Posts by Markk 12 publicly visible posts • joined 28 May 2010
The post above, "shoot the accountants", explains much of the workings. Consultants can be blamed (despite their recommendations not being followed) as non-employees of the company when management decisions led to something gone very wrong. From US Space shuttles and California gas pipelines blowing up to massive oil well spills, engineers warned management, and management failed to act properly.
Here in Boston, college students used it to hook up with others in local universities. Facebook was limited to Harvard U., then college, then H.S. students to keep out MySpace pervs, parents, and random others. That crimped its size and business model for sure, and thus fell by the wayside.
Remember when AOL chat users could not interact with Yahoo ones? Or Lotus or IBM mail didn't talk to Internet mail users? So, why can Facebook cell updates be possible, but not friendship with MySpace users? No technical reason, really. Thankfully, Internet carriers use interchanges (like phone systems), otherwise we all couldn't communicate with each other. Imagine if roads in one town didn't connect to those in the next!
It took Open Source, open protocols, and most importantly, user dominance to make TCP/IP dominate over SNA, DECnet, and others, RFC822 and 2822 to dominate over Lotus, IBM, Microsoft, and other proprietary, monopolistic mail formats. Unified connectivity without unique financial control. Handing Facebook its monopoly does not best serve communication. Only competition will force them to interact openly with other social networking systems.
If ebayclassifieds added erotic services, they might start getting some visitors!
Craig's List is so dominant, growing, and successful because it has remained true to original Internet freedom, community, and efficiency philosophy. Well, not quite so free now that morality police turned the screws. Before selling out, Slashdot was also an efficient user of bandwidth and computes. Without web page eye candy, CL doesn't need all the staff, servers, and revenue of other major sites. Its stockholders still get to live comfortably and users spared useless graphics and advertising.
Police don't like freedom - it makes their job more work, so advertisers had to provide more registration information. The victims of erotic services ads were mostly the prostitutes who got mugged by ad responders. That is no different from cash carrying for-sale ad responders going to buy a car, TV etc. and getting held-up by false advertisers. Victims are more likely to report it, though, because they won't become victimized again by police.
In 25 years the weight of a Honda Civic and like sized cars has increased 800 lbs, mainly due to DOT regulations on crash protection, airbags, and other mandates. For an airplane, that leaves little capacity to carry anything. The DOT made a huge blunder requiring child car seats instead of more accommodating safety belts. Most parents don't even use seats properly, and they have hugely encouraged SUV purchase. SUVs are easier to get kids in and out with, and only two seats fit in the back, so parents get 3-row SUVs. If the mandated killer airbags weren't such a stuff-up, the front seat could have been used. These SUV's are now so big, parents can't see and back up over their own kids! Yay nanny state and statisticians who look at aftermaths rather than use some sense beforehand.
Many rural airfields in the US and OZ are not served by taxi or hire cars.
Mr. Horizontal (prone!): HTML was developed by a physicist, not a computer scientist, to help communicate at CERN with a simple mark-up language authored by hand using a text editor. While many terse and efficient, binary, document+graphics page mark-up languages already existed, most were proprietary (Interleaf, Frame, MS Word, PageMaker, Quark, WordPerfect etc..), Bernars-Lee chose to create his own, modeled from the most verbose and inefficient mark-up language, SGML; a product of committee meant to satisfy every need and an ISO standard.
HTTP is used outside its scope because it was the easiest way to get data through most firewalls. Additionally, it survives "traffic shaping" and QoS better than any UDP traffic on non-well known ports, but not as well as VoIP.
You are 70% wrong about HTTP not maintaining a connection. Only embedded use the simpler V1 implementations. V2 allows connection persistence. Pipelined requests (doing GETs on new objects before outstanding ones have been sent) happen far less than they should due to all the layers and components of software constructing and sending content from servers - its just less bug-prone and complicated for each bloated package to serve its part on its own connection. HTTP connections are also kept open using a technique called browser comforting which tells browsers to not time out the GET, more data is on the way.
Google's changes also accommodate (encourage?) that inefficient and obese server software that's too complicated to funnel disparate pieces over already established connections. Google's changes supply another out for bad software, besides all those revenue generating land mines on pages.
Eric, you made some interesting points. Virtual servers can be a blessing. With only 65K TCP port numbers(16 bits in IPV4) for an IP address and being required to wait before reusing closed ones, running out sometimes is a reality previously solved by load balancers to proxy connections to multi-hosted server interfaces (a pool of IP addresses to use).
You are spot on about interaction issues. TCP window sizes are listed in the Google paper for various implementations. Vista and Win7 are tiny compared to the others, especially MacOS. There are actually two reasons for it. The built-in QoS scheduler is the main one. Higher priority packets will have a long queuing delay to get serviced if it has to wait a long time for a gap in a long HTTP stream. It has more to do with behavior of the server and devices in between than the client. Microsoft plays it safe such that the high priority applications get good service despite unknown and uncontrollable devices. The workaround for poor network file sharing speeds on LANs (where "feature" noticed the most) while listening to streaming audio was turning off streaming multimedia priority in the registry.
I've seen a bug in another Unix stack that caused a problem like the one you have with IRIX. Using Wireshark, I saw that the server had sent all the data followed by a FIN, saying it had no more data and was ready to close. The client didn't get one of the last packets, and ACKed only up to before the problem. The server responded with the missing packets OUT OF ORDER, followed by a FIN. Repeat infinitely, connection appears "hung". If the client was able to re-order packets, this would not be a problem. I think it was a Linux client, so an OS used as a server can't spare the time and memory to hold some number of packets to sort, hopeful that it has missing pieces. If either the bug didn't exist or the client did reordering, all would have been fine.
HTTP2.0 with persistent connections and sometimes used request pipe-lining addressed slow start already. It doesn't address pulling content from a dozen or more different servers.
What Google really wants is to speed up ajax interactions, stuff like search suggestions and all those other crappy things that pop up stuff whenever your mouse goes over ANYTHING not whitespace. F me, I can't open a web page without playing Mario Brothers running my mouse along whitespace to get to something I want to click and see!
I hate XML. Its gotten faster over the years, but it still wastes lots of bandwidth. Look at a Word doc! Worse, look at a Word doc converted to HTML. Dynamic server pages are nearly as bad and wasteful of bandwidth. BTW, something else slow in their paper - Gmail and Google maps!
Finally, TCP/IP is still evolving after 30 years. HTTP connections originally closed like normal TCP connections with FIN handshake, long replaced by FIN RST. IP Implementations, network congestion, speed differentials, router memory, and traffic dropping (shaping) policies all impact behavior besides connection bandwidths, server settings, and client settings. All the bounding factors might have opened up enough most places so their changes work.
I hate nearly all the interactive web page crap shoved at me. Google's changes will just encourage more of it. Give me a static page and let me click what I want to see!
Intel's Atom shows how smart DEC engineers were for scheduling instructions in software - scheduling instructions at run time and band aids for a dated machine instruction architecture all consume thermal budget that could have gone to faster clocks, shorter pipelines, and more memory channels. Only recently has Xeon started to differ in a real way from desktop counterparts optimized for playing computer games. AMD lead with Hyper-channel and on-chip memory controllers, that Intel became forced to copy or be left uncompetitive. Alpha was to have massive memory bandwidth, and that is still a weakness of x86. Alpha was also free of all the slow CPU cache->I/O coherency bottlenecks x86 has for more simplistic programming.
After computer game graphics and computation, the next greatest sacrifice of best general purpose performance is to running inefficient languages and implementations faster. While Sparc and Power systems don't need to play games well, their systems performance must still satisfy inefficient web server-side scripts and baroque implementations. For example, the Java sandbox is important for untrusted code, but that's seldom the case. Large Java applications usually leak memory and are impossible to run weeks without a restart, unlike C applications.
My comments on Israel and Intel were to make a point that AMD is a needed option for those holding the expressed sentiments. Zionists should feel an equal right to boycott all petroleum products and byproducts: gasoline, heating oil, electric power generation, plastics etc.., along with any companies using these products of Saudi Arabia. Personally, I have many more Intel based systems than AMD.
Intel has plants and significant investment in Israel, who's lone ally is the US. Customers in neighboring countries prefer not to buy products made in a country that has a poor human rights record, starves residents of Gaza, and maintains apartheid policies towards Palestinians. I learned this important lesson when trying to sell our products to Saudi's. They only had interest in our Sun Sparc-based products. So, yeah, an alternative to Intel is very important to some customers.
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