Comcast-BitTorrent together at last

Comcast has announced that it is going to do packet shaping in a protocol agnostic way according to an article from news.com.  Some people would think that this is a great thing especially those using bit torrent which has been unfairly slowed by many Internet service providers.  You may think the bit torrent is only used for people to steal copyright in material but it turns out that the tour is being used in more places lately and it is important that traffic is not being shaped.  A good example is Skype which use bit torrent for their connection process and for any of those who use the Penn College network they know how terrible Skype has been working lately I believe it to be because of the way to packet shaping on their network.  If I go to any other person’s house Skype works fine and it really doesn’t require a whole lot of bandwidth to use Skype but on the Penn college network it doesn’t work at all half the time because of the low priority that it’s given because of the use bit torrent.  The interesting thing that Comcast is doing here is that they’re going to be doing packet shaping without looking at protocol which sounds like it would be a better solution to most people.  To me it’s actually a worse solution because I am guessing that the way they’re going to implement this is through deep packet analysis which actually puts more overhead on the network and protocol analysis.  People seem to forget that all this crap that they’re putting on like the pix and packet shaping technologies are actually slowing down our network.  Also doing deep packet analysis from a legal standpoint could be very detrimental to these ISPs.  If you know anything about the Digital millennium copyright act and the safe harbor provisions within that you know that the only way that the ISPs are not in trouble for the information that they’re carrying across their network is because they supposedly cannot see any of the content on their network.  Once you start to do deep packet analysis and can see the information across a network I believe based on the walls in the United States they are completely responsible for anything going across their wire is to have full vision of what content is there.  This opens them up to lawsuits directly from any content rights holder and makes them a culprit in any civil lawsuit or criminal lawsuit.  I personally feel that it is not the ISPs responsibility to do any surveillance of the network.  I feel that they should limit people in their upload and download speeds at their cable modem to what would be suitable for their network.  This would be a more optimal solution, in my opinion, and provide much more privacy for individuals.  I do not truly believe that the Comcast agreement is a win for anyone if they decide to go the route of deep packet analysis of packet shaping based on protocol.  However, if Comcast decides to get rid of packet shaping on together in the future that would be a huge boon to all customers who use their service.

Toby Glenn Gone Wild

A blooper from the byoc promo video… Anyway it is funny stuff from Tom Garrett. Anyway check out the byoc at http://byoc.acm.pct.edu/.

Windows Server 2008

(this was a replay to a forum post about the new features in Windows Server 2008)

Paul Thurrott a guy who writes the superset for Windows also does a podcast with Leo Laporte on Windows.  Paul is a nice enough guy but he clearly doesn’t look at the competitors to Windows server 2008 before he posted a review.  That is write a review is structured to list the features of Windows server 2008 and he doesn’t really critically analyze what they’re doing with their new version.  I can tell you I got to listen to the Windows server 2008 list the features and explain in detail what they’re doing with their new version.  It looks good on paper what they’re done with 2008 and I commend them and making their product better.  I say this because this is actually a step down from Windows XP which is a huge step down from Windows 2000.  So it’s nice to see Microsoft actually do something to improve a product and not make it worse.  That being said if you actually look at what they’re doing with Windows server 2008 its a joke compared to a modern Linux system.  I’ll give you a list of the new features and their relationship to features that we already have in modern Linux distributions running a server OS.
•    One of their more highly touted features is the fact that you can run the server without GUI interface now.  We have had that on Linux servers since the beginning.
•    This feature actually cracked me up whenever I heard about it.  They are advertising now that when your machine needs to install and update it only installs updates particular to your machine and Windows server 2008 but the real kicker is when they said that those updates still require a restart. In Linux it’s always been the case that you only install updates particular to your machine and the software that is running and we do not require restarts for anything except kernel upgrades. The example that he gave was language packs and if you only install the English language patch when there is inning were English-language update it requires a machine restart this is ridiculous.
•    Another thing that makes me laugh is that Windows server has always had it in the service manual that the machine should be restarted once a month.  I am not joking this is in the service manual.  On a Linux system I’ve seen up time that is over one year without a restart.  What I love about Microsoft is they then get away with saying their servers have no down time but in fact they don’t account for that two to three minutes of restart time every month.  They should not be allowed to get away with this false advertising.
I’m not the best person to talk about server related issues though because security is not the reason why use Linux.  Stability and ease-of-use are why use Linux.  Ultimately I am more of Web and application designer than I am a server person.  That being said whenever I was in high school I did take third in a state networking competition…
Check out this episode of windows weekly http://twit.tv/ww45

Solid-state Drives

(this was a replay to a forum post about the new solid-state drives)

A lot of people don’t realize is about solid-state drives but they aren’t as impenetrable as people think they are.  It turns out that solid-state drive has an seemingly unlimited capability to be read over and  over again.  Even though they have the amazing ability to be read many times over they actually have a limited number of write cycles.  There was one story of a person who used a solid-state drive as the Windows swap file on his computer and burned it up very quickly.  It’s important to note that this technology could be really beneficial in creating computers that can be more difficult to damage.  It will be interesting to see what a life span of computers that use solid-state drives will be.  I am guessing that these machines will not be at the last anywhere close to the 10 years that some people see what their magnetic disk storage hard drives.  I guess that’s all dependent on how much writing you do to the drive and many users don’t do a considerable amount of writing so they may potentially even last longer than a magnetic drive.  I unfortunately am one of those people to wipe out their entire machine, delete applications, and add applications for testing quite often.  I found an article that explains in more detail the pros and cons of solid-state drives is a pretty interesting read actually.

http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=96

I get Slapped Hard

I was at the byoc lan party in Fall 2007 and I thought it would be ok to let people do a “unofficial power slapping toby tourny” there unofficially. I knew most people don’t have the balls to slap a person at full strength. Well, Ben does! It almost looks fake because of the wind up and trust me I dont move till after I get hit. You can here the echo of the hit… He is the first and only winner of the tourny. I am taking ideas for a new competition for the Spring 08 byoc lan party. You can check out the Penn College lan party at http://byoc.acm.pct.edu/.

Peoples vision of me

made by Ben Bryan of The Gamers Guild

My sumo wrestling

Toby Glenn battles Ed (a kid from Penn College) in a sumo match. It looks kinda weird but it is really hard to get up when you fall down. Toby Glenn figured out that you can get up by jumping on you opponent. Toby is in the blue and ed is in the red.

Old video I made while learning video editing

I posted a video on youtube showing me training to fight fedor. now I think I might have been able to fight him with the fact that the number 1 heavyweight hasn’t fought a single heavyweight since I posted it. Anyway it was good for me to learn some video editing. I would like to start to more video work…

First Comic

made by Ben Bryan of The Gamers Guild