My brita was one of the best investments I ever made. I drink around a gallon of H2O a day now. Didn't set out to consume that much but that's about where I wound up. If you get hungry in the middle of the day drink a 16oz glass of water. If you are still hungry in 20 minutes then permit yourself to eat something. More often than not though the water will quench your hunger pains, at least in my experience.
We are one of the few animals capable of self-determination. You don't need to eat just because your stomach is rumbling. Why more people can't wrap their head around this concept is beyond me.
Atkins isn't natural. Atkins kills all carbs, even those that are completely natural (fruits). Atkins demonizes carbs in the same manner as the older fad diets demonize fat. You can't compare an apple or orange to a glass of mountain dew. Both deliver most of their food energy in the form of sugars but the fruit also comes with vitamins, dietary fiber and is much more filling.
Personally I don't think it's particularly healthy to cut all the carbs out of your diet. The brain relies on them for energy and the body itself operates best with a mixture of energy sources.
The Atkins diet has been demonstrated effective in randomized, controlled trials published in JAMA.
The Atkins diet is no more or less effective than anything else. If you start living off protein and fat without reducing your actual caloric intake you aren't going to lose a pound of bodyweight. Atkins works for some people because protein is more filling and they fail at the moderation game when it comes to carbs.
I dropped from 238 to 192 pounds just by reducing my caloric intake. I didn't do anything special other than eat less. I even kept my beer habit -- it just dropped from 3-4 beers when I went out to 1 beer. In the midst of my diet I adopted a basic exercise regime at the recommendation of my MD. I don't credit that for the weight loss (unless you are unemployed you'll never exercise enough to lose weight without also reducing your caloric intake) but it certainly made me feel better about myself.
I'm glad Atkins works for some people but let's not pretend it does anything special or unique. You could lose weight living off twinkies and McDonalds if you moderated the caloric intake accordingly. It wouldn't be healthy but you could still do it.
Most of the subscriber base is locked into a two year contract.
Those contracts have get-out-of-jail free clauses if they change the material terms (i.e: pricing) of the plan or features you signed up for. If AT&T decides to ratejack everybody on T-Mobile you could leave them without paying any termination fee.
You are correct, though if you quit because the employer changed the conditions of your job you can and will collect unemployment. Most employers don't want to pay you half your salary to not do your job.
We went over this at my employer when they tried to impose random drug testing after the fact. The existing employees had all agreed to pre-employment drug screening but nobody had agreed to random drug screening. I was one of the few that fought it. My lawyer advised that they could fire me under at will employment but I'd be able to collect unemployment if that happened. They opted not to fire me and I'm one of a handful of employees that are grandfathered in and doesn't have to submit to the random piss tests.
Of course the victory is tainted somewhat by the fact that most of the sheep happily rolled over and signed new agreements consenting to random drug testing. I wasn't the only one that fought it but we were in the minority for sure. I think there's only two of us left that are still grandfathered.
They'll be fine with it as long as it's stored in bottles that contain no more than 3oz and you keep them all in a clear plastic bag for easy inspection.
I disagree. If a connection's buffers were 50-100ms in size (perhaps even less than 50ms would be enough sometimes), the latency could never exceed 50-100ms, which is plenty for most interactive protocols.
If the buffers were sized appropriately, rate-limiting wouldn't be necessary to avoid latency
Yes, actually it would. Interactive protocols are going to suck period if they wind up sitting in a buffer. A smaller buffer size might make them suck less but it's still not going to deliver acceptable performance. FIFO queuing can not handle interactive protocols even with smallish buffer sizes.
Changing the buffers will not help you if you need to run interactive protocols (VOIP/RDP/ssh/etc) alongside large non-interactive downloads (FTP/HTTP/NNTP/Bittorrent). The large downloads will rapidly proceed to consume all available bandwidth and the performance of your interactive sessions will suffer accordingly. A smaller buffer size might reduce the level of that suffering (though I'm skeptical) but it will not eliminate it. Only a solid QoS/shaping solution can make interactive and non-interactive protocols play nice together.
I'd be curious to know why my solution is "far from optimal". It has effectively enabled my employer to share a 3.0mbit/s connection with 60 some odd employees. We've been using it for five years now. We run interactive VPNs and VOIP alongside dozens of employees surfing the web/downloading files without any issues whatsoever.
The only problem I can see with my solution is dealing with "best effort" cable modems where your bandwidth isn't guaranteed (hard to shape traffic when you don't know your real line speed) but that's not really a concern in the business world, is it? Any commercial enterprise using an internet connection without an SLA for mission critical tasks deserves the headaches that will follow.
The router can manage QOS in the routers buffer but it has no controll over the buffer in the cable modem.
The solution to this is to rate-limit your downloads to 75%-80% of your total download speed at your router. If there is going to be any buffering you want to force it to happen at your equipment, rather than at the ISP's equipment.
Lobby your elected officials to remove the artificial barriers to entry (franchise agreements) that prevent new companies from offering you internet service. Pay for business class service that comes with an SLA. There are lots of things you can do if the internet is that important to you.
Around these parts we have the friendly local cable monopoly (Time Warner) and the friendly local DSL monopoly (Verizon). Verizon's service always reaches the promised line speed. Time Warner usually reaches the promised line speed unless you are unlucky enough to get stuck on an overloaded node. In that instance you might be hosed, though in my experience they will split nodes and make other behind the scenes improvements necessary to deliver quality service if you complain loudly enough.
You just perfectly described the procedure for shapeing upstream traffic.
You are shaping the "upstream" from your LAN interface. As I described it:
Linux router eth1 == internet
Linux router eth0 == lan
Path of packet from the internet: the cloud -> your ISP -> eth1 -> (nat/routing occurs here), eth0 -> your LAN PC
If you shape it before it goes out on your LAN the TCP stack of your clients will respond accordingly and the overall bandwidth consumption is appropriately limited.
I don't know if wondershaper can do this, as I've always configured my QoS by hand. More flexible that way. What I've described is very easy to set up with iptables, tc and the relevant Linux kernel modules.
Another possible fix is to shorten the TTL on packets, where the packets are discarded if the route has too much delay in it.
Umm, that's not what the TTL does. The TTL gets decremented by 1 for every router that touches the packet. If it hits zero without reaching it's final destination it's dropped. It has nothing to do with latency. Traceroute works by sending out packets with increasing TTLs (i.e: the first packet has a TTL of 1, the second has a TTL of 2, and so on) and looking at the returning ICMP time exceeded packets.
Or use UDP for streaming applications rather than TCP, like it was intended, and let the end points buffer the difference.
This. UDP is tailor made for streaming applications. Nobody is going to notice if their video feed drops a frame here or there. They are going to notice if it freezes because a TCP connection is waiting for a packet retransmit.
People who aren't networking engineers don't know about QoS, or don't know/want to know how to configure it.
*shrug*, not my problem:)
QoS used that way is a hack to work around an issue that doesn't have to be there in the first place
The issue is always going to be there. Pegged connection == FIFO queuing, absent some sort of QoS scheme.
How do you determine the maximum throughput? It's not necessarily the official line's speed.
If you aren't getting the line speed you paid for then you need to find another ISP.
The nice thing about TCP is that it's supposed to figure out on its own how much bandwidth there is
And it does, even with QoS. All you do with QoS is force the buffering to happen on equipment that you control rather than equipment your ISP controls. In this manner you can ensure that time sensitive packets (interactive VPNs, VoIP, etc.) don't sit in the queue behind someone's Windows Update download.
QoS is most effective on stuff you're sending
It's not really all that difficult to shape downstream traffic. All you need is a router between your internet connection and LAN clients. I've done this for years at my office using the QoS functionality of the Linux kernel. We are located out in the middle of nowhere with T-1s as our only means of connectivity. Sharing a 3.0mbit/s connection with 60+ employees without QoS is virtually impossible if you need to run interactive protocols.
Given that most traffic on a domestic connection is incoming, that doesn't help much.
It's not that hard to shape downstream traffic. Take a Linux router with two ethernet cards. eth0 is the LAN and eth1 is the internet. You shape eth0 with a maximum throughput of 75%-80% of your line speed. All of the downstream traffic has to go out on that interface so that's your opportunity to shape it. I do this at work and successfully share a 3.0mbit/s connection with 60+ employees. We use latency sensitive services like VoIP and RDP alongside streaming video and other large downloads without any major hassles. It stinks to lose some of your bandwidth because of this (you have to shape it to a number less than 100% of your line speed, otherwise buffering occurs at your ISP and your QoS scheme is defeated) but I'll take responsiveness over throughout any day of the week.
I read TFA and I'm not seeing the problem. He can't duplicate this issue unless he maxes out his connection and then his latency goes to hell. No shit Sherlock, that's what happens when your pipe is full and the packets have to wait in the queue to be transmitted. Am I stupid or could he avoid this issue entirely by using QoS and/or rate-limiting his connection to some amount <100% of it's maximum throughout? I have QoS at the office that keeps our connection from pegging (it's limited to around 75% on the download and 90% on upload) and have never once encountered an issue with latency or jitter. At home I only throttle the upload (to 90% of maximum) and have successfully ran VPNs, bittorrent uploads and VoIP calls all at the same time without any headaches.
Take a look at the salaries of the top people in government, from the President on down, and compare it to executive pay in major corporations.
You have a good point for the "top people" in Government. Now take a look at the line workers in Government vs. private industry. It's not even close. Public sector employees receive compensation that their private sector counterparts can only dream of.
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Where is my freedom when I'm forced to sit in an office all day with smoking co-workers?
Go work for an employer that prohibits smoking on the property.
Well for one, because in Scotland a democratically elected parliament voted in favour of the ban, which has broad public support.
Tyranny of the majority, that's a winning argument.....
And what's wrong with water?
My brita was one of the best investments I ever made. I drink around a gallon of H2O a day now. Didn't set out to consume that much but that's about where I wound up. If you get hungry in the middle of the day drink a 16oz glass of water. If you are still hungry in 20 minutes then permit yourself to eat something. More often than not though the water will quench your hunger pains, at least in my experience.
We are one of the few animals capable of self-determination. You don't need to eat just because your stomach is rumbling. Why more people can't wrap their head around this concept is beyond me.
Atkins isn't natural. Atkins kills all carbs, even those that are completely natural (fruits). Atkins demonizes carbs in the same manner as the older fad diets demonize fat. You can't compare an apple or orange to a glass of mountain dew. Both deliver most of their food energy in the form of sugars but the fruit also comes with vitamins, dietary fiber and is much more filling.
Personally I don't think it's particularly healthy to cut all the carbs out of your diet. The brain relies on them for energy and the body itself operates best with a mixture of energy sources.
The Atkins diet has been demonstrated effective in randomized, controlled trials published in JAMA.
The Atkins diet is no more or less effective than anything else. If you start living off protein and fat without reducing your actual caloric intake you aren't going to lose a pound of bodyweight. Atkins works for some people because protein is more filling and they fail at the moderation game when it comes to carbs.
I dropped from 238 to 192 pounds just by reducing my caloric intake. I didn't do anything special other than eat less. I even kept my beer habit -- it just dropped from 3-4 beers when I went out to 1 beer. In the midst of my diet I adopted a basic exercise regime at the recommendation of my MD. I don't credit that for the weight loss (unless you are unemployed you'll never exercise enough to lose weight without also reducing your caloric intake) but it certainly made me feel better about myself.
I'm glad Atkins works for some people but let's not pretend it does anything special or unique. You could lose weight living off twinkies and McDonalds if you moderated the caloric intake accordingly. It wouldn't be healthy but you could still do it.
The choice is either give in or use terrorism to convince the other country not to send them.
This isn't Iraq you know. It's Afghanistan. We wouldn't be there if they hadn't opted to support a terrorist group that attacked our country.
Most of the subscriber base is locked into a two year contract.
Those contracts have get-out-of-jail free clauses if they change the material terms (i.e: pricing) of the plan or features you signed up for. If AT&T decides to ratejack everybody on T-Mobile you could leave them without paying any termination fee.
You don't have to reload a station wagon on a crowded sidewalk...
Sssh! If Carolyn McCarthy finds that out she'll be introducing legislation to limit all new automobiles to 1 gallon gas tanks.....
You are correct, though if you quit because the employer changed the conditions of your job you can and will collect unemployment. Most employers don't want to pay you half your salary to not do your job.
We went over this at my employer when they tried to impose random drug testing after the fact. The existing employees had all agreed to pre-employment drug screening but nobody had agreed to random drug screening. I was one of the few that fought it. My lawyer advised that they could fire me under at will employment but I'd be able to collect unemployment if that happened. They opted not to fire me and I'm one of a handful of employees that are grandfathered in and doesn't have to submit to the random piss tests.
Of course the victory is tainted somewhat by the fact that most of the sheep happily rolled over and signed new agreements consenting to random drug testing. I wasn't the only one that fought it but we were in the minority for sure. I think there's only two of us left that are still grandfathered.
Which imposes an even bigger delay and makes interactive protocols a PITA (telnet/ssh) at best and nearly unusable (VOIP/streaming video) at worst.
They'll be fine with it as long as it's stored in bottles that contain no more than 3oz and you keep them all in a clear plastic bag for easy inspection.
I disagree. If a connection's buffers were 50-100ms in size (perhaps even less than 50ms would be enough sometimes), the latency could never exceed 50-100ms, which is plenty for most interactive protocols.
Unless they get dropped. Buffers are still FIFO.
If the buffers were sized appropriately, rate-limiting wouldn't be necessary to avoid latency
Yes, actually it would. Interactive protocols are going to suck period if they wind up sitting in a buffer. A smaller buffer size might make them suck less but it's still not going to deliver acceptable performance. FIFO queuing can not handle interactive protocols even with smallish buffer sizes.
Apparently, one can't have home TV and business Internet at the same address due to agreements with channel providers.
So get satellite service for TV instead. Or go without it entirely. It's not worth the money anyway.
Point is, there are always options.
Changing the buffers will not help you if you need to run interactive protocols (VOIP/RDP/ssh/etc) alongside large non-interactive downloads (FTP/HTTP/NNTP/Bittorrent). The large downloads will rapidly proceed to consume all available bandwidth and the performance of your interactive sessions will suffer accordingly. A smaller buffer size might reduce the level of that suffering (though I'm skeptical) but it will not eliminate it. Only a solid QoS/shaping solution can make interactive and non-interactive protocols play nice together.
I'd be curious to know why my solution is "far from optimal". It has effectively enabled my employer to share a 3.0mbit/s connection with 60 some odd employees. We've been using it for five years now. We run interactive VPNs and VOIP alongside dozens of employees surfing the web/downloading files without any issues whatsoever.
The only problem I can see with my solution is dealing with "best effort" cable modems where your bandwidth isn't guaranteed (hard to shape traffic when you don't know your real line speed) but that's not really a concern in the business world, is it? Any commercial enterprise using an internet connection without an SLA for mission critical tasks deserves the headaches that will follow.
The router can manage QOS in the routers buffer but it has no controll over the buffer in the cable modem.
The solution to this is to rate-limit your downloads to 75%-80% of your total download speed at your router. If there is going to be any buffering you want to force it to happen at your equipment, rather than at the ISP's equipment.
Lobby your elected officials to remove the artificial barriers to entry (franchise agreements) that prevent new companies from offering you internet service. Pay for business class service that comes with an SLA. There are lots of things you can do if the internet is that important to you.
Around these parts we have the friendly local cable monopoly (Time Warner) and the friendly local DSL monopoly (Verizon). Verizon's service always reaches the promised line speed. Time Warner usually reaches the promised line speed unless you are unlucky enough to get stuck on an overloaded node. In that instance you might be hosed, though in my experience they will split nodes and make other behind the scenes improvements necessary to deliver quality service if you complain loudly enough.
You just perfectly described the procedure for shapeing upstream traffic.
You are shaping the "upstream" from your LAN interface. As I described it:
Linux router eth1 == internet
Linux router eth0 == lan
Path of packet from the internet: the cloud -> your ISP -> eth1 -> (nat/routing occurs here), eth0 -> your LAN PC
If you shape it before it goes out on your LAN the TCP stack of your clients will respond accordingly and the overall bandwidth consumption is appropriately limited.
I don't know if wondershaper can do this, as I've always configured my QoS by hand. More flexible that way. What I've described is very easy to set up with iptables, tc and the relevant Linux kernel modules.
Another possible fix is to shorten the TTL on packets, where the packets are discarded if the route has too much delay in it.
Umm, that's not what the TTL does. The TTL gets decremented by 1 for every router that touches the packet. If it hits zero without reaching it's final destination it's dropped. It has nothing to do with latency. Traceroute works by sending out packets with increasing TTLs (i.e: the first packet has a TTL of 1, the second has a TTL of 2, and so on) and looking at the returning ICMP time exceeded packets.
Or use UDP for streaming applications rather than TCP, like it was intended, and let the end points buffer the difference.
This. UDP is tailor made for streaming applications. Nobody is going to notice if their video feed drops a frame here or there. They are going to notice if it freezes because a TCP connection is waiting for a packet retransmit.
People who aren't networking engineers don't know about QoS, or don't know/want to know how to configure it.
*shrug*, not my problem :)
QoS used that way is a hack to work around an issue that doesn't have to be there in the first place
The issue is always going to be there. Pegged connection == FIFO queuing, absent some sort of QoS scheme.
How do you determine the maximum throughput? It's not necessarily the official line's speed.
If you aren't getting the line speed you paid for then you need to find another ISP.
The nice thing about TCP is that it's supposed to figure out on its own how much bandwidth there is
And it does, even with QoS. All you do with QoS is force the buffering to happen on equipment that you control rather than equipment your ISP controls. In this manner you can ensure that time sensitive packets (interactive VPNs, VoIP, etc.) don't sit in the queue behind someone's Windows Update download.
QoS is most effective on stuff you're sending
It's not really all that difficult to shape downstream traffic. All you need is a router between your internet connection and LAN clients. I've done this for years at my office using the QoS functionality of the Linux kernel. We are located out in the middle of nowhere with T-1s as our only means of connectivity. Sharing a 3.0mbit/s connection with 60+ employees without QoS is virtually impossible if you need to run interactive protocols.
Given that most traffic on a domestic connection is incoming, that doesn't help much.
It's not that hard to shape downstream traffic. Take a Linux router with two ethernet cards. eth0 is the LAN and eth1 is the internet. You shape eth0 with a maximum throughput of 75%-80% of your line speed. All of the downstream traffic has to go out on that interface so that's your opportunity to shape it. I do this at work and successfully share a 3.0mbit/s connection with 60+ employees. We use latency sensitive services like VoIP and RDP alongside streaming video and other large downloads without any major hassles. It stinks to lose some of your bandwidth because of this (you have to shape it to a number less than 100% of your line speed, otherwise buffering occurs at your ISP and your QoS scheme is defeated) but I'll take responsiveness over throughout any day of the week.
I read TFA and I'm not seeing the problem. He can't duplicate this issue unless he maxes out his connection and then his latency goes to hell. No shit Sherlock, that's what happens when your pipe is full and the packets have to wait in the queue to be transmitted. Am I stupid or could he avoid this issue entirely by using QoS and/or rate-limiting his connection to some amount <100% of it's maximum throughout? I have QoS at the office that keeps our connection from pegging (it's limited to around 75% on the download and 90% on upload) and have never once encountered an issue with latency or jitter. At home I only throttle the upload (to 90% of maximum) and have successfully ran VPNs, bittorrent uploads and VoIP calls all at the same time without any headaches.
Really, what's the problem here?
There is a reason the Canadians came down and burned the whitehouse to the ground.
I hope you can appreciate the irony of complaining about the quality of our history classes while making a mistake like that ;)
Oh c'mon mods, this isn't flamebait. At least toss him a few funny mods.
Take a look at the salaries of the top people in government, from the President on down, and compare it to executive pay in major corporations.
You have a good point for the "top people" in Government. Now take a look at the line workers in Government vs. private industry. It's not even close. Public sector employees receive compensation that their private sector counterparts can only dream of.