Conversation
Ok connectivity issues persist, so I’ll be scarce today and much of tomorrow, SO I thought I would post a kind of miscellany room away from miscellany room, where you can talk about whatever you feel like talking about. Report interesting news or gossip or brawling if you see any.
I have a cable connection that goes out due to storms and technical problems every so often, but I have a cell plan that provides a hotspot that I can use as a backup. The amount of data is limited compared to my cable plan, but it’s more than enough to go for a few days at a time, and a cell connection is plenty fast nowadays. Not that I need to be connected all the time, but it’s nice to have options.
The house wifi and my phone are both on the same provider, and both get their signal from the same tower. The house supply goes down in our frequent power cuts, but we have a generator and can get it up and running again. But since I get unlimited data on my phone for €20 per month, I use that as a hotspot and don’t have to worry about being slowed down when everyone else is using the house wifi for watching films and playing games.
Being a child of the 1970’s and accustomed to actual fault-tolerant communications of the days of Yore (Bell System, anyone?) I’m actually rather astonished at how often our phone and internet communications fail now. And how readily we accept that situation (because what choice do we have?).
James, same! People I knew who work in telecoms always maintained that uptime had to be vanishingly close to 100%, yet IT providers (modern cell and internet included) seem to think somewhere around 99% is gold standard and above 95% is ok. It’s not. if anything our lives and jobs are even more dependant on communication now. We shouldn’t have outages.
Rob,
The system you remember was a different network entirely than the one we have today; it has traded strategic depth for strategic breadth, at the cost of a certain kind of fidelity. To put it simply, it’s a lot easier to guarantee uptime on a point-to-point system that communicates exclusively over hard wires, where the decision logic is in physically connecting or activating the connection between these wires, than on a multimodal distributed network that communicates primarily over airwaves and satellites where the decision logic has to run on supercomputers that themselves are distributed and have their own corresponding connectivity requirements. And that doesn’t even touch on the throughput people have come to expect, literally millions of times greater on the new network than the old one, with the expectation of more and more every year.
The modern network has exponentially more points of failure and many more failure modes than the network which preceded it. Demanding 99.999% uptime (the vaunted “five nines” that marketing gurus thought up and declared optimal) on all devices at all times would make the current system far, far more expensive than the old one, possibly prohibitively so. The fact that millions of people are, in any given moment, streaming high-quality audio and video to multiple people simultaneously all around the world is a miracle and a testament to human engineering; that this system fails only a bit more often than the old one is a pity, certainly, but it is remarkable that the whole thing works at all.
In other words, the main reason we could rebase the economy upon the new network in the first place is because we have collectively decided that the benefits it brings are worth the occasional outage (which, let’s be honest, usually lasts a few moments and rarely a few days). Perhaps this was a mistake, in more ways than one, but the good old days weren’t very good either.
I will say that since I moved from cable to fiber, my MTBF has been nearly up to engineer standards. At least the service has been that good. I’ve had a couple incidents of garbage trucks ripping my line down, but I can’t really fault the ISP for that.
On the other hand, I’m sure my service would be less reliable if I were using the provided hardware. *shudder* Nah, thanks. I’m using an OPNsense box, even though that meant using an exploit to become root and extract the dot1X certs from the ISP’s hardware, then running the firewall as a VM using a Linux bridge, because the ONT requires traffic be tagged as VLAN 0 and FreeBSD doesn’t allow breaking spec.
‘Cause that’s a reasonable thing to have to do just to be able to use the entire /60 you’re allocated, or have a NAT table that’s big enough to do anything, or do basic NPTv6, or …
*sigh*
Hmm, I remember reading something a long time ago, about the astounding reliability of the old telephone system. Some number like one failure per 100 million calls was mentioned (not the actual number, it was all too long ago, but it was huge).
It all made sense when the definition of “failure” came to light: A failure was connecting a phone call, but failing to charge the customer for the call.
I use the provided hardware, and I have surprisingly little downtime. I’m not sure why that is, but for the most part, when I have a failure, it is at my computer, not at the internet.
Now at work? We have countless failures every day, at least two or three enough that are monumental enough to let the entire network know something is down because it will affect so many people (still, not very often me. Maybe I’m a good luck charm, if I believed in that). And the failures we do have are often catastrophic in scope, like this week when grades were due but our grading system had an error and wouldn’t let us enter grades. Oops.
If it were still on paper, or if we had paper backup options (as we should), I could have entered it manually and sent it to the office. I love computers…but only when they do what they’re supposed to. The rest of the time, I long for the old paper and ink methods.
Der Durchwanderer, well, maybe? The point of the multi-node interlinked modern systems is supposed to be guaranteed uptime. In practice I suspect what has happened is that in some areas particular commercial service providers lack those redundant connections and the hardware/systems used are fundamentally less reliable. With a multiply redundant system with satellite, wireless, fibre, cable and multiple nodes, there should never be an outage. In practice, if the fibre cable between my house and the critical node nearly 100km away is cute, I have no home internet. While there are three cellular networks in my area, if there is a critical fault for my provider locally, regionally, or nationally, again I have no cell connection to the internet, even though there are other functioning networks.
In short, while speed and capacity have vastly increased, reliability has gone backwards because of commercial pressure and an acceptance of lower standards.
Harald, it reminds me of a story my brother told me of his time working in China a couple of decades back. One of his colleagues, an American, made a phone call back to family in the States. At the end of the month he received a huge bill for a multi-hour toll call. He disputed the bill, saying the call had been just a few minutes. Later he received a letter apologising for the mistake “you are correct. We have listened to the tape of the phone call and it lasted 6 minutes and …”. The days presumably when they relied on people and recording devices rather than computers.
As an aside, he said the Chinese government was so blatant about bugging their offices and homes that they just accepted it because they knew where the bugs were and could work around them.
From Peter Sagal’s twitter earlier today:
“Sex is pretty good, but have you ever watched Alex Jones having to testify under oath?”
Hulu has gone cuckoo.
It’s such a perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with woke nonsense on both ideological (i.e., modern “feminism”, antiracism, safetyism, etc.) and creative (e.g., not understanding that “strong female character” isn’t supposed to mean “physically powerful female character”) levels that I’m left nearly speechless.
My local paper, the one I don’t subscribe to:
https://twitter.com/malegauze/status/1555310678034026499
“NEW: Minneapolis officials said Wednesday that they hope to make the city a “safe haven” for people seeking abortions and reproductive health care.”
had you seen the Guardian Australia twitter thing?
https://twitter.com/s_palm/status/1555113804475772929
they appear to have deleted them by now
compare: https://pastebin.com/uVJFnPzy
kind of _creative_ (for given value of creative, in a total vacuum) way to tackle the problem of “are trans women women?”, just substitute it away …
Watching today’s Mess and wanted to give Arty Morty a high five for making the point that the implausibility of a religious profession is proportional to its binding strength. I’ve been trying to explain that to people for years.
Also, “literally wanking”. I guffawed.