At oil change time when you go to turn into the Mr. Lube the steering wheel resists, the doors and windows lock, the radio turns to a Ford oil change commercial and you're driven to the nearest Ford dealership
One of the major effects of bufferbloat on wireless is reduced ability to usefully deal with lots of clients connecting to the same AP.
All the major vendors should be aware of what is going on at www.bufferbloat.net and have something in place to ensure that their products will reflect new updates soonest when things get fixed. This is an ongoing problem that crept up on the internet tech community and there is work in progress to deal with it but it will take time.
OK - in-the-ear aids are nice - but (and I don't need a hearing aid) I run around with a blue-tooth headset on much of the time (we have hands-free law for driving here in BC) so...
1 - custom fit? I got 8 different ear moulds for the basic unit - pick one and suffer while my ear adapts
2 - custom frequency response? - Are you telling me that a 1+ GHz processor can't do the math for umpteen different frequency bands and adapt if/when needed?
3 - patents? Digital signal processing has been around for a lot more than 20 years - we used to use the Telebit Trailblazer modem (M68K processor and signal processing chip) back in the mid 1980s - and it broke the audio spectrum down into 256 discreet bands at that time!
So... if you can't afford an in-the-ear unit, someone please do up an ap for the smart phones and bluetooth!
My wife has a hearing aid - so I'm sensitive to this.
When she got it, we were fairly well off - just sold a company and to be frank, I didn't notice how much it cost.
recent problems with it put me on the front lines - and getting a bill for $800 just to fix is gave me a lot of angst. I have to say I railed at the person on the front counter quite a bit considering I know a lot about analog, digital, integrated circuits, and such - and basically told her that IMHO the components she was quoting as retail in the $3000 range were worth about $10 or less.
Then she loaned us an "over the ear" unit while the in-the-ear one was out for repair - and when I went to give it back, said "keep it" - so confirming that the actual hardware cost is trivial (unit is about 3 times the size of the current one but otherwise similar capabilities - and given the progress in IC units, represents maybe 3 years' progress)
So... when I heard an ad on the radio last week for an in-ear hearing aid for $500, I figured "about time" and so the poster is correct - there is a revolution coming.
Question is - what patents will be held over the heads of those trying to break this cartel - because it truly must be a cartel.
Note that I can now (despite the eye-glass cartel of yesteryear) purchase more than useful eye-glasses in various basic diopters at the local dollar store - to the point where I have enough around the house that I have achieve "maxiumum vapour pressure" of eye-glasses (i.e. there is a pair at hand any time/where I need them)
I'll never forget the point at which the GUI took over from the keyboard for such things as bold, italic, and other things.
Prior to this - the likes of WordPerfect were fast and efficient word processors because your fingers never left the "home" row and all commands were done with key combinations.
Now - type something, move right (or left) hand to the mouse - highlight - move mouse to menu - select - press mouse button - find "home" row again and start typing.
No wonder kids today use short-forms and misspellings and such
In the mean time - I take full advantage of what key-combination commands there are - and get a lot more done
Ken Thompson, one of the original creators of the UNIX system and the C language was asked what he'd do differently if he were redesigning the UNIX system.
Then in light of all that has transpired in the PS3 debacle, then Sony would claim they held copyright - at least so opines my cousin sitting here in the room beside me:)
in light of Microsoft may add evesdropping to Skype this is a really stupid idea - but then in light of some of the other "ideas" that come out of government in general and this one in particular we should be happy they're not actually going to conference in big business purposely.
While you're talking about latency - take a look at Bufferbloat and the stuff pertaining to wireless networks in general and cell-data in particular.
Much of today's cell tower equipment is installed with no queue management turned on - and 100% retry "forever" (or at least a long period of time, longer than the 2 seconds it takes TCP/IP sessions to decide a packet didn't get there and resend, causing cascading congestion) and loads of buffer space to the point where latency is measured in 10s of seconds in some cases.
A carrier that actually takes advantage of the queue management built into the edge equipment can make their network faster and "feel" faster, and cut down on the actual amount of data they carry - but many (most?) don't have a clue.
So, I run into the dentist's office with a horrendous toothache, tears in my eyes and pain in my expression - and get handed this to sign. Do the legal beagles out there think this is a fair contract signed in good faith?
I'm betting that a case can be made that this at least some such signatures were obtained under duress and therefore not valid.
Many (most?) WIFI routers have an option to provide authentication (and secure cert?) via a radius server.
Somehow, some way, this seems to be an opportunity to open up such machines to public access by setting up a default server that either simply authorizes anyone/everyone - or that requires a subscription and some form of signup.
An open-source project if there ever was. It has been a LONG time since I did anything with radius but I bet it could be done.
All this right after I read Wired Science's article on 7 science-education battlegrounds of 2011
If the US wants to be effective in technology they have to stop being stupid in education - otherwise we Canadians, along with the rest of the world, will beat the crap out of you.
Computer science is all about math so somehow we have to get the government(s) to get their thumbs out of their butts and get it off the table as far as patents are concerned. The problem is, it is also about human interface, needs, wants, applications, etc. that to the average non-computer person have little to do with math, and that is where we have our problems with the judiciary it seems. Maybe if we had lowered the barriers earlier we'd have some judges who had actually gone through some decent computer courses and would be familiar with the real facts of the matter.
The courses can't ignore math - but they don't have to go into it nearly as deeply as they do. Basic binary and theory should be included so that there is an understanding of what the compiler/interpreter is doing taking high-level down to machine level.
I'm not a mathematician but I've done my stint with calculus (back in the late 60's at high school and then university, just as compu-sci was really getting going) I hardly ever use anything but basic add/subtract/multiply/divide, even in designing some of the more sophisticated business and consumer products I've been involved with (but I've got Knuth's books and use them); that's why there is a need for experts - to bail me out when I need them. We need both kinds of computer people - those who can deal with the algorithms at the core, and those who can apply those algorithms to real programs that interact with humans. But more than that, we need more "real" people who have gone through the computer programs and thereby have at least a half a clue as to how computers really function and how to apply them to problems.
Was talking to a friend of mine - he grows flowers and cuts hair for a living - and he was decrying the fact that all the various computer stuff he's got is "just too complicated" for the average old pharts like him (and me, but I've grown up with it so I'm an exception to this) - and I had to agree because the programs were designed in large part by people who are techs and mathists - not your typical non-tech humans. Put it down to the filter at the education point of requiring the math skills that weeds out many is my guess.
Problem is highlighted by the note that the math profs have problems teaching compu-sci from anything but a math perspective - and the bulk of computer program design is in the human interface and basic business world that they don't easily relate to (nor do students who understand them in most cases)
So putting up the largely artificial barrier of understanding math (at least for some aspects of compu-sci) is hurting our use of computers in many ways.
I don't care what you say about Linux - just spell it correctly.
Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Android, Gentoo, Mandriva, Knoppix, SUSE, Slackware, Puppy, Slax, Freespire...
Who cares?
As long as you don't spell it Microsoft
p.s. The Kernel is Linux - the rest of the stuff is Open Source. Even Apple's OS/X gets it 95% right - they just use MACH instead of Linux and then apply a different GUI.
"Any packet loss is bad" - that's the mantra I get from network engineers - and then the idiots don't turn on ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification) or run some bad-ass piece of crap that resets the ECN that is already on the packets they're transiting - or their routers don't respect the notifications or...
(Reasonable) packet loss or ECN - pick one - and then tell your up and downstream neighbors why you picked it (hopefully ECN will find its way into near 100% deployment ASAP) and why they should respect it and follow on.
Then - when the Bufferbloat gurus get the testing systems working, test and report so we can do our jobs and let the world know good/bad setups and such.
I deal with streaming video daily - from a producer, distributor and support point of view.
"Why does the web site load so slowly?" is the classic question - caused in many cases by the "eagleholic" having 4 live eagle nest video streams running in one window while trying to post observations and screencaps to the web site in another.
Believe me - there is ample reason to deal with the problem as most of today's home networks are used for more than just one thing at a time. Mom is watching video, sis is uploading pictures of her party to Facebook, son is playing online games and dad is trying to listen to streaming audio - and NOTHING is working correctly despite the fact that this is a trivial load for even a T1 (1.45Mbps) let alone today's high-speed cable (30Mbps down and 5Mbps up). We used to run 30+ modems and web sites and email and all manner of stuff over bonded 56K ISDN lines for pity sake - and we got better latency than the links today.
What's the problem? The latency for the "twitch" game packets has gone from 10ms to 4000ms or more - and the isochronos audio stream is jerky because it's bandwidth starved and the upload takes forever because the ACKs from FB can't get through the incoming video dump from YouTube (with its fast start window pushed from default 3 to 11 or 12) and by the time the video is half over, the link to YouTube has dropped because it took 30 seconds or more for the buffer to drain after the first push and the link had timed out.
That's the problem - you need low latency for some things at the same time you need high throughput for others - and it is possible and can be done - and IS done if things are tuned correctly. But correctly tuning the use of buffers is an art today, not a science - and the ever-changing (by 3-4 orders of magnitude) needs of today's end-point routers has pushed the limits of what AQM (automated queue management) algorithms are currently available, even if they're turned on (which in most cases they're not it seems)
And that is exactly the problem with QOS that is under the control of someone who has a stake in the outcome.
"I want everything louder than everything else" (Meat Loaf) epitomizes the net today - we have Google screwing with the fast start window and Microsoft pretty much ignoring it and setting it as large as possible in some cases (they do other things right though it seems)
The buffer bloat problem is one born of history and ignorance:
History - it used to be that we could not put enough buffer RAM into the device because it was too expensive - so we designed our algorithms to use all that was available "because there's never enough."
Ignorance - we now have a generation of network "engineers" who have grown up not having to deal with really congested networks (until very recently) and simply don't bother to turn on things like RED (Random Early Detection) in their router products or ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification) on their servers and links - or ensure that ECN is actually passed through and not zero'd. Now they don't even recognize the problem and we have to teach them (and get them to un-learn their bad habits - like "any packet loss is bad")
5 months ago my prototype of our old company's first generation embedded Linux router software, running on an old '486 chassiz, finally died. When I replaced it with a recent D-Link, my connection from my home office to the world went from quite acceptable to almost useless whenever I was up or downloading anything larger than a couple of hundred K. The buffer on the router fills up and the latency goes from 10-20ms to 4000ms (4 seconds) - and my streaming radio stops - and my xload monitors and other remote monitors on servers stop - and my nagios system checks go off thinking that the remote systems are down.
This is unacceptable - and it is a LOCAL problem. In systems where the ISP's equipment is to blame, there's little I could do but rate-limit my connection to something under the threshold of pain.
Even turning on the router's "QOS" setting (switch, not knob - no control over parameters) that should give me "better gaming results" does not eliminate the problem or do much at all.
Bufferbloat is real - but the good news is that it can be fixed if we start asking the right questions of our suppliers and get them to admit there is a problem. The Bufferbloat community is in the process of putting together test facilities to help you and the ISPs and manufacturers get definitive information on the problem; things like a mixed-mode lantency/throughput test that measures 2 or 3 different stream types at the same time instead of just raw "bits through the pipe from source to destination"
I expect that even if ISO had won the war (and I was there in the trenches at the time the war was being fought) we'd have come to this point at some time - but IMHO that would have been some time in the next century as the ISO "standards" regime (and cost) was a huge damper on development and deployment. We would not have had the digital revolution at all if it was ISO anchored.
Away back in the mid 60's I took one of the at that time "proprietary" telephones apart and spread the bits and pieces throughout my desk so there was no single "phone".
The guy from the local telco, when they finally figured out that I had it (not sure how - had the ringer turned off and that was typical way they found extra phones) he actually complimented me on what had been done - and slapped my hand fairly hard.
Doing the same thing with cell technology, given the size of the various parts necessary and the fact of things like software radios and published standards and hacks, chances are that something that will communicate as a cell phone won't look anything like it soon.
Even scanning for a phone might not find them as it is possible to make one only respond to the network if/when a call is being made, rather than all the time.
Only some method of tapping/monitoring the cell sites will do much, if anything in this case - and of course there are always suitcase cell sites and such that can be aimed tightly from outside to allow calls despite such monitoring.
Slashdot Mirror
At oil change time when you go to turn into the Mr. Lube the steering wheel resists, the doors and windows lock, the radio turns to a Ford oil change commercial and you're driven to the nearest Ford dealership
All the major vendors should be aware of what is going on at www.bufferbloat.net and have something in place to ensure that their products will reflect new updates soonest when things get fixed. This is an ongoing problem that crept up on the internet tech community and there is work in progress to deal with it but it will take time.
See (for example) Bufferbloat - Dark Buffers in the Internet, 1/20/2011
1 - custom fit? I got 8 different ear moulds for the basic unit - pick one and suffer while my ear adapts
2 - custom frequency response? - Are you telling me that a 1+ GHz processor can't do the math for umpteen different frequency bands and adapt if/when needed?
3 - patents? Digital signal processing has been around for a lot more than 20 years - we used to use the Telebit Trailblazer modem (M68K processor and signal processing chip) back in the mid 1980s - and it broke the audio spectrum down into 256 discreet bands at that time!
So... if you can't afford an in-the-ear unit, someone please do up an ap for the smart phones and bluetooth!
you get 90% of the life (some are 100% but some are 50%) for 25% of the price
When she got it, we were fairly well off - just sold a company and to be frank, I didn't notice how much it cost.
recent problems with it put me on the front lines - and getting a bill for $800 just to fix is gave me a lot of angst. I have to say I railed at the person on the front counter quite a bit considering I know a lot about analog, digital, integrated circuits, and such - and basically told her that IMHO the components she was quoting as retail in the $3000 range were worth about $10 or less.
Then she loaned us an "over the ear" unit while the in-the-ear one was out for repair - and when I went to give it back, said "keep it" - so confirming that the actual hardware cost is trivial (unit is about 3 times the size of the current one but otherwise similar capabilities - and given the progress in IC units, represents maybe 3 years' progress)
So... when I heard an ad on the radio last week for an in-ear hearing aid for $500, I figured "about time" and so the poster is correct - there is a revolution coming.
Question is - what patents will be held over the heads of those trying to break this cartel - because it truly must be a cartel.
Note that I can now (despite the eye-glass cartel of yesteryear) purchase more than useful eye-glasses in various basic diopters at the local dollar store - to the point where I have enough around the house that I have achieve "maxiumum vapour pressure" of eye-glasses (i.e. there is a pair at hand any time/where I need them)
richard
Note that my workstation is locked into NTP (drift of 5.0ms) but in any case I'd expect that Google's servers are too.
Now - type something, move right (or left) hand to the mouse - highlight - move mouse to menu - select - press mouse button - find "home" row again and start typing.
No wonder kids today use short-forms and misspellings and such In the mean time - I take full advantage of what key-combination commands there are - and get a lot more done
His reply: "I'd spell creat with an e"
one byte - but a world of errors
Posted about this in 2008 Electricly Heated Home??? How about Computer Heated?
Then in light of all that has transpired in the PS3 debacle, then Sony would claim they held copyright - at least so opines my cousin sitting here in the room beside me :)
in light of Microsoft may add evesdropping to Skype this is a really stupid idea - but then in light of some of the other "ideas" that come out of government in general and this one in particular we should be happy they're not actually going to conference in big business purposely.
Much of today's cell tower equipment is installed with no queue management turned on - and 100% retry "forever" (or at least a long period of time, longer than the 2 seconds it takes TCP/IP sessions to decide a packet didn't get there and resend, causing cascading congestion) and loads of buffer space to the point where latency is measured in 10s of seconds in some cases.
A carrier that actually takes advantage of the queue management built into the edge equipment can make their network faster and "feel" faster, and cut down on the actual amount of data they carry - but many (most?) don't have a clue.
For those interested in diving deeper - take a look at the Bufferbloat mail list and for want of a better one, this post by Jonathan Morton that speaks of 3G
stop sending money to politicians accused of being stupid - tax revolt in "free" world follows political revolt in Arab countries
I'm betting that a case can be made that this at least some such signatures were obtained under duress and therefore not valid.
Somehow, some way, this seems to be an opportunity to open up such machines to public access by setting up a default server that either simply authorizes anyone/everyone - or that requires a subscription and some form of signup.
An open-source project if there ever was. It has been a LONG time since I did anything with radius but I bet it could be done.
richard
All this right after I read Wired Science's article on 7 science-education battlegrounds of 2011 If the US wants to be effective in technology they have to stop being stupid in education - otherwise we Canadians, along with the rest of the world, will beat the crap out of you.
Make 'em paranoid - but entertain them at the same time - love it!
The courses can't ignore math - but they don't have to go into it nearly as deeply as they do. Basic binary and theory should be included so that there is an understanding of what the compiler/interpreter is doing taking high-level down to machine level.
I'm not a mathematician but I've done my stint with calculus (back in the late 60's at high school and then university, just as compu-sci was really getting going) I hardly ever use anything but basic add/subtract/multiply/divide, even in designing some of the more sophisticated business and consumer products I've been involved with (but I've got Knuth's books and use them); that's why there is a need for experts - to bail me out when I need them. We need both kinds of computer people - those who can deal with the algorithms at the core, and those who can apply those algorithms to real programs that interact with humans. But more than that, we need more "real" people who have gone through the computer programs and thereby have at least a half a clue as to how computers really function and how to apply them to problems.
Was talking to a friend of mine - he grows flowers and cuts hair for a living - and he was decrying the fact that all the various computer stuff he's got is "just too complicated" for the average old pharts like him (and me, but I've grown up with it so I'm an exception to this) - and I had to agree because the programs were designed in large part by people who are techs and mathists - not your typical non-tech humans. Put it down to the filter at the education point of requiring the math skills that weeds out many is my guess.
Problem is highlighted by the note that the math profs have problems teaching compu-sci from anything but a math perspective - and the bulk of computer program design is in the human interface and basic business world that they don't easily relate to (nor do students who understand them in most cases)
So putting up the largely artificial barrier of understanding math (at least for some aspects of compu-sci) is hurting our use of computers in many ways.
Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Android, Gentoo, Mandriva, Knoppix, SUSE, Slackware, Puppy, Slax, Freespire...
Who cares?
As long as you don't spell it Microsoft
p.s. The Kernel is Linux - the rest of the stuff is Open Source. Even Apple's OS/X gets it 95% right - they just use MACH instead of Linux and then apply a different GUI.
No matter what - Redmond loses.
(Reasonable) packet loss or ECN - pick one - and then tell your up and downstream neighbors why you picked it (hopefully ECN will find its way into near 100% deployment ASAP) and why they should respect it and follow on.
Then - when the Bufferbloat gurus get the testing systems working, test and report so we can do our jobs and let the world know good/bad setups and such.
Lead, Follow, or get the hell out of the way
"Why does the web site load so slowly?" is the classic question - caused in many cases by the "eagleholic" having 4 live eagle nest video streams running in one window while trying to post observations and screencaps to the web site in another.
Believe me - there is ample reason to deal with the problem as most of today's home networks are used for more than just one thing at a time. Mom is watching video, sis is uploading pictures of her party to Facebook, son is playing online games and dad is trying to listen to streaming audio - and NOTHING is working correctly despite the fact that this is a trivial load for even a T1 (1.45Mbps) let alone today's high-speed cable (30Mbps down and 5Mbps up). We used to run 30+ modems and web sites and email and all manner of stuff over bonded 56K ISDN lines for pity sake - and we got better latency than the links today.
What's the problem? The latency for the "twitch" game packets has gone from 10ms to 4000ms or more - and the isochronos audio stream is jerky because it's bandwidth starved and the upload takes forever because the ACKs from FB can't get through the incoming video dump from YouTube (with its fast start window pushed from default 3 to 11 or 12) and by the time the video is half over, the link to YouTube has dropped because it took 30 seconds or more for the buffer to drain after the first push and the link had timed out.
That's the problem - you need low latency for some things at the same time you need high throughput for others - and it is possible and can be done - and IS done if things are tuned correctly. But correctly tuning the use of buffers is an art today, not a science - and the ever-changing (by 3-4 orders of magnitude) needs of today's end-point routers has pushed the limits of what AQM (automated queue management) algorithms are currently available, even if they're turned on (which in most cases they're not it seems)
"I want everything louder than everything else" (Meat Loaf) epitomizes the net today - we have Google screwing with the fast start window and Microsoft pretty much ignoring it and setting it as large as possible in some cases (they do other things right though it seems)
The buffer bloat problem is one born of history and ignorance:
History - it used to be that we could not put enough buffer RAM into the device because it was too expensive - so we designed our algorithms to use all that was available "because there's never enough."
Ignorance - we now have a generation of network "engineers" who have grown up not having to deal with really congested networks (until very recently) and simply don't bother to turn on things like RED (Random Early Detection) in their router products or ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification) on their servers and links - or ensure that ECN is actually passed through and not zero'd. Now they don't even recognize the problem and we have to teach them (and get them to un-learn their bad habits - like "any packet loss is bad")
5 months ago my prototype of our old company's first generation embedded Linux router software, running on an old '486 chassiz, finally died. When I replaced it with a recent D-Link, my connection from my home office to the world went from quite acceptable to almost useless whenever I was up or downloading anything larger than a couple of hundred K. The buffer on the router fills up and the latency goes from 10-20ms to 4000ms (4 seconds) - and my streaming radio stops - and my xload monitors and other remote monitors on servers stop - and my nagios system checks go off thinking that the remote systems are down.
This is unacceptable - and it is a LOCAL problem. In systems where the ISP's equipment is to blame, there's little I could do but rate-limit my connection to something under the threshold of pain.
Even turning on the router's "QOS" setting (switch, not knob - no control over parameters) that should give me "better gaming results" does not eliminate the problem or do much at all.
Bufferbloat is real - but the good news is that it can be fixed if we start asking the right questions of our suppliers and get them to admit there is a problem. The Bufferbloat community is in the process of putting together test facilities to help you and the ISPs and manufacturers get definitive information on the problem; things like a mixed-mode lantency/throughput test that measures 2 or 3 different stream types at the same time instead of just raw "bits through the pipe from source to destination"
I expect that even if ISO had won the war (and I was there in the trenches at the time the war was being fought) we'd have come to this point at some time - but IMHO that would have been some time in the next century as the ISO "standards" regime (and cost) was a huge damper on development and deployment. We would not have had the digital revolution at all if it was ISO anchored.
wetware - 21st Century backwater
on the other hand, I do know that Toronto is not in the US - at least not yet.
The guy from the local telco, when they finally figured out that I had it (not sure how - had the ringer turned off and that was typical way they found extra phones) he actually complimented me on what had been done - and slapped my hand fairly hard.
Doing the same thing with cell technology, given the size of the various parts necessary and the fact of things like software radios and published standards and hacks, chances are that something that will communicate as a cell phone won't look anything like it soon.
Even scanning for a phone might not find them as it is possible to make one only respond to the network if/when a call is being made, rather than all the time.
Only some method of tapping/monitoring the cell sites will do much, if anything in this case - and of course there are always suitcase cell sites and such that can be aimed tightly from outside to allow calls despite such monitoring.
all in all - I fear they're in a losing cause
was the temperature of the water
Hence forth, all major petroleum spills are limited to warm climates
Take that, Canada - no drilling in the Arctic!!!