing Nazi memorabilia across the internet to someone in France (if I remember my google / ebay precedents right). [BTB, I agree with American policy there: it may be bad to sell Nazi memorabilia, but I don't think it's the government's call.]
Are you aware that you US was just about the only country that didn't agree on their soldiers being accountable for war crimes in international court.
It seems that you don't notice how you're ok playing the police, but when it's you that's being accused, well, you want to have the right to do anything.
(another example? this goes to flaming, but still. How about biochemical weapons treaty? US revoked their participation yet attacked iraq for weapons of mass destruction...)
Even if Linksys complies after some cajoling, this demonstrates the practical "loophole" we have been witnessing for the past 2 years:
.tar.gz's because I do everything possible to be able to use the stock products. Why? These are long term products, life spans of about 10 years. Living with a set of patches for every damn tool we need... I have better things to do. If there's a way to avoid changing the origian sources, we'll go ahead with that one.
companies use GPL'ed stuff, and if they get caught, they (often) comply. For each violation that gets caught, there might be several that get away.
So what? I mean, I'm all pro GPL and also a GPL sw coder. I work for a company that manufactures slot machines that run linux and loads of other GPL'd software aswell as our own apps. Technically we don't distribute the slotmachines so we're not bound by GPL, and if we were, we'd just put a simple ftp server that would have the
And what's the real beauty is that when we discover bugs or make future enhancements or such changes, we try real hard to get them into the actual sw package, again just to avoid having to maintain a large set of patches.
And for example Linksys failing to offer a stock kernel tar ball in their site doesn't sound that serious to me. A proprietary sw mogul using gpl'd code in their product, now that would be a serious violation.
Unfortunately what all the peaceniks always forget is step 3.5 "Then they annihilate you". You can never get to step 4 anymore than the underpants gnomes can profit.
Are you the gunzoid that new the Oklahoma bomber from "Bowling for Columbine"? "Gandhi? Who? I'm not familiar with that?"
I propose a new unit of ego: The ESR
As a replacement to RMS, I suppose, but why?
Is that standardized somehow? I don't see esr getting along any better with the other units present in lkml, especially the main units Torvals (fame), Cox (hacking skills).
That's a slam dunk. Don't get me wrong, I'm a mozzy user myself, but this guy nails the "ironic discussion" with post that is, like another poster said, both funny, insightful and informative.
Hmm, physical laws are actually not facts...
:
They are more best explanations for which no counterevidence exists yet or explanations that describe the problem as good as needed
That can be called a), but you really shouldn't forget
b) they give predictions that can be measured
For any scientific theory it's equally essential that it both explains and predicts. Otherwise we wind up into the domain of undisputable explanations, e.g. "it was God's will".
Perhaps you refered to that as best explanation, but atleast it seems that many people tend to forget the importance of explanations having to be predicting or falsifiable or something like that. Why else would we have so many gollable releigious people around?
Newtonian mechanics was run down by the theory of relativity.
Moreover you mix approximation and special case. The special theory of relativity is correct in relativity framework although it only applies when there are no accelerations involved, i.e. constant velocities.
Newtonian mechanics however is not a special case of anything. It's a good approximation for small velocities and macroworld, but even then it's erroneous from a theory of relativity point of view.
How the future will show that the quantum and relativity theories were both in fact just good approximations in their own domain remains to be seen, but neither is likely to be a special case of anything. Or atleast other cannot be, heck, they're contradicting theories, yet undisputed in their domain.
Not that easy to make it brief, but I'll give it a shot.
The sent bit is polarized as either vertical(1)/horizontal(0) or the two diagonals as 1/0 in a same way. If you try to measure weather it's vertical/horizontal, but the sent bit was one of the diagonal polarities you get randomly 1 or 0. And naturally if you try to measure the correct polarities you get the intended bit 1 or 0.
The receiver can measure the polarity in of those two different ways. Upon receiving he picks the polarity measurement of choice in random, because he cannot know of which method he should use. Naturally he'll select about 50% correctly. For those his measurements are valid.
He can then simply call the sender and tell which polarity directions he used in each bit and the sender can then afterwards tell which were correct.
The essential thing here is that a man-in-the-middle hacker cannot receive and retransmit because prior to knowing of which polarity the original qubits in the stream was he cannot be certain any of his received bits, thus making it impossible for him to resend it to the originally intended receiver.
that sounds silly, you can't possibly need 125 fps, most monitors only update the picture with a frequency of 80Hz or so, so 1/3 of your frames will just never be drawn.
Anything above 80fps is just useless.
If this is about Quake 3 again, the 125 fps is not about graphics, but physics. Exactly 125 (and 43 and 76 IIRC) maximises the rounding errors that occur in player physics simulation, this allow people to pull off a tad higher rocket jumps and other such trickery. This was an accident, but it's being widely used by using com_maxfps to cap the fps to either 76 or 125 and making sure your 3D card can sustain that in all situations.
I do understand. And truth be told, the same minute I had posted complaining sortage of pictures available and not being able to see jack sh*t, the sun popped into the pictures. I guess over in Finland the eclipse started somewhat sooner than in Norway, thus when I already saw the eclipse gotten to one third it must have been only just starting there.
:)
Cheers for the effort though. Your live pic hosting might have worked out quite a bit better had it not gotten slashdotted...
I can see sun being 1/3 eclipsed already, yet the webcasts don't show anything but crap. Worst "live webcasts" I've seen...
Erm, isn't this just a problem of tuning the various parameters?
Not much to tune in TCP.
802.11b, as far as I know, does not provide a reliable transport, thus the TCP over it runs nicely.
The problem arises then you run TCP over a reliable transport (e.g. ppp over another TCP). And then only then there congestion underneath, i.e. packet loss, this results in lower TCP to cutting down it's send window. This appears as huge latency increase to the upper tcp, but not packet loss occurs there, thus the timer gets all messed up and it falsely assumes it has a _lot_ smaller bandwidth than it does.
As people have stated here, saying "I run ppp over ssh without problems", if you have no packetloss then things should go smoothly, but if you run that ssh over the internet especially when there's traffic or over a transport for which packetloss is something you have to learn to live with (say, cable modems or mobile networks) you will experience problems.
I'm not talking about minor overhead here, I'm talking about the upper TCP getting totally messed up.
And, in practice, I haven't seen it be a problem.
Packetloss becomes your worst enemy. Lan or well provided ADSL, no problem. Cable modems, jammed isps or mobile solutions, have you tried with any of these?
Naturally there's no problem regardless of how many times you stack TCP, as long as there's no congestion. But when you start dropping packets, actual IP ones underneath, your lower TCP reacts to that by killing it's send window and on the same time the ppp data being run on top of that gets queued, which causes timers to bang their heads in there. Results is untolerable lags and even connection breakage.
However, that problem is just as relevant when tunneling a single port over ssh as it is when you vpn your whole connection.
No it's not. in simple port forwarding only the data is tunneled via encrypted tcp as opposed to vanilla tcp, but if you run ppp on top of that then the vpn ip packets travel in the ppp data and thus on tcp.
It is deffinitely not the same and there's nothing wrong with simple ssh port forwarding as long as you don't mix IP encapsulation there with slip or ppp.
I run NFS over VTUN over SSH. Is it fast? nope (actually, if I'm local (airport), the performance is OK). Does it work? Yup. Is it convenient? Hell, yes.
Sure it runs ok on top of ethernet where packetloss is extremely rare.
Have you actually ran tcp on top tcp over the internet, across distances? Even 5% packetloss lags the upper tcp to unbearable sluggishness. And 5% is not that much, especially with congested ISP , cable modems, mobile solutions... you name it. Running tcp over ssh outside lan typically becomes a problem. I think your airport being largish lan based vpn is an exception...
I'm not ranting about minor sluggishness here either, I'm talking about lags so bad that you do really start to actively look for other alternatives.