There was a fair amount of angst amongst Americans in the know back in the 1940s when it became clear that we would have to become a counterpoise to the Soviets. Essentially, we became a mirror image of them. Identical but opposite. This was all over and done with before Truman left office, sadly.
Very few people alive today are aware of what the US was like before that.
The problem with the Soviet Union was always that it believed in International Communism - no comment being made on their adherence or lack thereof to true Marxist thought. They had a firm belief (at least in the early days) that they were on the leading edge of a world-dominating wave, and had a strong interest in making it happen through espionage and overt encouragement of movements in other nations.
Under those circumstances, regardless of how many 'peace' organizations the Soviets had*, they were an existential threat to all other nations. They should have expected no less.
* The 'peace' organizations were also part of the overall Soviet strategy of trying to look inoffensive while trying to topple governments and extend their power.
My reasoning is as follows: I don't want to be using what the mass of the Internet is using in terms of browser. I want something with strong plugins and the ability to filter out dynamic code embedded in pages. That means Firefox.
When it looked like Firefox was going to gain 50% share, I was worried. First, my browser gets targeted. Second, people would be motivated to detect and block those using the script and ad blocking plugins I use. The decline in FF market share is pretty good news to me.
Actually, I got an offer in my email for a free copy of D3 if I buy a yearly pass for WoW. I cancelled my account a couple years ago. I wonder how many others got the same thing?
I started my daughters (17 and 14 now) on it a couple years ago and they seem to enjoy it. The gf is also big on it. The rules are simple, a PHB is enough for them. I don't give them access to the other books. It turned out to be a much better playing experience than I expected. Thinking of inviting more adults to join in now.
The problem is mitigated by TCP acceleration - PEP in particular. I guess you could call it a change of protocol - at least in between the two proxy nodes - the one at your end of the link and the one at the ground station end. It does quite a bit of spoofing and avoids waiting for ACKs. It is usually combined with proxying of web traffic (think Squid) and some sort of lossless compression (think v.42bis on modems or gzip on http).
It works. It isn't a panacea. I have tried just about every PEP product available out there and none can achieve more than a 30% acceleration of a link on a general basis. They can get more in specific circumstances - easily compressible traffic, something that was plagued with handshake delays otherwise, etc. None of those situations are normal so using the 30% number is appropriate.
I've used Ku in some pretty shitty environments with little issue. As you pointed out, the dishes were oversized for clear weather but were sufficient for burning through weather. With the exception of the little Swedish 0.92m, which was just tiny but a great performer. Consider this an endorsement of their gear. The rest were mostly autoacquire AVL 2.0m and 2.4m dishes. The dishes mostly were set up for quad band, with separate sets of LNB/BUC/waveguide/feed horn for each band. Ku was easier to get in some areas of the world than other bands, so that's mostly what we used.
Also, we could test out the Ku in CONUS before we went out there. There is no traveling to some remote armpit of the earth without testing the stuff at home first.
Our BUCs were mostly sized at about 30-35w. Sufficient for the task. Some people (think the Army) put huge BUCs on their dishes (hundreds of watts), but it mostly just serves to do bad things to the transponder on the bird.
The thing people miss about satellite connections is that they are never anywhere near 100%. 98% of your packets getting through sounds good in theory, but in practice it makes most TCP based protocols painful. You won't be doing much realtime anything over satellite. Mind you, i've lived at the end of multiple satellite links that I managed in SWA. We had great conditions - flat terrain, few clouds, no smog, high elevations due to being relatively close to the equator. You still lose a few here and there. It slows down downloads, causes losses even from IM traffic, emails fail to send, you name it.
A well managed and accelerated 12mbps downlink could provide some excellent speed, comparable to a high end DSL link. The real numbers you'll see will hover in the 700k/sec range in raw download speed. The latency is never going to be better than 520ms and probably worse, depending on the ground station location.
The problem with this technology is that it's Ka based. Ka is much worse in regards rain fade than Ku itself, which made the concept famous. All Ka systems I have worked with (commercial, and military) can't hit the bird anymore when the sky gets cloudy or a few drops of rain hit ground. This doesn't sound like a winner.
There sure as fuck is a such thing as 'gouging'. If the stock of retailers is full of product bought at $2.00 and the price drops to $1.00 because of weak demand, they are still going to try to sell the shit at a markup based on the cost of goods already stocked, ie, $2.00. This is otherwise known as gouging, making people pay outrageous prices for a nonexistent shortage. There's plenty of stock.
Oil companies are notorious for precisely this.
Your handwaving about economics doesn't change this simple fact. The only shortage is a shortage of suckers willing to pay exorbitant prices. No one wants to take a loss, so the prices continue to suck and people continue not to buy hard drives.
I am a right winger and now I know why the lefties hate your type. Ye gods, you want people to LIKE getting fucked up the ass.
Key quote: "Roughly 25 per cent of all global hard drive assembly facilities are located in Thailand, according to industry tracker iSuppli, which said supply would be constrained until the fourth quarter of 2012."
75% of the manufacturing capacity is unaffected. 25% was affected, though production was restarted back in December. The prices remain at about 200-250% of pre-flood prices, even for producers completely unaffected by the floods. Check Newegg yourself... This amounts to "not gouging" and "not cartel pricing" how?
If their intent is to sell hard drives at this point, they need to fix the prices. I'm just not buying anything until they get back into the reasonable range. The only way to make them do so is to not buy anything. The price increases amounted to gouging.
It has a follow-on effect also, I am also not buying any CPUs or motherboards.
Disassemble it using your 7/32" nut driver (buy online, it's an uncommon size) and run everything but the circuit board through the dishwasher. Enclose the key caps in a basket so they don't end up melted by the heater.
Works remarkably well and doesn't take the print off the keys, either. Use alcohol to clean the board. It will have some crumbs on it, mostly, unless you spill liquids into the keyboard.
Or it means we found someone who is an asshole. Either way, whatever. You wins mod points, you loses them. Just whore a bit to make up for it, easy stuff.
Well, I can think of a few reasons off the top of my head.
One is power - you might say solar but that only works ~ 12 hours a day on average, the rest would have to be battery powered and then you have battery failure to deal with, also. Stringing a power cord over an oceanic distance is infeasible, of course. At least at the surface.
Next, to get that ~ 20 miles a hop, you need to elevate the antennas. And I say antennas, because you'd have to have one facing in each direction. So you'd have a buoy with a minimum 15 meter mast off the top. Probably wouldn't stay upright. At the surface, the horizon is as little as 7 miles.
Then, you'd have to deal with wind and wave movement. The LOS antennas need to have at least a rough point at each other, within a degree or so at that range. If that 15m mast is flipping back and forth in waves, that isn't happening. Even at the surface it would be a problem - seen a buoy in rough weather? They bounce all over the place.
Then, how do you anchor the buoys? There will be a fair bit of play in any technology for anchoring a buoy at over 10k feet from the bottom. This will impact the antenna pointing as noted above.
I like the creative thinking but I don't think it will work.
This product delivers 108mbps of real bandwidth over a shot that can be up to about 20 miles. The radios can also be meshed, allowing multiple connections to each antenna. It's essentially not all that much different than wifi AP rigged up with a directional antenna. We've seen articles about such shots being extended to the same ranges the RF-7800w achieves. The key issue with such shots is the terrain, of course. Hills and valleys pose problems.
That said, why isn't anyone thinking about this? It would work. True, it wouldn't help with transoceanic shots, but in that case you could consider satellite to carry that kind of traffic. Or just pipe it over the wired Internet using the encryption mechanism of your choice - cheaper and easier. Use the sats as a backup to that in the event of government interference.
Not to entirely handwave the latency bit away, but a good PEP can solve a lot of the issues associated with latency. Compression and proxying can be handy also, but the TCP acceleration is vital and can offer a real world 30% improvement in usable bandwidth as well as much faster response times, as chains of acknowledgements are spoofed.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a fair amount of angst amongst Americans in the know back in the 1940s when it became clear that we would have to become a counterpoise to the Soviets. Essentially, we became a mirror image of them. Identical but opposite. This was all over and done with before Truman left office, sadly.
Very few people alive today are aware of what the US was like before that.
The problem with the Soviet Union was always that it believed in International Communism - no comment being made on their adherence or lack thereof to true Marxist thought. They had a firm belief (at least in the early days) that they were on the leading edge of a world-dominating wave, and had a strong interest in making it happen through espionage and overt encouragement of movements in other nations.
Under those circumstances, regardless of how many 'peace' organizations the Soviets had*, they were an existential threat to all other nations. They should have expected no less.
* The 'peace' organizations were also part of the overall Soviet strategy of trying to look inoffensive while trying to topple governments and extend their power.
This post deserved an upmod, moreso than many others.
These aren't so hard - SOCKS proxy works, for instance.
That said, I would suspect that shadow DNS projects would get a kick in the pants by this type of activity as well as SOPA.
My reasoning is as follows: I don't want to be using what the mass of the Internet is using in terms of browser. I want something with strong plugins and the ability to filter out dynamic code embedded in pages. That means Firefox.
When it looked like Firefox was going to gain 50% share, I was worried. First, my browser gets targeted. Second, people would be motivated to detect and block those using the script and ad blocking plugins I use. The decline in FF market share is pretty good news to me.
Keep at it, Asa!
Actually, I got an offer in my email for a free copy of D3 if I buy a yearly pass for WoW. I cancelled my account a couple years ago. I wonder how many others got the same thing?
It's about horseys, you see.
I started my daughters (17 and 14 now) on it a couple years ago and they seem to enjoy it. The gf is also big on it. The rules are simple, a PHB is enough for them. I don't give them access to the other books. It turned out to be a much better playing experience than I expected. Thinking of inviting more adults to join in now.
MD area, north of Baltimore.
It's easy to point out how obvious this solution is, because I'm not in a field that gives me any insight into the actual technical problems.
I love this statement. I will use this in the future without reference to you in meatspace, sadly.
The problem is mitigated by TCP acceleration - PEP in particular. I guess you could call it a change of protocol - at least in between the two proxy nodes - the one at your end of the link and the one at the ground station end. It does quite a bit of spoofing and avoids waiting for ACKs. It is usually combined with proxying of web traffic (think Squid) and some sort of lossless compression (think v.42bis on modems or gzip on http).
It works. It isn't a panacea. I have tried just about every PEP product available out there and none can achieve more than a 30% acceleration of a link on a general basis. They can get more in specific circumstances - easily compressible traffic, something that was plagued with handshake delays otherwise, etc. None of those situations are normal so using the 30% number is appropriate.
I've used Ku in some pretty shitty environments with little issue. As you pointed out, the dishes were oversized for clear weather but were sufficient for burning through weather. With the exception of the little Swedish 0.92m, which was just tiny but a great performer. Consider this an endorsement of their gear. The rest were mostly autoacquire AVL 2.0m and 2.4m dishes. The dishes mostly were set up for quad band, with separate sets of LNB/BUC/waveguide/feed horn for each band. Ku was easier to get in some areas of the world than other bands, so that's mostly what we used.
Also, we could test out the Ku in CONUS before we went out there. There is no traveling to some remote armpit of the earth without testing the stuff at home first.
Our BUCs were mostly sized at about 30-35w. Sufficient for the task. Some people (think the Army) put huge BUCs on their dishes (hundreds of watts), but it mostly just serves to do bad things to the transponder on the bird.
The thing people miss about satellite connections is that they are never anywhere near 100%. 98% of your packets getting through sounds good in theory, but in practice it makes most TCP based protocols painful. You won't be doing much realtime anything over satellite. Mind you, i've lived at the end of multiple satellite links that I managed in SWA. We had great conditions - flat terrain, few clouds, no smog, high elevations due to being relatively close to the equator. You still lose a few here and there. It slows down downloads, causes losses even from IM traffic, emails fail to send, you name it.
A well managed and accelerated 12mbps downlink could provide some excellent speed, comparable to a high end DSL link. The real numbers you'll see will hover in the 700k/sec range in raw download speed. The latency is never going to be better than 520ms and probably worse, depending on the ground station location.
The problem with this technology is that it's Ka based. Ka is much worse in regards rain fade than Ku itself, which made the concept famous. All Ka systems I have worked with (commercial, and military) can't hit the bird anymore when the sky gets cloudy or a few drops of rain hit ground. This doesn't sound like a winner.
There sure as fuck is a such thing as 'gouging'. If the stock of retailers is full of product bought at $2.00 and the price drops to $1.00 because of weak demand, they are still going to try to sell the shit at a markup based on the cost of goods already stocked, ie, $2.00. This is otherwise known as gouging, making people pay outrageous prices for a nonexistent shortage. There's plenty of stock.
Oil companies are notorious for precisely this.
Your handwaving about economics doesn't change this simple fact. The only shortage is a shortage of suckers willing to pay exorbitant prices. No one wants to take a loss, so the prices continue to suck and people continue not to buy hard drives.
I am a right winger and now I know why the lefties hate your type. Ye gods, you want people to LIKE getting fucked up the ass.
Link to FT article
Key quote:
"Roughly 25 per cent of all global hard drive assembly facilities are located in Thailand, according to industry tracker iSuppli, which said supply would be constrained until the fourth quarter of 2012."
75% of the manufacturing capacity is unaffected. 25% was affected, though production was restarted back in December. The prices remain at about 200-250% of pre-flood prices, even for producers completely unaffected by the floods. Check Newegg yourself... This amounts to "not gouging" and "not cartel pricing" how?
If their intent is to sell hard drives at this point, they need to fix the prices. I'm just not buying anything until they get back into the reasonable range. The only way to make them do so is to not buy anything. The price increases amounted to gouging.
It has a follow-on effect also, I am also not buying any CPUs or motherboards.
The cartel pricing on hard drives is the problem.
Yes.
The other answer above is correct, it doesn't gather much water and gunk. You can handwash them if you care, but the dishwasher has done well for me.
Disassemble it using your 7/32" nut driver (buy online, it's an uncommon size) and run everything but the circuit board through the dishwasher. Enclose the key caps in a basket so they don't end up melted by the heater.
Works remarkably well and doesn't take the print off the keys, either. Use alcohol to clean the board. It will have some crumbs on it, mostly, unless you spill liquids into the keyboard.
Someone downmodded the above comment, it's altogether too true. Apparently another of the "gibbering retards".
Wouldn't having a lot of meshed nodes be one of the elements of said redundancy? Kind of hard to DF and shut down thousands of nodes...
Or at least made reference to the Python bit about Australian table wine having a bouquet like an Aborigine's armpit.
Or it means we found someone who is an asshole. Either way, whatever. You wins mod points, you loses them. Just whore a bit to make up for it, easy stuff.
Well, I can think of a few reasons off the top of my head.
One is power - you might say solar but that only works ~ 12 hours a day on average, the rest would have to be battery powered and then you have battery failure to deal with, also. Stringing a power cord over an oceanic distance is infeasible, of course. At least at the surface.
Next, to get that ~ 20 miles a hop, you need to elevate the antennas. And I say antennas, because you'd have to have one facing in each direction. So you'd have a buoy with a minimum 15 meter mast off the top. Probably wouldn't stay upright. At the surface, the horizon is as little as 7 miles.
Then, you'd have to deal with wind and wave movement. The LOS antennas need to have at least a rough point at each other, within a degree or so at that range. If that 15m mast is flipping back and forth in waves, that isn't happening. Even at the surface it would be a problem - seen a buoy in rough weather? They bounce all over the place.
Then, how do you anchor the buoys? There will be a fair bit of play in any technology for anchoring a buoy at over 10k feet from the bottom. This will impact the antenna pointing as noted above.
I like the creative thinking but I don't think it will work.
This is a 5ghz band line of sight radio that I have worked with.
This product delivers 108mbps of real bandwidth over a shot that can be up to about 20 miles. The radios can also be meshed, allowing multiple connections to each antenna. It's essentially not all that much different than wifi AP rigged up with a directional antenna. We've seen articles about such shots being extended to the same ranges the RF-7800w achieves. The key issue with such shots is the terrain, of course. Hills and valleys pose problems.
That said, why isn't anyone thinking about this? It would work. True, it wouldn't help with transoceanic shots, but in that case you could consider satellite to carry that kind of traffic. Or just pipe it over the wired Internet using the encryption mechanism of your choice - cheaper and easier. Use the sats as a backup to that in the event of government interference.
Not to entirely handwave the latency bit away, but a good PEP can solve a lot of the issues associated with latency. Compression and proxying can be handy also, but the TCP acceleration is vital and can offer a real world 30% improvement in usable bandwidth as well as much faster response times, as chains of acknowledgements are spoofed.
The US equivalent is called a Phalanx. It rocks, but it isn't 100% effective against SSMs.