Benson Schliesser - Latest Comments

Re: Short Video: Parallel

Terri Schliesser — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:23:35 -0000

Nice. I like the soundtrack. Mesmerizing.

Re: Benson Schliesser

Terri Schliesser — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 12:16:35 -0000

Em did a great job representing the clinic! She is obviously knowledgeable and hard working there. Her level of commitment and whole-heartedness is sure evident in the confident manner in which she moves about the clinic sharing the work and needs of WRC. She is a great representative and advocate of the clinic and I admire the tenacity & tenderness that she has to do the job well. Nice interview:)

Re: Beautiful 1sec Video Montage

Terri — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:01:53 -0000

Warms my heart. Thanks.

Re: Reflection on The Underpants Gnomes’ Master Plan

Anonymous Coward — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 15:01:47 -0000

I don't know how I got here, but I enjoyed reading this.

Re: RFC 5952: Recommended IPv6 Representation

Guest — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 15:50:34 -0000

I noticed there's also an erratum that stipulates uppercase instead of lowercase, but it seems like it may have been added by someone who greatly dislikes lowercase hex digits:

http://www.rfc-editor.org/erra...

Re: RFC 5952: Recommended IPv6 Representation

Beau Gunderson — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 15:50:33 -0000

Re: ARIN-prop-136: Services Opt-out « Benson Schliesser

Jcurran — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 14:13:18 -0000

>It shouldn’t need to be said, that if both proposals are rejected then ARIN is effectively saying that legacy address holders have “no option” but to submit to regulation.

If you submit both proposals to Greenpeace and they alsoreject them, does it mean Greenpeace has an opinion on the matter, or just that you're submitting them to the wrong body? It requires a global policy to change the structure of the Internet number registry system, and that involves all five RIRs and ICANN.

Re: Broadband vs. Internet Speed: Not So Fast

georgeou — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 05:36:47 -0000

Looks like the US broadband providers have some of the most honest advertising in the world.
http://www.digitalsociety.org/...

Re: End Puppy Mill Cruelty – YES on Missouri Proposition B

LegalTruth — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 10:34:01 -0000

I am against this bill but I actually like your article.

I do not believe in the factory farming of dogs, but that is my opinion not law. My opposition to the bill comes from three main criteria.

One, there is no legal basis for the bill. Case law, statues are not true basis, the U.S. Constitution is.

Two, some of the regulations spelled out in the bill are not in the best interest of dogs nor the people who will/would become the new owners.

Ten dogs might is not really that many when you count intact females over the age of six months. Lots of hobby breeders keep that many if only occasionally. So do guide and therapy dog breeders. The restrictions in this bill eliminate breeders from keeping a dog in confines of their own homes. It puts an end to home raised puppies. The females will now have to whelp in a kennel. That's fine for some but it shouldn't be public vote nor an across the board decision.

Another example is veterinary care. The bill requires immediate vet treatment for any illness or injury. So, if a dog gets into the holiday candy bowl (I've seen this happen) and gets diarrhea from it and you've bred just one of your females you will be forced to take the dog to the vet instead of waiting it out or you will be convicted of animal cruelty.

Is that really what American citizens are now considering fair and just?

Three, if the bill did provide for only basic minimum care every pet owner, veterinarian, groomer, boarding facility, shelter, and rescue needs to meet the same requirements and be accountable to the very degree as the breeders this bill targets.

All I ask is that pet owners and non pet owners - all voters - Please look at this bill as if it were aimed at individuals.

Would you think it is fair and reasonable?

Are you willing to accept these same restrictions for yourselves?

Re: End Puppy Mill Cruelty – YES on Missouri Proposition B

Marq701 — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 00:41:30 -0000

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?...

A wonderful message from Barbara Schmitz, Dir. Mo. HSUS

Re: Hiring at Savvis: IP Address Engineer

Chrismyersmo — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 23:57:51 -0000

Benson, sure hope I am the good fit along with the other person! Can't wait to pick your brain for all the IP subnetting, supernetting, CIDR, VLSM, and ip addressing I can handle. - Chris

Re: Unemployment in Historical Recessions

WilliH2O — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 19:49:24 -0000

This was quite insightful - thanks for posting. Really wish the nightly news focused on that 17% unemployment number wish is a lot closer to the truth !

Re: POTD 26.Aug.2010 – Hummingbird Moment

Benson Schliesser — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:02:27 -0000

Just don't spill your drink. ;)

Believe it or not, this is my backyard. Em has been filling a bunch of Hummingbird feeders all year, and we've collected a few regular visitors. Check out some better images on my Flickr account; I posted 6 photos earlier starting with http://www.flickr.com/photos/b.... They're not perfect, but they're pretty.

Re: POTD 26.Aug.2010 – Hummingbird Moment

Nathanael Dermyer — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 22:42:28 -0000

whoops, comments appear below. I will blame ... um ... <glances around=""> ... vodka ... for that double post..</glances>

Re: POTD 26.Aug.2010 – Hummingbird Moment

Nathanael Dermyer — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 22:41:19 -0000

Hummingbirds are my favorite. Where did you take this?

Re: POTD 26.Aug.2010 – Hummingbird Moment

Nathanael Dermyer — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 22:40:55 -0000

hummingbirds are my favorite. Where did you take this one?

Re: Broadband vs. Internet Speed: Not So Fast

Dave — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 18:54:40 -0000

You can ignore George, he's a known troll whose organization lobbys on behalf of the likes of AT&T and Comcast.

Re: Pic >1k words: U.S. Health Care Ineffectiveness

narconon07 — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 06:32:59 -0000

Emerging Issues in Health Care Regulation: Protecting Patients or Punishing Providers? It's obvious that politicians getting into healthcare and the greater control of medicine (by the government) are signs of something not working right. When are we going to do something about this ?

Best Drug Rehabilitation

Re: Broadband vs. Internet Speed: Not So Fast

georgeou — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 19:32:54 -0000

"Oversubscription may not even need to be documented, per se, since it will be misunderstood and can be easily gamed."

If you understand that, I'm not sure why you keep hammering me about it when I go out of my way to talk about all ISP issues. As I said in my previous response, core contention can't be solved on a technical basis simply because the amount of aggregate traffic coming from the end points can always exceed the fastest fiber connection on the planet. The long-haul transit links will likely run the quickest fiber transceivers possible anyways since it's the cable plant that's the most expensive part of the game. Furthermore, caching is the fundamental solution for video on demand.

Caching can't be applied to real-time communications e.g., video conferencing. But that's a lot less traffic that the Tube sites because it's just a lot less popular. So the long haul connections should be used for things that can't be cached and that's pretty much what's happening already. The TCP speed penalty turns out to be a good limitation as it offers a great incentive to build things near the end users.

The type of contention that really needs to be solved is the last few miles. Once you have a network of 10,000 plus broadband users, it becomes economical to cache things for them. The cable industry faces a deeper problem of contention on the last mile as well as the backhauls near the end users. The Telcos don't really have to worry about the last mile, but they do have to worry about the backhauls that connect those miniature DSLAMs.

Re: Broadband vs. Internet Speed: Not So Fast

georgeou — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 19:23:34 -0000

I'm not sure why you keep saying that I don't want to talk about oversubscription when I specifically address the issue in my transparency article. It feels like you're almost looking for something to criticize me about by only reading 1/10th of what I wrote. The sync rate issue was only one of many issues I mentioned. Let me cut paste a section that specifically talks about oversubscription.

"Where does the most sharing occur? Does it happen on the “last mile(s)” which connects the home to the broadband provider’s equipment or does it happen further upstream? How oversubscribed is the system on the most oversubscribed portion of the network? In other words, how many customers are sharing each Mbps of bandwidth."

The latest article is specifically talking about the problem with the FCC report that completely misrepresents the issue and I'm under no obligation to repeat every point I've ever made in the past when I'm trying to focus on a specific issue in a specific blog post.

My transparency article does in fact talk about all the ISP issues that slow the end-user down including oversubscription and dynamic video bandwidth sharing e.g., U-verse TV. What I tried to do is come up with a simple way to measure and report oversubscription. Read the section on "Computing the average achievable performance of broadband". As far as I'm concerned, the ISP is responsible for any contention that touches their own network. However, the transit bandwidth issue can only be solved through more in-premise or same-IXP (Internet Exchange Point) caching over more peering connections paid or unpaid. There's simply no feasible way or even technical way to make the core of the Internet support every gigabit end point on the planet concurrently.

My problem with the OTI proposal is that they're calling for no more than 2:1 oversubscription which would be pure fantasy. Topolski's demand that ISPs have to write a check to the end user for not ensuring 50% minimum performance is silly because that would simply mean that the ISP would have to charge higher rates to begin with. As you even pointed in your article above, the low margin characteristic of broadband makes higher oversubscription ratios a requirement. This is especially true when consumers are so price sensitive.

Re: Broadband vs. Internet Speed: Not So Fast

Benson Schliesser — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 19:08:14 -0000

Thanks for the link to your post "The need for a broadband transparency standard" (http://www.digitalsociety.org/.... It does a better job outlining the issues, including a reference to oversubscription which is missing in your more recent article.

If you confine your view of the service provider's performance to sync rates and frame overhead, then it's a logical conclusion that the server is to blame. That's the direction in which the fax machine analogy misleads the reader. To your credit the article was updated to talk about transmission protocol (i.e. TCP) performance, which is another important factor. But it's a factor that can't fairly be assigned to anybody (user, server, OS vendor, broadband provider, etc) which I suspect is why you're happy to include it.

My frank suggestion is that you also consider more of the "middle" of the network path, specifically focusing on the part that is managed by the broadband service provider. Since oversubscription rates (on aggregation and core routers, as well as transit and peering links) within a broadband provider's network are critical to performance, I don't understand why you're hesitant to address them. Your comments on the New America OTI proposal (http://www.digitalsociety.org/... also express a desire to avoid looking at oversubscription.

If you think oversubscription shouldn't be regulated, I agree with you. Oversubscription may not even need to be documented, per se, since it will be misunderstood and can be easily gamed. But it should be examined in the conversation. Perhaps the result of such a discussion is to agree on a proxy or set of proxies for network performance (such as packet loss, latency, and jitter) as it might be impacted by oversubscription. Commercial ISPs do this already in Service Level Agreements; might it be a good method for broadband providers to represent their network quality?

Re: Broadband vs. Internet Speed: Not So Fast

georgeou — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:35:24 -0000

“The fax analogy is not very strong. In fact, it misleads the reader to conclude that broadband access speeds on each end are all that matter.”

The fax analogy was admittedly an oversimplification, but it made a very good point about the problem with the recent FCC report and sensational media headlines. Your criticism would carry some weight if the fax analogy was all I offered, but I went into great detail as to what can cause single-download Internet performance to drop and most of those factors were not due to the ISP in any way.

I discussed the following factors.

1. Broadband service peaks substantially lower than advertised e.g, sync rates don’t even meet advertised speeds. This rarely occurs in the US (though it could be improved) but it is common in the UK. This should be blamed on the broadband provider.
2. Actual payload performance is generally 85% to 90% of sync rate performance on DSL services advertised at sync rates. While the issue is more minor, it deserves to be fixed. This issue doesn’t affect newer services like AT&T U-verse, Verizon FiOS, and cable broadband services because they advertise actual data rates.
3. Server performance is generally the most common issue. This could be due to server congestion, network congestion, or the TCP speed limit and performance penalties of latency even when the server/client/network can support much higher multi-flow TCP or UDP speeds.

I offered a much more thorough debate to broadband transparency here.
http://www.digitalsociety.org/...

Re: Broadband vs. Internet Speed: Not So Fast

Benson Schliesser — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:06:06 -0000

Since I published this yesterday, the original article “Conflating broadband speed with Internet speed is misleading“ was updated with some more information about the effect of latency on TCP. It also now includes a recommendation to use multiple streams to measure effective throughput. This is a good addition to the article, and gets closer to the truth. Still no discussion of provider oversubscription, but a step in the right direction.

Re: Cloud: Private vs Public, Internal vs External, Oh My!

Dust Collector Remote — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 03:16:05 -0000

Yep! I was agreed, I'll keep in touch to your blog. This blog is so usefully, Thanks for the posted ;)

Re: Network Virtual Appliances Are Silly

Etherealmind — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 03:41:33 -0000

The Nexus 1000V isn't an appliance so isn't a valid comparison.. It's more like an attempt to upgrade the networking capabilities of the vSwitch and give networking some operational capability.