Category: Mobile/Wireless
March 24th, 2008
Fixing the unfairness of TCP congestion control
Bob Briscoe (Chief researcher at the BT Network Research Centre) is on a mission to tackle one of the biggest problems facing the Internet. He wants the world to know that TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) congestion control is fundamentally broken and he has a proposal for the IETF to fix the root cause of the problem.
The Internet faced its first congestion crisis in 1986 when too much network traffic caused a series of Internet meltdowns when everything slowed to a crawl. Today’s problem is more subtle and lesser known since the network still appears to be working correctly and fairly. But underneath that facade and illusion of fairness, a very small percentage of users hog most of the Internet’s capacity suffocating all other users and applications.
Solving the first Internet meltdown crisis
In October of 1986, the Internet began to experience a serious of “congestion collapses”. So many computers were piling their traffic on to the network at the same time that the network came to a grinding halt and no one got any meaningful throughput. By mid 1987, computer scientist Van Jacobson who is one of the prime contributors to the TCP/IP stack created a client-side patch for TCP that saved the day. Every computer on the Internet - roughly 30,000 in those days - was quickly patched by their system administrators.
Jacobson’s TCP stack patch worked by causing a computer to cut the flow rate of its TCP stream in half as soon as it detects any packet loss. Packets are lost whenever the routers relaying them receive more packets than they can forward and the router begins to randomly drop packets across the board. But whenever a computer sees an acknowledgement that its packet arrived successfully, it quickly and continually increases its flow rate with every acknowledgement until it experiences another packet drop at which time it cuts its throughput in half again. This became known as the AIMD (Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease) algorithm where the sending computer is constantly probing for the maximum allowable bandwidth by repeatedly increasing throughput until it crosses a line and gets knocked down.
Jacobson’s AIMD algorithm also allowed a new TCP stream to open up and quickly rise to equilibrium where it attains the same flow rate as all other TCP streams. Conversely when a TCP stream ended transmission, the extra bandwidth freed up would be evenly distributed amongst the remaining streams. Van Jacobson’s patch was so successful that it became a part of the TCP standards and it hasn’t fundamentally changed for over 20 years and according to Bob Briscoe, Jacobson’s algorithm is the “fifth most cited academic paper in all of computer science”.
Under Jacobson’s algorithm which sought out to balance the flow rate (throughput) of each TCP stream, the system was more or less fair to everyone who wanted to use the network so long as everyone used an equal number of TCP streams. Since people typically used one TCP stream at a time and people had limited usage on those time-sharing computers in the 1980s, Jacobson’s algorithm was adequate for the problems of that era. While it was possible for someone to open two FTP downloads or uploads at a time and get double the total throughput than anyone else, this wasn’t a big problem when applications and operating systems were mostly limited to text and computers were limited to academic and large corporate institutions. But as time went on and as the number of applications and users grew, it was only a matter of time before the fairness of the system would be exploited.
March 7th, 2008
Asus' 8.9" Eee draws crowds at CeBIT
Here in CeBIT 2008, crowds descended on Hannover Germany to see the latest technologies. Germany is certainly a lovely country but there’s nothing lovable about the 5.60 Euro per gallon gas prices.
CeBIT is certainly one of the more unique conventions I’ve been to since everything is spread out over a square kilometer and it’s like going to 10 mini conventions. While you get some outdoor air between the halls, don’t expect any fresh air with all the smokers there. The temperature delta certainly makes proper attire a challenge because it’s too warm inside and freezing outside.
Asus had a massive presence in building 26 which is one of the more popular spots at CeBIT and they managed to draw crowds wanting to get a closer look at the new and improved 8.9″ Asus Eee PC. The new 8.9″ Asus Eee comes with more SSD flash storage, a bigger LCD screen with 1024×600 resolution, a better quality webcam. The same Pentium M 900 MHz CPU is the same as the original Eee. [See gallery for a close-up view.]
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The Windows XP model comes with 8 GBs of SSD flash memory when the Linux model comes with 12 GB of SSD flash memory. So far we only know that the price will be 399 Euros (which typically means it will be fewer in dollars for the US market), but we don’t know if there will be a price difference between the Linux and Windows XP model. It is possible that the price of the flash memory offsets the licensing costs of Windows XP.While holding the lightweight Eee with one hand, I tested the quality of the Mic and the Webcam and confirmed that the quality if fairly good. The Webcam is definitely much better quality than the old Eee. The Eee also comes with a wired 10/100 Ethernet port as well as 802.11g. The one down side to the Eee is that it doesn’t have a DVI output and instead has a DB-15 VGA port.
Here’s a comparison of the older 7″ Asus Eee versus the 8.9″ Eee. As you can see, the screen is much bigger and the color and contrast appears to be much better. The speakers had to be moved to the bottom of the laptop because the bigger screen pushed them off the lid. You can also see that the track pad is also larger.
I wouldn’t doubt if people buy the 12 GB Linux version and use NLite to install a trimmed down version of XP though having Linux on this device is extremely useful if you’re going to use it as a security auditing tool. The 8 GBs of SSD is more than enough to hold the OS and key applications and a $60 16 GB SDHC card is more than sufficient to hold plenty of movies and data. With the larger screen and nicer webcam and adequate microphone, it becomes a great Skype video conferencing solution. The bottom line is that the Asus Eee is very pleasing in the hands and it runs Windows XP very quickly if you keep bloatware/crapware off of it.
March 3rd, 2008
A geek's trip to Capitol Hill on Network Management
I appeared before congressional and government staffers on Capitol Hill for a panel on Network Management sponsored by iGrowthGlobal. This was my first time in Washington DC and while it was a little cold for my Californian bones, it was a beautiful city and seeing the capitol of the nation was certainly a worthwhile experience. One thing that struck me was how large and spread-out the Capitol was with so many Government buildings several miles apart.
The panel was moderated by Scott Wallsten, VP for Research and Senior Fellow of iGrowthGlobal. I met Mr. Wallsten at the Net Neutrality summit held at University of San Francisco last month where the two of us presented on separate panels. The rest of the panelists for this event were:
- Melvin Ammori, General Counsel, Free Press
- David Burstein, Editor, DSLPrime
- George Ou, Editor at Large, ZDNet
- Haruka Saito, Counselor for Telecom, Embassy of Japan
- Christopher S. Yoo, Professor of Law and Communications, University of Pennsylvania
Christopher Yoo -
After a brief introduction by Scott Wallsten who explained that the order of the presentations will be reverse alphabetical order, Christopher S. Yoo kicked off his presentation. Professor Yoo explained that networks, like roads, aren’t built for everyone to use them at the same time. Yoo gave the example that if a person wants to know how fast he can travel on a freeway, he wouldn’t know until he got there because we can’t predict exactly how many other people will be on the road at the same time. Yoo explained the difficulty in projecting network capacity and that we can’t always be right when determining whether more capacity or network management was the answer. Sometimes more capacity is the answer, sometimes network management is the answer and we shouldn’t lock ourselves in to one solution or the other.
Haruka Saito -
Next up was Mr. Haruka Saito from the Embassy of Japan. Mr. Saito explained that Japan had been studying and debating the issue of Network Neutrality in Japan for about a year and a half and he offered a lot of hard data gathered in Japan. Japan is one of if not the most connected nation in the world when it comes to broadband deployment with 100 Mbps fiber deployments and despite this abundance of capacity, even I was shocked that they were running in to congestion problems.
When the traffic chart was broken down in to color-coded regions showing application usage, P2P easily ate the lion’s share of resources and dwarfed everything else on the chart. Mr. Saito went on to explain that 1% of the users primarily through P2P consumed around 50% of the total capacity and this pretty much mirrors every other study I’ve seen elsewhere in the world regardless of capacity. The debate in Japan was who was going to pay for this excessive usage and whether the heaviest users should start paying more money.
George Ou -
Next up was me and I gave a presentation based on my Comcast versus Vuze and Comcast before the FCC article. After Mr. Saito’s presentation, it certainly made my job a lot easier showing my charts on how BitTorrent and P2P were effectively the primary bandwidth hogs. I explained that the vast majority of all web applications like Web surfing, YouTube, Apple iTunes video downloads, Xbox Live Marketplace video downloads, and other applications like email almost never use any upstream capacity. Even though there are applications like Skype High Quality Video Conferencing which can fully saturate the upstream pipe, its duration is relatively short which significantly lowers its average load on the network.
I then explained that Vuze using the P2P model shifts nearly all of its server, storage, and bandwidth costs to its customer’s computer and the broadband providers while all other video distribution services pay for their own distribution costs. Then I explained that Cable networks and Wireless networks are shared-medium networks that are constrained in capacity and that they weren’t built nor sold to be content servers for the rest of the Internet. Wireless networks are even more scarce in terms of capacity because of the scarcity of spectrum and many of the smaller ISPs would be put out of business if the Government made rules banning P2P throttling or P2P blocking. Without those smaller wireless ISPs that cover the rural areas that the larger companies don’t want to cover, those Americans living in rural America would be cut off from the Internet and possibly even their phone service. We have plenty of choices on getting content but few choices on broadband carriers and the Government must keep this in mind when making network management policies.
David Burstein -
David Burstein went up next to give his presentation though he didn’t actually have a presentation ready so he improvised the presentation. After indirectly but clearly referring to Professor Yoo as an “idiot”, Burstein told the audience that if only Comcast would upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0, then there wouldn’t be any need to manage the network. That seemed to fly in the face of the hard network traffic data that Mr. Saito presented indicating that even a 100 Mbps per home dedicated fiber network would have congestion problems due primarily to P2P traffic. Burstein continued to insist that a measly DOCSIS 3.0 network (which is 120 Mbps shared between a few hundred users) would somehow be immune to congestion problems.
Even stranger was Burstein’s testimony that it would only cost Comcast 10 cents per user per month to upgrade everyone to DOCSIS 3.0. When pressed where he got such a number, Burstein Then he admitted it was only a guess but insisted that until someone proves him wrong, then everyone should laugh in the faces of his doubters. I didn’t bother challenging Burstein on the spot since there were so many other things I wanted to say, but I will respond to him here.
If we take Burstein’s estimate at face value, then we would have to believe that a DOCSIS 3.0 CMTS (Cable Modem Termination System) along with a ~250 DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems could be had for a cheap total of $50 for the entire neighborhood per month. Now bear in mind that the typical DOCSIS 2.0 modem costs about $60 and a CMTS is about the size of a 40U rack and falls under the category of very specialized networking gear. A more common Cisco switch half the size would easily cost a quarter million dollars so it wouldn’t be surprising if a CMTS costs upwards of half a million dollars. With 500 users on a CMTS loop (Cable TV with typically half of them subscribing to cable broadband), the costs will at least be $1000 per user for just the CMTS and we haven’t even begun to look at the costs of upgrading the surrounding infrastructure to support the higher capacities and the cable modems.
[Update 3/4/2008 - Dave Burstein has asked me to issue a correction that he stated it was 10 cents per user PER MONTH. I do apologize for my error, but it doesn't really change the fact that the correct number from Burstein has little to do with reality. At 10 cents per user per month, it would take 10,000 months or 833 years to break even on a minimal $1000/user investment.]
Marvin Ammori -
Marvin Ammori from the Free Press went up and also improvised a presentation. He kicked it off with a cheap shot saying how he was glad that Professor Yoo and I didn’t bring a busload of chair warmers and attempted to paint the two of us as industry shills. Ammori then went on to build a straw man argument that he thought my position was that YouTube didn’t pay their fair share of the Internet. Ammori obviously never saw my article from last year where I ripped Ed Whitacre’s statements that Google didn’t pay their fair share on Internet connectivity. After Ammori finished his presentation, I let my displeasure be known that I spoke as a proud American citizen who was in Washington DC for the first time with no one paying me to speak.
One other interesting tidbit was the fact that Mr. Ammori who admittedly never heard of the word “BitTorrent” up until a few months ago claimed that BitTorrent will only do 4 upstream sessions. Since Ammori told us that he heard it from Professor Edward Felton [waiting for Ammori's clarification on who he heard it from], somehow that overturns my testimony that BitTorrent was a bandwidth hog that opened 10s of upstream sessions. The reality was that certain BitTorrent clients will default to 4 upstream sessions for each torrent, but multiple torrents meant multiples of 4. The other interesting claim that Ammori made was that BitTorrent was intelligent and kind enough to back off when your neighbor was trying to use something like a web or email application. Where exactly Ammori got this information wasn’t clear, but I’d like the Free Press to show me some documentation for a protocol that no one has ever heard before.
[UPDATE 3/4/2008 - Ammori emailed me that he didn't say it was from Ed Felton despite the fact that he mentioned Ed Felton's name in the closest proximity to as far as my memory is concerned. Ammori writes in his email that he had named David Reed, David Clark, and Ed Felton as the three expert witnesses he cited, but has so far refused to clarify which one told him that BitTorrent maxes out at 4 upstream sessions. Strangely, Ammori seemed a lot more confident of his source when testifying before the government to bolster his claims and discredit mine but now he refuses to clarify his source when he is shown to be wrong. At this point I don't know if Ammori was given the wrong information or didn't understand what he was told, but either way he gave bad testimony.
Instead of offering clarification, he took a few more shots at me the same way that he attacked Richard Bennett implying that we're somehow not qualified and that we're "brought in" by Comcast which has no truth. Then just as he did at the panel last Friday, he insists that his sources are better even though none of his sources have disputed anything I or Richard Bennett has said. Richard Bennett is one of the pioneers of the Internet and he's written some very informative and articulate articles on this matter and he's also faced off with Ed Felton in podcasts. You can hear the podcast for yourself but I think you'll find that Richard Bennett held his own against Ed Felton and Richard has far more expertise on this particular subject matter.
During his presentation, Ammori also tried to discredit the data I showed where P2P seeding was pretty much the only application that hogged the upstream. In the context of the hard data presented by Mr. Saito from the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications showing that P2P was undoubtedly the upstream and downstream bandwidth hog, it was shocking that Ammori would try to continue disputing that fact. Ammori basically argued that we can't really know if the charts I used (copy here) are legitimate or not and he made a habit of trying to discredit me with no factual data to counter. It will be interesting to see if he's willing to explain exactly which expert he was citing.]
During the informal panel debate after everyone had spoke, I brought up the fact that Comcast gives you web space to post content which operates 10 times faster than any BitTorrent seed. This apparently wasn’t good enough for Mr. Ammori and he felt that this was somehow impinging on his right to free speech since he couldn’t serve out high-definition video content from his own home. Never mind the fact that we’re in a unique time in history where for the first time user generated content on YouTube can have a huge impact on the election. Anyone can put up a political ad on YouTube and get millions of people to watch it if the video was clever enough, but the fact that Ammori couldn’t serve it in High Definition from his own home was somehow a violation of his first amendment. But the fact of the matter is that you can serve HD video from your own home if you pay for a commercial-grade Internet connection that allows you to host servers. What you don’t have the right to do is buy a cheaper residential-grade Internet connection, hog the scarce resources by serving content to the whole world and violate the terms of service.
So to sum it up, it was knee deep in politics experience but it was all worthwhile. I felt honored that I had contributed something to my Government and my Nation.
[Update 3/4/2008 - Since this post is obviously being told from my viewpoint, I will be happy to link to any of the other speaker's blogs rehashing their experience if they write anything regardless of whether I agree with them or not.]
February 26th, 2008
FCC hearings: Comcast versus Vuze
The FCC held its hearing on Comcast’s Network Management practices at Harvard University yesterday. Vuze executive Gilles BianRosa whose company filed one of the two FCC complaints against Comcast reportedly told the FCC yesterday that BitTorrent does not hog bandwidth. Since most Internet experts would dispute that claim, I generated the following hard data on the bandwidth consumption of various applications that run on the Internet.
Note: Richard Bennett who was an expert panelist at yesterday’s hearings informed me that BianRosa claimed that BitTorrent didn’t exceed the contracted limit. That however ignores the explicit “no server” clause in the terms of service and no broadband service was built to be fully saturated 24×7. This is why commercial grade T1 lines that offer less than half the speed of broadband connections costing 8 times less are $400 per month.
Bear in mind that the data below is in reference to upstream (upload) bandwidth consumption in kilobits per second since that is the focus of these FCC hearings. Also note that applications like web surfing hardly use the upstream at all since it’s primarily your clicks and URLs that are being transmitted to tell the web server where you want to go.
The following is a graph of the above chart
* Corporate VPN telecommuter worker using G.722 codec @ 64 Kbps payload and 33.8 Kbps packetization overhead
** Vonage or Lingo SIP-based VoIP service with G.726 codec @ 32 Kbps payload and 18.8 Kbps packetization overhead
*** I calculated that I Sent 29976 kilobytes of mail over the last 56 days averaging 0.04956 Kbps
It is interesting to note that before the advent of P2P applications, Broadband users were primarily downloaders and rarely did they ever upload. It is for this reason that Broadband networks were built asymmetrically and heavily favored the downstream. Servers in data centers with commercial-grade Internet connections served and transmitted content and consumers consumed that content by downloading them.
If you’re downloading video from a service like Apple iTunes, Microsoft Xbox Live Marketplace, Netflix, or YouTube, you’re only downloading and not uploading anything. Those services pay a lot of money for their own datacenters filled with servers, their own bandwidth, and/or they pay services like Akamai to cache and distribute their content over the entire Internet.
Vuze on the other hand uses a different business model where they don’t pay for their own bandwidth and they expect their users to contribute their upload bandwidth to make the service work using the BitTorrent protocol. Vuze basically gets free distribution because they enlist their own customers to be their servers and bandwidth providers using their own computers and broadband connections. So instead of paying for commercial distribution, Vuze offloads their bandwidth on to the broadband providers.
<Next page - Exacerbating the Cable and Wireless spectrum scarcity>
Disclosure: Many people have asked me for the source of the data so I will put out the following disclaimer. As I already indicated in the first paragraph of this article, I am the original source of those charts and graphs. I’ve written extensively on VoIP bandwidth consumption as the former Technical Director of TechRepublic. Before TechRepublic, I built and designed networks for a living. I worked on the routing, the switching, and the traffic engineering of Intranet and Internet based networks. The in-use bitrates I cited are detailed and include packetization overhead and they can be independently verified.
February 23rd, 2008
Why Satellite Internet service is so slow
I was reading in the news today about an experimental geosynchronous communications satellite being launched by Japan and I got to wondering about why Satellite Internet service has such horrendous latency and is so slow. So I drew up a little diagram above (click to see full resolution) and did some calculations on the distance traveled and how long it takes for light to take the four-way journey. That’s because you have to go up to the satellite, then back down to the service provider, then back up to the satellite, and finally back down to you. Seeing that circle represent the planet Earth gives you some perspective how far and high a geosynchronous orbit is.
Here are some interesting numbers I compiled and estimated
- 35,780 kilometer geosynchronous altitude
- 12,756.32 kilometer diameter of earth at the equator
- 12,715.43 kilometer diameter of earth at the poles
- 299792.458 km/s is the speed of light in a vacuum
- Just the speed of light delay is between 477 ms to 556 ms delay
- With equipment delay and congestion, we’re looking at 500 ms to 1000 ms delay for satellite Internet service.
- ~199862 km/s is the speed of light in glass
(assuming glass is 1.5x slower than in vacuum) - 39.6 ms theoretical ping from California to New York
- 80 ms is the realistic ping from California to New York
- 90.8 ms theoretical ping from California to Germany
- 180 ms is the realistic ping from California to Germany
- 100.8 ms theoretical ping from California to China
- 200 ms is the realistic ping from California to China
February 7th, 2008
First experiences with Vista SP1 RTM
[UPDATE 1/12/2008 2:55PM - Looks like my fellow blogger Ed Bott may have pulled through and found the answer in the quotation below. The lesson in this is to always update the motherboard BIOS when upgrading to a new OS. This shouldn't be too much of a surprise since this same rule applies to upgrading memory and CPUs as well.
Ed Bott: 2.07 (BIOS for IBM Thinkpad T60) is ancient, and according to the changelog Vista support was added in 2.09, so your BIOS is not Vista-compatible. The most up-to-date BIOS is 2.20:]
[UPDATE 1/12/2008 2:55PM - It looks like the IBM ThinkPad T60 lockups may have something to do with Vista SP1 after all. It locks up within 30 seconds when I boot the Vista SP1 fresh install DVD or when I boot Windows Vista that was upgraded to SP1 from a different DVD. My IT person loaded Windows XP on the laptop and it runs smoothly. He will load Windows Vista without SP1 and see if it is stable as well. More updates to come. Update 3:15PM - Looks like Vista without SP1 crashes too. This reminds me of the lone desktop machine I had last year that ran fine for a year on XP but was never able to load a fresh install of Vista without it crashing. This could be one of those hardware problems that only manifest itself when being taxed more by something like Windows Vista. Either way, we're trying to get to the bottom of this and this laptop is going back to where we bought it from.]
[Update 3:55PM - Seems like a hardware issue with this specific IBM ThinkPad T60 since Microsoft tells me they have plenty of T60s that are running fine with SP1. I was trying to recover some log files for Microsoft by booting the Windows Vista SP1 fresh-install DVD and it hung there and locked up the mouse too. That would seem to at least rule out DivX and it was a mere coincidence on the exact timing of the lockup. Heck the battery on it is dead too and the screen came with some scratches so it's time this dog of a laptop goes back to the IT department.]
I completed the first two installations of Vista SP1 RTM upgrade last night on to my primary desktop computer and my first Vista laptop meant to be my new work computer. The result is a near death experience with my desktop computer, and then a real death experience with the laptop (caused by hardware and not Vista SP1). I guess I should count myself lucky that it wasn’t my main computer that died since I haven’t migrated to the laptop for work yet. I will try to get some help from Microsoft to see if we can resolve this issue.
Near death with desktop computer:
The desktop computer almost didn’t make the upgrade but finally managed to pull itself out of the gates of hell. The SP1 upgrade on both computers took more than an hour to install along with multiple reboots. When the desktop system finally allowed me to log in, it went in to non-aero mode and it refused to let me flip in to aero. The sound was temporarily messed up but I managed to get it working after I enabled the sound. 5 minutes after I logged in the Windows SP1 upgrade finally told me it was finished which seems strange since you would think the user should be locked out until everything was done. Since I couldn’t get aero running I figured I’d try rebooting but the next reboot just seemed to hang on a black screen with a working mouse pointer for 5 minutes so I tried rebooting again. On that last reboot everything finally came up and I breathed a sigh of relief. [UPDATE 3:55PM - Microsoft says they are working with the driver developers on this to smooth out the install process]
Death of a laptop:
The laptop computer on the other hand went a little smoother on the SP1 upgrade and worked fine for about two hours until I installed the latest DivX codec and the whole machine just locked up after Vista popped up the Windows experience feedback prompt. Now this laptop locks up the entire computer within 15 seconds of logging in and there’s no way I even have time to run system restore to see if I can get it to the state right after I installed SP1. All I see is a locked up Vista screen and the laptop is as useful as a bookend. It is possible that this could be a hardware issue but the laptop was working fine up until this point. [UPDATE 3:55PM - It appears to be most likely a hardware issue with this specific IBM ThinkPad T60 laptop]
I don’t know if Vista SP1 just doesn’t like DivX or if it was just a coincidence and something else is causing this problem. I have the same DivX codec installed on my desktop computer this week but it was installed before last night when I installed Vista SP1. It’s quite possible that installing this version of DivX after SP1 will kill the computer but if this is the true, Microsoft needs to issue a warning and block this codec from installing after SP1 has already installed. If you’re planning on installing SP1 on your computer, DO NOT install DivX codec after you’ve installed SP1 until after I verify what’s going on and update this blog. If you have DivX codec installed already, then it doesn’t seem to be a problem.
Minute long login times for domain connected computers
The other problem I was told that Windows Vista SP1 would fix was the minute long login times for a Vista computer joined to an Active Directory. This turned out to be false at least in my case since it still takes 55 seconds of looking at the “Welcome” message after I type in my password. This doesn’t seem to be a problem coming out of suspend mode if you’re already logged in so it would only affect you if you reboot or log off the computer, but it’s annoying as hell and it really makes me think twice before using Vista in a business environment until these issues are solved.
[UPDATE 4:05PM - Microsoft explained to me that until a laptop at least logs in once on the corporate LAN and cache the domain controllers correctly, it will exhibit a 20 second delay per each domain controller the laptop knows of. That's a neat solution and all, but I know quite a few mobile workers who never go in to the corporate LAN and they need a solution where they can simply VPN in and get all this nonsense sorted out automatically and painlessly without flying in to an office with a permanent LAN or WAN connection to the Domain Controller]
Some improvements after SP1
My desktop computer seems to be a lot healthier now after I installed Vista SP1. The Vista install seemed to have gotten corrupted to the point that IE7 was locking up left and right while I kept getting these error messages from Windows Media Center Store Upgrade Manager shown in the figure below. [UPDATE 4:15AM - Looks like I may have spoken a bit too soon and the talkback tool here still locks up IE7 pretty hard on this computer. I'm not sure if it's related to the talkback or something else on that page that's causing it. All I know is that IE7 has been locking up hard on my Windows XP laptop and Vista machine for the last month or more.]
So far that error message hasn’t popped up yet [UPDATE 3:55PM - The message popped up again and it appears I need to rebuild the database score in Windows Media Center] and IE7 seems to have stabilized now and it’s no longer locking up the CPU to 100% utilization on a single CPU core[UPDATE 3:55PM - I'm working with Microsoft to figure this issue out and will update since it's still locking up in the talkback section]
The Windows networking indicator icon shown in the screenshot below seems to be a lot more responsive in discovering your network location. It completes in a few seconds after you log in rather than sometimes wait up to a minute pre-SP1. The laptop (before it died) also exhibited the same responsive network indicator icon. [UPDATE 3:55PM - Microsoft says quite a bit of work went in to the TCP/IP stack. This seems to be a good thing.]
Windows Movie Maker for Vista still a stinker:
If you’re wondering why I even bother with the DivX codec and Dr. DivX video encoder, it’s because Microsoft’s Windows Media Encoder 9.0 is old and doesn’t support high definition HDV formats yet and Windows Movie Maker for Vista is still garbage. If you attempt to use Windows Movie Maker to encode HDV videos, it will only encode one corner of the video at standard resolution and leave out most of the rest of the video frame. [UPDATE 3:55PM - Microsoft says they can encode HDV footage without problems so the problem may be caused by some codec conflicts. They also say that Microsoft Expression Encoder ($300) will work much better, though that's quite a bit more money than I want to spend since Dr. Divx is free.] The latest version of Dr. DivX (which requires the DivX codec) will handle High Definition .dvr-ms files and let you encode in to the desired video format for DVD set-top box playback or for YouTube optimized format. I’d love to be able to encode in to the 1080p Windows Media Advanced Profile format that Windows Media Encoder 9 promises but the software simply doesn’t work.
Making things worse, I was hoping Windows Movie Maker which only comes with the Premium or Ultimate Edition would actually be a complete application by now but I would be disappointed again. The old Windows Movie Maker in Windows XP was a free download and it allowed you to select the part of the tape you want to record off your DV camcorder but HDV format wasn’t supported at all. The new Windows Movie Maker for Vista does support HDV format but it teases you by asking you if you want to “Import entire videotape or just parts?”. Then it only gives you the option to “Import the entire videotape to my computer” as shown in the screenshot below. If anyone knows of a cheap or free non-bloated HDV capture program for Windows, please tell me in the talkback.
Fortunately DivX codec and Dr. DivX works on my desktop computer since they were installed before SP1 so I will need to get verification of the problems on my new work laptop.
Now at this point it’s still to early to draw any conclusions about Vista SP1 and the problems I faced may be unique to my particular setup or hardware. It certainly doesn’t make a good first impression for me and you need to be careful anytime you install a major upgrade like this. Please check back here for updates and status reports on these problems.
February 4th, 2008
ISSCC 2008: Details on Intel Silverthorne
At this year’s ISSCC 2008 (International Solid State Circuits Conference), details of Intel’s new 45nm Silverthorne will emerge. Intel CTO Justin Rattner held a press briefing last Wednesday to preview some of the highlights of this week’s highly technical ISSCC conference in San Francisco.
Credit: Intel Corporation (from ISSCC preview presentation)
Intel Silverthorne is a brand new Intel x86 processor for the Menlow platform developed from the ground up for low-cost and ultra-low power applications. This includes UMPC (Ultra Mobile PCs), MID (Mobile Internet Devices), set-top applications, some embedded applications, and eventually for smart phone applications though this initial generation may not be suitable yet. Its small 25mm^2 die size on a 45nm process allows 2500 chips to fit on a single 300mm diameter wafer allows for extremely economic production.
From Rattner’s press conference last week, we know that Silverthorne will launches in the first half of 2008 but Rattner will not give a yes on a Q1 launch in response to one of the questions. The first Silverthorne dies were publicly shown in April of 2007 in IDF China so it’s quite possible that we’re looking at a second quarter launch. Rattner also explained that Silverthorne was a dual-issue in-order pipeline architecture with HT (Hyper-threading) and that this was better than hyper-threading in out-of-order architecture. I later got verification via email that the HT type was SMT (Simultaneous multithreading) and not SoEMT (Switch-On-Event Multithreading).
The slides shown by Rattner indicated that Silverthorne had a power consumption below 1W and up to 2W and that it was “10x lower power than ULV Dothan”. The Dothan was the second generation Pentium M product and ULV parts had a TDP (Thermal Design Power) of 5W. I later got clarification via email that Silverthorne processors can have TDPs as low as 0.6W with lower clock speeds and higher clocked parts will have a 2 watt TDP. I spoke with analyst David Kanter of Real World Technologies and he explained that 0.6W which doesn’t factor in chipset power consumption might be too high for smart phone applications. However, its immediate successor in the Moorestown platform which may launch late 2008 may solve that problem with its SoC (System on Chip) design.
Update 3:10PM - There are quite a few inaccurate reports out there on Silverthorne’s power consumption. They have reported the power consumption of Silverthorne as 0.6W to 2W which is not correct. 0.6W is actually a TDP rating which describes PEAK power consumption. Actual idle power consumption can dip down to 0.01W for some models and 0.1W for other models. Intel is not saying too much more right now but it is reasonable to assume that this extremely low power state is designed to maximize battery life in Smart Phones. Keeping a continuous Skype or SIP application presence in a UMPC or MID device to receive calls is now a possibility.
The 2 GHz variant of the Silverthorne processor will operate at 1 volt and it will have performance equivalent to a first generation “Banias” Pentium M notebook processors circa 2003. Rattner confirmed this was for single-threaded performance on a broad range of applications. This would seem to imply that with multithreaded applications, the performance would be even higher than Banias which lacks Hyper-Threading.
Here are some additional quotes pulled from Rattner’s slides:
- Deep power down C6
- Optimized register-file and cache 6T bits cells
- CMOS mode on quad-pumped FSB IO
- Split IO power supply
Here are some additional email responses:
- 0.6W to 2W measured TDP power on real world applications – over the lifetime of the processor/architecture
- Can achieve 2GHz core frequencies at 1.0V
- Will support features such as Digital Media Boost (SSE3), Intel Virtualization technology, Intel 64 Architecture support, HT
January 30th, 2008
Painful lesson in OLPC mesh networking for Mongolians
The Mongolians have had a painful lesson on mesh networking according to the OLPC current events webpage. Broadcast storms in the overly dense mesh environment along with excessive mDNS broadcast traffic seem to have crippled the Gobi desert experiment. Here’s an excerpt:
We have painfully discovered the limitations of the mesh and current collaborative software in Mongolia, where the convolution of the number of laptops with bugs #5335 (more mDNS traffic than expected) and #5007 (mesh repeats multicast too much) make the perfect storm, which prevents anybody from using the network. We will continue to improve the mesh performance, but clear guidelines are needed as to what network infrastructure to deploy under what conditions. Once a certain density of students is exceeded, a wired backbone and conventional access points will be required.
The limitations of mesh topology are well known in the wireless engineering community and I’ve raised the issue and pointed out the limitations last September. Each mesh hop you add increases the propagation delay as well as multiply the radio traffic and congestion. Performance on a mesh network is fundamentally many times slower than a non-mesh network and when the density gets high enough, the system simply breaks down.
When on a tight budget, I had always recommended the usage of a cheap $60 router running open source DD-WRT would have sufficed and you get a free router with it which you need for IP sharing anyways. The addition of a high-powered antenna would allow the access point to hear distant signals from faint clients and it will amplify the broadcast signal. A simple in-door $26 9 dBi antenna placed up high can easily cover a small school. A $60 12 dBi outdoor antenna positioned on the roof would easily cover an entire campus. If you put two centralized Access Points and large antennas on channel 1 and 11 (avoid adjacent channels because of channel bleeding) in the 2.4 GHz spectrum, you can load balance and have redundancy if one set of AP/antenna fails.
My fellow blogger and teacher Chris Dawson feels that the ability to do peer-to-peer collaboration with or without an Access Point has great potential. But peer-to-peer wireless collaboration could have been done with regular ad hoc networking technology without the expense or problems of a full 802.11s mesh implementation.
The inclusion of full 802.11s stack has been challenging. The need for a radio system that stays on and continues to forward packets even while the laptop is off added unnecessary expenditure to the OLPC XO and it unnecessarily drains the laptop batteries. When you multiply this expense and complexity across all the clients and realize that the wireless access point comes free with the router, it becomes clear that this may not have been the best design decision.
January 9th, 2008
This ad brought to you via Bluetooth
I spoke to Tiffany Burns from iSign Media Corp at a CES party last night which offers some interesting if not controversial technology. This technology will send you spa, I mean advertisements to you via Bluetooth technology. Ms. Burns touted the fact that these ads were free since they weren’t eating up any cell phone time or racking up messaging charges, but my immediate reaction was what happens if the user doesn’t want to see the ad. Burns’ responded that the user can simply hit no on the yes/no dialog but I asked what if the user doesn’t even want to see these ads ever, not even the prompting. The response was to turn off Bluetooth which didn’t make me any more comfortable since people may not know or may not want to shut off Bluetooth on their cell phone.
Now I have my personal feelings about this technology but I want to hear what you have to say about this so I put up the following poll. Please feel free to comment in the talkback section too.
Loading ...December 6th, 2007
We need to calm down over the SAFE act
Updated 12/8/2007 - Slashdot had this eye-popping headliner “House Bill Could Criminalize Free Wi-Fi Operators” which linked to Declan McCullagh’s story “House vote on illegal images sweeps in Wi-Fi, Web sites“. The bill in question H.R.876 would enact huge fines for any wired or wireless ISP including home users with open Access Points who fails to report child pornography users.
I must admit after reading that story I was pretty furious and about to write a blog blasting the bill and Congress, but now I’m not so sure. Reader “faboidea” wrote this very intelligent rebuttal to McCullagh’s story which forced me to go and read the text of the bill. The following is an excerpt from the bill.
H.R.876 section 2258A
(f) Protection of Privacy- Nothing in this section shall be construed to require an electronic communication service provider or a remote computing service provider to–
- monitor any user, subscriber, or customer of that provider;
- monitor the content of any communication of any person described in paragraph (1); or
- affirmatively seek facts or circumstances described in subsection (a)(2).
So as you can see, no one is going to be required to monitor their infrastructure. You simply need to report any incidents of child pornography if you happen to come across it. So they only controversial part of the bill that I can see is that it has some retention rules that forces the private sector to retain child pornography images even after they’ve turned over the obscene material. These provisions probably need to be reexamined but we all need to calm down and read the bill before we freak out.
Update 12/8/2007 - The blogosphere seems to have gotten up in arms over this post in favor of the bill and against the bill. I want to clarify that I am not necessarily for this bill since I think a lot of the rules are already covered by other laws and there are clearly some places that this bill steps on some really shaky ground. It also adds tons of bureaucracy we don’t need and the retention rules being foisted upon the ISPs seem to go over board.
The rules which criminalize images of fully clothed children, depictions, and cartoons/animes can in some cases have merit but can also be easily abused since the line between legal and illegal is extremely difficult to define. For example, I remember reading about a controversial movie many years ago depicting an adult male doing it to a minor although nothing was shown explicitly. Does anyone who owns this DVD now become a child pornographer? Heck I even remember a TV movie set in WWII where the 12 year old character Ricky Schroder plays was raped by an adult in prison. Does that also qualify as an illegal depiction? On the other hand, it is possible to draw people so real that you can circumvent the laws if there are no rules against depictions so this isn’t an easy subject to tackle.
In any case, the only reason I wanted to post this note is because I wanted us to have a reasonable debate on this issue. I don’t know if this bill is right or necessary though clearly it’s one of those things that few politicians want to oppose since it’s “for the children”.
December 3rd, 2007
EFF wants to saddle you with metered Internet service
Updated 12/8/2007 - The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) last week publicly joined Free Press and Public Knowledge in recommending a metered Internet service as the alternative to Comcast’s BitTorrent throttling. The extremist “Net Neutrality” crowd that wants to regulate the Internet with bans on per-user charges/contracts for Enhanced QoS are so busy trying to revive their cause by using the Comcast issue that they’re overlooking the fact that these three groups are trying to bring you a metered Internet service. The media for the most part has missed the boat on what’s really going on and they present this to the public as if EFF is trying to protect the public’s interest from evil corporations.
The EFF goes as far as touting the Australian model for broadband service. Just to be sure this isn’t some kind of mistake, I personally confirmed with EFF this is what they want. In their report they write:
The Australian broadband market offers an illustration of how this can work in practice. The selection of Australian broadband options can be searched at http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/bc-plan.cfm. It includes a wide selection of plans with different peak and off-peak quotas, some with a traffic shaping after a quota has been passed and others with a wide range of per-gigabyte fees. It also includes explicitly “no set limit” plans where the ISP reserves the right to deem certain usage excessive, and more expensive, truly unlimited plans where the user can saturate their link 24/7 if they wish.
I checked out the link and a Cable broadband connection costs $40/month with a 400 MB cap and a $150/GB overage charge. Just imagine if you accidentally left the BitTorrent client on for a weekend or if the kids use Grandma’s computer to download a bunch of videos racking up hundreds of dollars in charges. We’re all going to have to go back to the cell phone model where we worry about peak and off/peak hours and how many megabytes we used just like we worry about how many minutes we use.
Well no thanks EFF, I as an American have no interest in paying higher prices like they do in Australia (no offense to the beautiful country of Australia and its people). Not only does a metered Internet service plan screw the low-end users, it makes BitTorrent or any kind of peer-to-peer networking cost prohibitive. The EFF ironically claims its standing up for BitTorrent rights when it fact it would kill it with metered Internet services.
Update 12/8/2007
The EFF has responded to me and others that I have misrepresented their position. I’ll let you be the judge of that so here is what they sent me and what they’re telling everyone else.
The article incorrectly states that EFF endorses legislation or regulation that would force ISPs or users to offer only metered services. The EFF report actually states that the *availability* of metered access alongside “all you can eat” plans, combined with accurate advertising by ISPs, is one alternative that might solve whatever congestion issues Comcast might be having (as the language you quote in your article expressly makes clear).
Nowhere in this blog post do I state EFF would force ISPs to *only* offer metered services? All I said was “The EFF goes as far as touting the Australian model for broadband service” as a better alternative to Comcast’s current model and I included the Australian ISP link the EFF pointed to. The plans that came up were mostly metered plans and some were very expensive unlimited plans. Peter Eckersley even sent me an email touting this page where you pay $65/month AUD for a plan that gives you 8 GB of “pre-paid data” during noon to midnight [Update 12/12/2007 - Peter Eckersley emailed me saying he sent me the wrong link and had meant to link to this page which is $20 cheaper. That's slightly better but the 8GB cap is still a horrible idea]. Since you can download 8 GBs in less than 2 hours at 10 mbps, you essentially give up using any BitTorrent from noon to midnight unless you want to pay $3/GB. Even the off-peak rates are metered so you still have to be careful to turn off your BitTorrent client after 1 hour each day. If you want 48 GB “pre-paid data”, you need to pay $120/month AUD and $3/GB over that amount.
Now consider Comcast’s offerings which permit you to download and upload unlimited data using BitTorrent with no throttling for a flat fee of $40 per month. You can easily download 100 GBs and upload 10 GBs per month or more and Comcast won’t stop you or charge you anything extra. The only thing Comcast does is occasionally scale back the number of BitTorrent seed connections (dedicated server mode) you can have even though Comcast’s TOS (Terms Of Service) prohibits servers of any kind. My ATT DSL plan is less than $20/month and I can download 8 GB per day every day and not pay a single cent on overage charges so what is the EFF thinking recommending the Australian ISP model over Comcast’s “bad” model?
The EFF says what Comcast is doing is evil and that the Australian model is the better alternative even though it’s draconian compared to what Comcast or any other American ISP is doing. It would certainly stop the BitTorrent usage during peak hours but at what price to the user? The Free Press and Public Knowledge also think metered Internet is a better alternative but they go a step further and want to criminalize Comcast’s current operating model and fine them trillions of dollars. So again I ask: Who is the EFF, Free Press, and Public Knowledge serving? The RIAA and MPAA couldn’t buy this kind of anti peer-to-peer lobbying if they tried.
November 29th, 2007
Updated sub-$400 all-in-one dual-core LCD PC images
I’ve put the top and bottom lid on my new sub-$400 all-in-one dual-core LCD PC and mounted an 802.11 b/g USB adapter to it so I can use the computer anywhere in the house. To keep the chassis cool, I drilled 5 large holes on the top board. I am still waiting for my female USB socket connectors that hook up to the USB leads on the motherboard so I’ve temporarily used one the venting holes to mount the USB Wi-Fi adapter. I also need to paint the thing black to match the color of the LCD and sand some things down. [See gallery, A computer's place is in the kitchen, for larger photos.]
The AIO computer is sitting on the corner of my kitchen dining table and there are no bulky ATX towers sitting on the floor or table.
This particular power strip is a bit bulky so I’m looking forward to finding something thinner that I can bolt to the bottom of the PC chassis. Having the extra power sockets right there on the computer is really nice to have.
When the computer isn’t being used or if it’s being used as a movie playback device, I can tuck the mouse and keyboard away taking up less room than a laptop sitting on the table.
To put this in to proper perspective, here’s the entire kitchen table with the AIO computer sitting at the edge of the table. It hardly takes any room and the table is wide open for eating. I finally had the kids eating at the kitchen table for once since I had a movie playing. Once I get an HDTV ATSC USB tuner dongle, this will also act as an HDTV with PVR capability along with wireless connectivity to a DVD library.
This is what the back looks like. It will be a lot less noticeable once it’s sanded and painted all black.
If you want to see what the insides look like, see the original image gallery.
Update 11/30/2007 - I’ve bolted a slimmer power strip to the bottom of the wood box and it’s a lot cleaner since I no longer have a loose power strip to worry about. It gives me extra AC ports for things like speakers or anything else that needs power.
November 28th, 2007
Wi-Fi crushes Bluetooth mouse for RF airspace
I finished up my sub-$400 all-in-one dual-core 19″ LCD PC and added an Airlink 101 AWLL3028 (Realtek 8187B chipset) 802.11 b/g USB 2.0 wireless LAN adapter for $10 last night. Now I have a cheap wireless all-in-one computer that can be placed anywhere in or around the house but there’s trouble in computing paradise and it’s the expensive 2.4 GHz Bluetooth keyboard and mouse that’s giving me some serious problems.
Whenever the 2.4 GHz 802.11g adapter is in use when I’m streaming a DVD or copying files over the air, the mouse becomes nearly useless as it stutters and moves as slow as molasses. Granted this is a more difficult situation than usual since the Bluetooth dongle and the Wi-Fi dongle are situated next to each other, but I never had these problems with less expensive 27 MHz or any other non-2.4 GHz input device regardless of device separation. I will get USB connectors installed on the top of the computer and I’m hoping that will alleviate the situation but I won’t hold my breath.
I even analyzed the 2.4 GHz spectrum with the Wi-Spy 2.4x (an inexpensive spectrum analyzer that is a must have for any IT department) and found that most of the Bluetooth RF (Radio Frequency) energy was directed at the beginning of the 2.4 GHz band. Since that correlates with channel 1 for 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi devices, I moved my Wi-Fi to channel 11 for as much channel separation as possible and that didn’t fix the problem. Bluetooth is simply designed to back off whenever Wi-Fi is in use and that Bluetooth mouse just wasn’t going to be usable whenever files were being transferred.
| 802.11g channel 11 | Bluetooth while moving mouse |
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Ironically, 2.4 GHz Bluetooth keyboard/mouse combos are two to four times more expensive than wireless keyboard/mouse combos that operate in the sub-100 MHz band. For example, the Logitech EX110 keyboard/mouse operates at 27 MHz and it costs $30. I gave my mother the one I had and it operates smoothly while 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi is in operation. By contrast, the high-end Microsoft Wireless Desktop 7000 - which I liked in my review - operates in the contested 2.4 GHz band with Wi-Fi and it costs at least $117 but is giving me these problems.
The Logitech EX110 does use a somewhat bulky external receiver with a wired connection but it works very reliably. The Microsoft WED 7000 uses a very compact USB dongle or it can use your computer’s built-in Bluetooth adapter, but the slick form factor doesn’t do me any good if it gets crushed by Wi-Fi networking. I can certainly use 5 GHz 802.11a but the hardware costs a lot more and you certainly can’t find any $10 802.11a USB dongles so I am stuck for the moment until I find a solution.
The point of this blog posting isn’t to single out Microsoft and promote Logitech. Logitech also sells very expensive Bluetooth keyboard/mice combos which would probably have these interference problems too and I have a wireless Microsoft mouse that operates flawlessly in the sub-100 MHz range. The important lesson here is that 2.4 GHz is too crowded and Bluetooth simply doesn’t have any teeth when it comes to wireless contention.
Update 3:40PM - I’ve moved the computer in to the kitchen 100 feet away from the Access Point with two walls separating the AP and the client and the results are much better than having the AP 2 feet away from the client. There are still some intermittent problems with mouse tracking so I still recommend against going to a Bluetooth input device and sticking with the cheaper sub-100 MHz input devices.
Since I was receiving data and not transmitting it, the proximity of the Bluetooth dongle to the Wi-Fi dongle wasn’t the culprit. But if I was transmitting data with Wi-Fi and the Wi-Fi dongle is only 1mm away from the Bluetooth dongle, that would undoubtedly cause some huge issues. So using the USB extension cable that came with the Wi-Fi USB dongle, I routed the USB cable inside the chassis and mounted the Wi-Fi USB dongle on top of the case which gives me better Wi-Fi reception and moves the dongles further apart.
Update 4:00PM - I tried to upload a file (transmit data) from the all-in-one computer and the prognosis on Bluetooth keyboard/mouse has been downgraded to unworkable again. Even though the Wi-Fi dongle and Bluetooth dongle is now more than 100mm apart compared to when it was 1mm apart, the mouse tracking is worse than it’s ever been when I was only receiving files from the Access Point. I also checked the spectrum analyzer again to see if the Airlink 101 AWLL3028 has proper containment on channel 11 and it looks normal. While data transmission is something I wouldn’t do often on a non-server machine, it does happen and I can’t have my mouse going to hell while I’m doing it.
November 26th, 2007
The $363 19-inch dual-core all-in-one LCD PC
Update 11/29/2007 - See updated AIO computer images
This is the new all-in-one Intel dual-core 2.0 GHz E2180 19″ LCD PC computer I built for the family. The shocker is that I did it for less than $363 in parts (not including keyboard and mouse). The 19″ LCD (1440×900 resolution) was on sale for $140 and the dual-core Intel CPU/Motherboard/graphics was on sale at Fry’s for an eye-popping $88 and I just couldn’t resist the temptation to build a nice all-in-one for the kitchen/dining area. I got a 300 GB hard drive for $50 and 1 GB of RAM for $30 (with an additional $20 rebate) and I used a $50 energy efficient “80 plus” 220 watt 1U power supply. For the chassis I used some scrap wood I had left over and spent 4 hours on a Sunday afternoon building this computer. [See image gallery.]
I haven’t made the top lid or bottom lid for this computer yet but this picture shows the full thickness of the computer bolted on to the back of the 19″ LCD display. The entire computer excluding the 19″ display consumes 40 watts in idle and 65 watts peak (WPrime with 2 threads). The 19″ LCD consumes 22 watts when it’s operating at full resolution regardless of the image being displayed. If the system is overclocked to 2.66 GHz, then the peak wattage goes up to 100 watts which is still well within safety margins. Note that this particular motherboard that came free with the CPU isn’t a stable overclocker so I don’t recommend overclocking on this system with this motherboard. For testing purposes, I loaded Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit edition and it booted up in less than 35 seconds (10 seconds due to BIOS post).
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With the top and bottom are sealed off (with some holes for venting heat), I wanted to make sure the CPU fan had a fresh supply of cool air so I cut out a hole in the back. I didn’t have one of those circular cutters handy so I had to freehand the hole with a jigsaw so I still need to sand it in to something smoother. I also didn’t want to make the chassis an extra inch thicker to accommodate the retail box fan that came with the CPU. To minimize cable clutter, I used 1 foot long power cords plugged in to a power strip. That strip also comes in handy for plugging in lots of other things.
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Unlike the VESA stand PC I built a few months ago, this computer uses the monitor’s factory stand which allows me the full range in tilt motion. Here in the photo you see that it’s tilted all the way back and it’s in no danger or tipping over.
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For the photo gallery, I used the Microsoft Wireless Entertainment Desktop keyboard and mouse. Not shown is a tiny USB Bluetooth dongle in the back that connects the keyboard and mouse.
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This photo shows the inside of the system with the back, top, bottom covers off. The hard drive is bolted on to the side but I will need to put some rubber washers on to minimize hard drive noise. Wood has a nasty habit of amplifying sound which is great for musical instruments but not so good for computers so I’ll need to spray the inner walls with insulation foam to minimize noise. I’ll probably look in to plastic materials in the future.
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This is the back of the computer with the components exposed. As you can see, the box is not much bigger than the Micro ATX motherboard. The hard drive had to overlap the motherboard a little so that the entire box can be narrower than the 17″ wide 19″ diagonal LCD display. The LCD has a DVI input but the motherboard only had VGA out so a VGA cable was used. Wired Ethernet was used but I have enough room to plug in a PCI wireless LAN adapter using a 90 degrees PCI adapter. [Update 11:55PM - I'm probably going to go for a cheap 802.11g USB adapter since that saves me the trouble of using a PCI angle adapter. The fact that I can mount it on top means it will probably get better radio reception.]
This is the full profile view of my new all-in-one computer. Note that I made a mistake of not turning the bad side of the wood in so you can see some flaws in the wood. It’s not too late for me to unscrew it and turn it around though.
So the bottom line is that while it isn’t pretty from the side or the back, you won’t ever notice it from the front and it doesn’t take any more space than the LCD display would occupy by itself. The price tag is $1000 cheaper than commercial all-in-one computers from Apple, Gateway, and now Dell. Sure you can get a laptop but laptops don’t have 19″ displays and they can’t safely clock to 2.66 GHz like this one. Having a full size keyboard and a real mouse makes this computer as powerful as a desktop yet it’s portable.
[Update 11:59PM] - Instructions for making your own box
If you want to make your own box, you just need to cut 6 pieces of board. The dimensions for front and back plate are 17″ by 8.75″. Side plates are 8.75″ by 2.5″. Top and bottom are 17″ by 3″ (thickness of front and back added 0.5″). The top 2 VESA holes are 2.75″ from the top (not including thickness of top plate). The four VESA mounting holes are centered on the box and measure 100mm apart.
The box needs to be mounted to the LCD before the motherboard is installed. To figure out where to mount the motherboard, place the motherboard and power supply on the wood and mark where the mounting holes will be with a pencil.
My colleague Justin James suggested that I go to the auto supply store and buy some rubber underbody coating (spray or roll on) for spraying on the internal walls to dampen the noise. That should also pad the contact between the hard drive and the side wall so that the hard drive noise isn’t amplified by the wooden box.
[Update 11/27/2007] - A number of people in the talkback want to know about the RF interference characteristics and whether I will paint the box black or not. On the RF interference issue, all motherboards and electronic components are already FCC certified to be within limits of how much RF noise can be leaked and I haven’t had any RF interference issues running my over-the-air HDTV tuner in my home or radio close by to this computer. As for painting the box black, yes that is what I intend to do so that it will blend in with the LCD.
Update 11/29/2007 - See updated AIO computer images
November 20th, 2007
Ruckus brings smart antennas to the enterprise wireless LAN space
Ruckus Wireless launched a new line of products for the small to mid enterprise wireless LAN space. Ruckus was a maker of smart antenna technology specializing in smooth and reliable data delivery for IPTV applications but now they are extending this technology to the enterprise space. In addition to smart antenna technology, Ruckus also implements wireless bridging and mesh technology in to these products. Soon to follow will be 802.11n and dual-band 2.4/5 GHz access points. See larger image gallery here.
Ruckus is going after the small to medium wireless LAN with a very simple web interface. Based on the demos I’ve seen, it doesn’t require a lot of tweaking or a high degree of expertise with wireless LAN technology. Four virtual access points for commonly used applications like guest, voice, and internal access are preconfigured and the administrator just needs to tweak a few settings such as priority.
Pictured left is the Zone Director 1000. It is a wireless LAN access point controller that controls up to 6 smart antenna access points for the entry level model and up to 25 smart antenna access points for the high-end model. The controller handles configuration on all the access points and automatically manages the channel allocation on the access points. It also manages the software images on the access points so that software updates on the access points don’t have to be handled one at a time.
The higher-end Ruckus 2942 is designed to be ceiling mounted although it can be mounted against a wall since its antennas can propagate horizontally or vertically. It features an ordinary FastEthernet port or an 802.3af PoE (Power over Ethernet) port. That bulge on top houses the smart antenna that automatically optimizes its configuration for the node it’s communicating with. For extra flexibility, the 2942 also features an RP-SMA external antenna connector.
This is the smart antenna for the Ruckus 2942 access point. It features antennas that cover not only the horizontal direction but also the vertical direction which can form a directional beam equivalent to a 9 dBi antenna. Coupled with the intelligent controller, the administrator simply needs to spread a few access points out based on user density and they don’t need to worry about spectrum management or complex and costly antenna installations.
This is the lower-end MediaFlex smart antenna access point. It uses a similar design to the IPTV distribution wireless routers that Ruckus sells to the IPTV providers. Unlike the 2942 antenna, the MediaFlex antenna only covers a 2D plane (with some leeway for up/down coverage) so the access point must be horizontally positioned. The MediaFlex is smaller in size so it only has 6 dBi antenna gain compared to 9 dBi on the 2942, but that’s still better than the antennas included on traditional access points especially when you factor in the directional aspect of it.
Smart antenna technology
The benefit of a smart directional antenna is that it only amplifies to a single direction towards the device it’s talking to and not to anyone else. Omni-directional antennas amplify signals in all directions for receive and transmit which makes them more susceptible to receive noise and more likely to generate noise for other devices. Wireless signals coming from other devices from other directions will reduce the signal to noise ratio on a dumb omni-directional antenna but not on a smart directional antenna. I’ve witnessed the efficacy of such a system first hand when I saw unbuffered UDP streaming video on a laptop sitting next to a noisy microwave oven and the smart antenna solution was able to overcome the problems while the dumb omni-directional antenna simply failed to deliver video.
In theory, it is possible to get a similar improvement using dumb directional antennas but that improvement is only aimed at a single direction. Putting a mechanical rotation device on a fixed directional antenna can solve the direction problem but it’s very costly and complex and it can’t possibly change directions thousands of times a second to adjust to multiple clients. The smart antenna uses an array of antennas facing a wide range of directions and software logically points the antenna by only using the portions of the antenna that generate the highest signal to noise ratio.
November 19th, 2007
Is it ethical to turn on wireless security for an open access point?
One of my readers sent me the following question and I thought it posed an interesting question on ethics. I’ll post his email and then I’ll answer his questions.
I helped a friend move, and re-established her wireless network working with a new ISP. While working, I encountered 7 wireless networks (in addition to hers), 3 of which were wide open, 2 were SSID belkin and one called linksys, etc. It was the same old problem, they plugged the router in, said “hey we’re connected” and that was it. I want your opinion on this.
I connected to each one, then using 192.168.2.1, 192.168.0.1, etc, I connected to their wide open routers, then changed the network to be WPA-PSK and made the passphrase “Secure your network, you are totally unsecure”. I did not change the router password.
Worst case, I figure geek squad will be called, but maybe, they call their router helpdesk, and learn something. I still think pressure needs to be brought to bear on router providers to default to WPA-PSK, the last “wizard I ran” never even touched on securing the link.
I have little doubt that what I did was illegal, the same way it is illegal to open someone’s car door and turn off their lights, but was what I did wrong?
Besides the fact that what you did was illegal and would get you arrested if you were ever caught, turning off someone’s car lights does cost the owner a penny but saves them a bundle by saving their car battery. But if the victim of your “good deed” needs to call Geek Squad to come and fix their router, they’re out a hundred dollars or whatever the going rate is for tech support. In many cases I think the user will simply call tech support and find out that WPA-PSK was enabled, but there are people who will suffer economic damage. Perhaps if you dropped an envelope with a letter explaining what happened with instructions on how to configure WPA-PSK for Windows or Mac, then the user won’t have to suffer agitation or a Geek Squad bill.
Using a random 10-character alpha-numeric upper/lower pass-phrase would be better since your pass-phrase would be known by everyone though the owner should be scared enough to learn how to change it themselves. Changing the SSID would also be a good ideal. That has nothing to do with security but it does prevent accidental connections between neighbors. Changing the router default password is as important as enabling wireless LAN security. Of course all these changes would have to be in the letter.
There have been proof of concept browser scripts that can go in to your router using the default password and change the router configuration. Criminals simply need to change the DNS server on your router and redirect all of your DNS requests though proxy servers that can harvest all of your browser session and snoop on all of your communications. This would be even worse than a PC root kit because it hijacks every computer on the network and you can’t clean it off the computer because it’s on the router.
Again I reiterate that breaking in to someone’s router (even if it’s to lock down their network) is ILLEGAL and you need to ask yourself if it’s worth the risk of going to prison. But if you want to continue doing this, please consider the potential economic impact to the owner of the wireless network and at least drop a letter in their mailbox explaining how to fix it. While I admit the damage is far lower than getting hacked by a real criminal, the law isn’t going to see it that way. Personally I wouldn’t be caught dead doing this because I have nothing to gain and everything to lose.
Update 12:45PM - It seems the readers have spoken in the talkback and they are pretty much universally against changing someone’s wireless settings. I personally don’t view it as negatively since I believe the dangers of leaving it open are greater, but I do think it falls on the side of unethical. Changing the Wi-Fi settings will break things for the user and most cause them some real economic damage so the ethics of doing changing the Wi-Fi security is very questionable. I think changing the password on the router so that the person doesn’t get hijacked by someone malicious wouldn’t be unethical since that doesn’t really break day-to-day operations like changing the Wi-Fi security settings. I’ll add a poll to see what all of you think.
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November 1st, 2007
$99 Toshiba HD DVD player on Friday at Wal-Mart?
Ok this is just absolutely nuts. $99 for a Toshiba HD DVD player and $348 for a 1GB Acer Laptop supposedly this Friday at Wal-Mart and it isn’t even Black Friday yet. This is being advertised as the “Secret in-store specials” ri-walmart.com site which I’m not 100% sure is Wal-Mart operated but a whois.org search says it’s registered to “Wal-Mart stores”.
I guess it’s not really such a “secret” anymore if you’re reading about it here. If that’s the case, there’s a good chance people will be camped out for 24 hours in front of Wal-Mart. Heck for all I know people might be lining up there now and I thought the $170 Sears deal with the Toshiba HD-A3 bundled with 7 HD DVD titles was already outrageous. If this $100 HD DVD is for real and if there are no sub-$250 Blu-ray set-top players this, I’m starting to think the High Definition format war is all but over.
Speaking of laptops, the Asus Eee $299 4 GB Flash 512 MB RAM 7″ LCD model is now selling for $399 at full retail cost at Newegg. But that’s a full $100 higher than we were led to believe and we see these outrageous deals with 1GB laptops and large screens selling for $348. I would say there’s no point in buying an Eee unless they can get the price down to what they originally promised unless you absolutely need an ultra-small notebook.
If I were to take a guess based on last year’s experience, you won’t be able to buy one of these laptops unless you show up today no later than 4:00PM with some sleeping bags and get ready to wait 16 hours. Then again Wal-Mart might have more of these in stock and fewer people know about this pre-Black Friday deal so it’s possible you only have to line up 12 hours ahead of time. You can count me out but I would do it in a heartbeat if I were still a starving college student.
Update 3:35PM - This appears to be the real deal. Many other sites are reporting on this and colleagues are telling me that they saw these deals advertised on TV. I guess the retailers are launching a Christmas season price war almost a whole month before Black Friday.
Update 11/3/2007 - Bestbuy fulfills backordered Toshiba HD-A2 with HD-A3 which comes bundled with “The Borne Identity” and the movie “300″.
October 16th, 2007
$60 router + DD-WRT = high-end wireless router and switch
Getting a high-powered wireless router with some high-end features is a lot cheaper than most people think. In fact it doesn’t cost any more than a regular router needed to connect to the Internet which allows the sharing of IP addresses between multiple clients. With the addition of DD-WRT, you can turn a cheap commodity router in to a high-end wireless router and switch. With the addition of a high-powered antenna located high up in the air which amplifies the send and receive capability of the wireless access point, anyone can set up their own wireless hotspot service with a massive coverage area.
Pictured to the left is the Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 router that sells for as little as $60 at all the local electronics stores like Circuit City, Best Buy, and Fry’s or it can be ordered online. The WHR-G54 sells for as little as $50 and is virtually identical except for the fact that the WHR-HP-G54 has a receive side amplifier which helps the router hear faint laptops coming in on long-range connections. Both routers come with an RP-SMA antenna connector for external antennas which makes this router extremely flexible for wireless ISP and long-range bridging applications. The WHR-HP-G54 also comes with a wall mounting bracket so that you can mount the device up high.
This particular router can run DD-WRT using this specific upgrade procedure. DD-WRT can turn this cheap device in to an enterprise class product with enterprise features normally found in devices costing hundreds of dollars more. Things you often don’t get on your consumer routers are features like VLAN (Virtual LAN) support on the switch, Enterprise Wireless LAN security support, QoS (prioritization), site-to-site VPN tunneling and VPN servers, Hotspot, and advanced routing features like OSPF and BGP. You can see a full gallery here with all the important features of DD-WRT.
[Update 10/17/2007 - Readers have commented that the OpenVPN function is very nice too. I'll also be looking at adding FreeRADIUS to this device and will follow up on it.]
October 9th, 2007
OLPC is the PC you can't ever criticize
As Nicholas Negroponte said a year and a half ago in a presentation on the OLPC: “people really don’t want to criticize this because it is a humanitarian effort, it is a non-profit effort and to criticize it is a little bit stupid actually”. When I dared question the need for OLPC mesh networking (criticism on client-side mesh topology and not fixed wireless mesh or wired mesh) since it is a solution to a problem that can be solved a lot cheaper and better though other means, I got flooded with harsh words and intimidation. I’ve had people accuse me of being a first world rich snob even though I was actually born in the third world and went to a mud-made school with holes for windows and doors. I even had one person in the past get so personal in a forum that he accused me of hating children, including my own.
When the Indian minister of education Sudeep Banerjee did when he said that the OLPC was “pedagogically suspect” last year, he was quickly dismissed. Now we have New York Times pundit David Pogue has accused the education minister of fearing a change in the status quo and losing his job though he didn’t have the courage to call him out by name but it’s fairly clear what he meant. Now I’m not going to sit here and say you can’t criticize the India minister of education, but it’s pretty silly when you consider how well India educates its children when PC penetration in that country is a mere 5%. Pogue also went on to say that the obstacle to the XO’s (that’s the name of the green OLPC machine) isn’t technology but “big name computer makers” fearing the loss of a two-billion-person market. I guess Pogue was afraid to call out Microsoft and Intel by name since those are the usual scapegoats for the conspiracy to kill the OLPC. Never mind the fact that Microsoft has been working with OLPC project and Intel is actually on the board of the OLPC project, we can’t ever blame the OLPC or the project for being too expensive and not delivering on promised features. It’s always someone else’s fault that foreign governments are only happy to sign on for the OLPC so long as someone else signs the check.
Pogue raved about the “famed $100 laptop” (what’s +$100 among friends) in a video embedded in the same article on page one quoting the battery specs and the mesh feature though I have yet to see an objective analysis of the actual battery life and I have yet to see a successful implementation of client-side mesh topology. But when it came to actual criticism such as the boot times and application load times, Pogue thought that was just fine since “it isn’t for snarky bloggers it’s for poor kids in other countries”. But that kind of self-righteous arrogance made me very uncomfortable and what is it about poor kids in other countries that makes it ok for them to have long boot times (2 minutes when I tried it last spring) and application load times (20 seconds when I tried it last spring)?
Maybe if it wasn’t possible to build a responsive $200 laptop, then the OLPC XO’s sluggishness might be an excusable shortcoming but the $230 (basic model with Wi-Fi) Asus Eee has already shown 15 second Linux boot times and Intel Classmate works just fine too. Instant boot was actually one of Negroponte’s key selling points in the same presentation he gave where he said you couldn’t criticize the OLPC. Negroponte criticized modern bloated PCs (only if you have too much Crapware which can be removed) and promised that the OLPC will make computing wonderful again with instant boot. Yet the reality is that OLPC turned out way more sluggish. But since no one is allowed to criticize the OLPC, I guess everyone is overlooking that minor detail. The OLPC is the one PC you can’t ever criticize or give an honest assessment of because you’ll be bashed like there’s no tomorrow.
September 25th, 2007
Why OLPC mesh wireless networking won't work
One of the touted features of the $200 OLPC laptop is the peer-to-peer mesh topology networking feature that can theoretically bring an Internet infrastructure where there is no network infrastructure. The problem is that peer-to-peer wireless LAN mesh topology sounds better than it actually works and there’s a good reason it isn’t used commercially.
[UPDATE 9/27/2007 - I should clarify that OLPC mesh technology applies to the XO laptop shown on the left or to the Intel Classmate [current version of Classmate doesn't support mesh]. Intel is also on the board of OLPC so it’s not OLPC versus Intel. Intel is also providing some help on technology based on the centralized Access Point and Bridge model. OLPCs can also work with centralized wireless LAN infrastructures and that is the point of this blog; that the two technologies work best together and that they’re not mutually exclusive. A $60 Linksys router running modified Linux and a $20 antenna can provide fast and reliable infrastructure for the entire school.]
The word “mesh” is traditionally highly regarded in the networking world because every IT student is taught in Computer Networking 101 that “mesh topology” is the most advanced form of networking. Mesh topology traditionally conjures up the image of multiple redundant links with high-performance distributed loads but that only applies to the wired networking world when multiple physical links are used to build the network. High-performance and load-distribution does not apply to wireless mesh topology especially when we’re talking about typical implementations that use a single radio and a single radio frequency. In fact, every wireless relay adds another hop and the relay action doubles the radio contention because the same data has to be retransmitted on the same radio frequency.
Even if we ignore the delay and contention problems of mesh topology wireless LANs, there’s an even more fundamental problem facing the peer-to-peer mesh technology being implemented in projects like the OLPC. The radios and antennas are so small that it would take hundreds of OLPC devices with perfect spacing to replace a single high-powered Access Point with high-gain antennas. Consider the illustration below where I compare OLPC laptops that are capable of transmitting up to 50 meters with their small 30mW radios and small antennas versus a centralized AP that’s capable of 400 meters range.
Mesh versus Access Point topology:
Note that I’m being very conservative with the 400 meter range with a 300mW Access Point because those things can easily go twice as far. But even with a mere 8:1 advantage in range, it would take more than a hundred OLPC laptops to cover the same area. If we’re talking about a more realistic 16:1 advantage in range, then it would take more than 400 OLPC laptops to cover the same area and they would all have to be spaced out perfectly. We also have the possibility of using 500mW radios and 16 dBi antennas for even longer range in rural areas. When we consider the fact that a single failure in one of the mesh nodes due to battery drainage, moving out of range, software hang will cause the entire mesh scheme to break, there simply is no way to get around the centralized architecture.
Last week at Intel’s IDF convention in San Francisco, Intel’s “World Ahead Program” was showing off some cheap commodity technology and blueprints that would empower schools with wireless networking and Internet access. These blueprints and part lists allow the schools to build their own wireless infrastructure with cheap off-the-shelf components. The all-in-one Wireless Access Point and Wireless Bridge box (dual radio) allows remote locations that lack wired Internet uplinks to bridge wirelessly to the central uplink. I came up a slightly modified version shown in the illustration below to show the flexibility of this architecture.
AP and bridged extension wireless LAN (full size):
With a few of these “towers” with sufficient transmit power and high-gain omni-directional antennas for client access and directional antennas for the backhaul; we can reliably cover a very large campus.
George Ou is Technical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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