Chronicals of a 944: Catastrophic FAIL! Between the power and wheels

I did some work on the car 2 weeks ago. Minor stuff really.

The sway bar had been rattling since I got it. This is due to the aftermarket sway bar adjuster that was installed. The sway bar linkage to the trailing arm was a ball joint. Mechanically sophisticated in theory however, the designers did not consider what would happen when the ball joint started wearing as it did in mine. It's nothing big but a very small gap between the ball and socket develop after many many many miles of city driving (bumps and what not). This small gap doesn't affect the mechanical ability much if at all, but the sound it makes is loud over uneven terrain. Sounds like my car's going to fall apart! The stock linkage is buffered by urethane bushings so it's always silent, no such liberty on the after market linkage. I decided to remove the entire sway bar just to make sure that the sound I kept hearing was from the linkage. After removing it I test drove it a short distance. Lo and behold, the sound was completely eliminated.

It would have been a ggreaatt moment if what happened during the test drive didn't happen.

Making a right turn onto Marine Drive, I started accelerating normally. 1st, 2nd and then into 3rd. At about 2500 RPM a loud CLUNK! Then terrible grinding noises as I coasted to a side street south of Marine Drive. After a lot of thought and consulting the almighty Internet, I came to the conclusion that my transmission had suffered the not so rare 'ring and pinion' failure. This resulted in the immediate and catastrophic destruction of the R&P which resulted in metal fragments of hardened steel from the now shattered ring and pinion, hundreds of them, circulated through the entire gearbox. There was nothing I could have done as soon as the R&P failed, short of flipping my car upside down and immediately stopping my gear box from turning (as I coasted to a stop). My car and I were stranded, but fortunately for me I hitched a ride from my mom back home. Eventually I had it towed home after leaving it sitting stranded in front of some stranger's house for a week.

There were two solutions to get my car working. One was to send my box to a shop and have them rebuild the internals. Installing new gears is easy, even I could do that but the hard part is the calibration once it's installed and that is something I cannot do and in fact is beyond 95% of real mechanics out there let alone me, a backyard wrench monkey. Sending it to a specialized shop would cost upwards of $600 for the new gears plus some $2000 to get the work done on it. 

The second solution was more appealing. It involved sourcing a used low mileage transmission from another car and swapping it with my broken one. Luckily I found a guy who had a spare transmission he was selling. He sold it to me for $300. However, car repair is karmic, and what I dodged from the cost of fixing my car I was pegged with the work I had to do myself.

It took an entire weekend to remove my old transmission and install the new (still old) transmission.

Went to the shooting range last week. First time this year. Was kinda eager to try out and sight in my new red dot sight on the shotgun.

Web 2.0

The Face of our Internet Future 

Eric Chau

81715047

University of British Columbia

Department of Computer Science

CGA Canada

Introduction

For me personally, the Internet has been a significant part of my life. I grew up at just the right time to see the Internet be born from what was then just a collection of small private networks. At the front, and most visible, was HTTP, aka Hyper Text Transport Protocol. This language enabled users to browse pages severed on the Internet. From it’s infancy to now, it has changed a lot. It started out only serving images and text, but now, it is the basis of Internet based applications and dynamic websites. The Internet, many say, is still young. It has a lot to learn and will undergo an infinite amount of changes. Our perception of the internet could change from seeing it as a linked collection of pages of information to an interactive ‘everywhere’ software platform. Such ideas are what defines Web 2.0.

Web 2.0

Our Web, magnificent as it may be, had only scratched the surface of what it can really do. What we do most on the Web is going from page to page, reading and clicking. As said before, the Web appears to only be a collection of pages from a collection of websites. We call this the first generation of the World Wide Web. In the first generation, content is limited to what we see on the web page, that is, blocks of text with occasional images within them. Sure you can say that we have online shopping and even web email, but while these things seem spectacular when comparing them to blocks of text, they are merely small components in what will become Web 2.0. Simply put, Web 2.0 is an umbrella term for what the Web should and will become in the near future. Currently, analysts predict that applications that were primarily PC based will move to the Web, and global collaboration originally hindered by distance and borders will also move to the Web, side stepping physical hurdles.

But why are these two things important? Much of why it is important spawns from the nature of Computer Science itself. While the theory aspect of Computer Science has always promised a better, easier and more enlightened life for us, when we try to apply these principles to the real world, we are often met with numerous barriers. Our barriers range from the limited capabilities of programming languages, engineering good software, hardware limits even manpower. Web 2.0 serves as a new platform for computer science, allowing programmers to reach out to more people, and produce more functionality while jumping over obstacles present in PC based software.

Applications

The majority if our software is PC based, that is, it is loaded and installed on our PC in its entirety. Everything we need to run the software is included. Occasionally, the software will connect to the internet and some server to retrieve data or to receive updates. Access to the software is limited to its installed location (computers we’ve installed it on). Data artifacts created by said software, also usually left on the computer.  Furthermore, several manual steps must be taken to update the software if there’s a new version, and even then, we need to receive notifications of such updates. Indeed, there are workarounds to these problems. Automatic updates can be done with special software and servers for instance. But more often than not, these solutions are tedious to implement, introduce more problems to solve (albeit for the most part, solvable) and are merely fixes to a problem introduced by design. Some of these problems can be solved by moving applications to the web. I will now illustrate how that can be achieved with a few case studies.

Web Mail

Web Email has been with us since when the Web was born. Hotmail was the first service to popularize online email services. When it was introduced, the primary method of retrieving email was to use an email client installed on the computer. The PC based client would download the email and display it. The user could arrange their email into folders and write out going email. However a big problem was that their email would only be stored at their PC, and when users accessed their accounts from another computer with a similar client, the sorting they have done would not have been applied to the downloaded email. Furthermore, it was common practice by the servers to delete emails that were downloaded, meaning that the only copy were the messages downloaded to the PC. Web Mail solves a number of these problems. First, email accounts could be accessed from anywhere, given that people had access to the Web from where they were. Secondly, whatever sorting, archiving or deleting operations the user did was persisted if the user was accessing his email from Canada, Britain, Japan or anywhere. The Web interface for email doesn’t just solve the sort comings of PC based email though there are a lot of things that can now be done that come PC email clients can’t do. Enter Gmail.

Gmail

Gmail is one of the bigger things to happen to email in the recent years. This is in part due to the seemingly unlimited storage size that Google offers for their accounts. At the time of writing this, each email account is offered in excess of 5 gigabytes of storage space. Google’s slogan was along the lines of, “You’ll never need to delete an email message again”. In addition to solving old problems, Gmail (as well as other Web mail services) offer extra tools. The Microsoft Office suite is an expensive suite to buy. The professional grade MS Outlook email client is chock full of features, but suffers from PC based boundaries as illustrated before and without a proper corporate level MS Exchange server, the client becomes even more crippled. Web mail, specifically Gmail, offers enterprise grade email but at a substantially lesser cost to the end user (well it’s free). At the current moment, Gmail considers itself still in beta but that isn’t surprising considering how many more things Google can do with Gmail.

Stock Ticker and Charts

It used to be the case that you had to buy expensive software to get live second by second updates of financial data. These software packages also come with tools to analyze trends and even make predictions for you. Char Station specifically, offers a lot of these professional plotting algorithms for free. Real time data down to the second is present. The Java applet does everything a PC based chart does but doesn’t require you to download software or perform updates to it, since it updates itself when required. It makes sense though, if an application is required to connect to the internet to function, why not have it served on web pages?

Google Documents / Google Spreadsheet

Google Documents is only a few months old. What it  can do is kind of limited at the moment but there are a few things that are quite interesting. One of its main features is its ability to have multiple users view and edit it at the same time. This allows a high degree of concurrent collaboration. The most popular software system for this kind of thing is Microsoft’s Sharepoint. At the moment, Sharepoint is still a clear winner at the corporate level but who knows what will happen in the next few years after all, it certainly is possible to have the same system on the web. For me and the general public who can’t afford to run a server system, Google Documents may just fill the gap. Just this term, I worked on a team based software project. We used a Google Spreadsheet as a cheap and dirty method as a task list. Sharing the spreadsheet only takes a few button presses. Multiple users can be editing the spreadsheet at the same time, so we usually worked with the spreadsheet up, checking it occasionally for new updates from other team members. All we had to do was type and save. The other members who already had the sheet open would view the changes made almost instantaneously. Finally, the idea of working on a document at work, and then working at it from home without needing to transfer documents though a disk is simply brilliant. There won’t be any lost disks and no worrying if the document will fit on the disk. Also, the server would be able to organize and store all the documents in a single location. In addition, the way the documents are store, they will never be lost or destroyed.

Application Summary

As I hopefully have pointed out in the cases above, the move from PC based applications to web based applications is a logical one especially with programs that require live data or live communication. Web based applications solves a few general problems starting with availability. Because the application in its entirety is based on the internet, you can access it anywhere in the world, so long as you have an internet connection. Granted, depending on the level of complexity of the service you’re trying to access, the browser may need a few updates to run some of the newer stuff. Secondly, because the application is on the server, the end user need not do anything to get an update. The programmers can fix the error, and the next time the user launches the service, it’s already updated. Often, the user doesn’t even know that a new update was applied.

There are a few problems though. What we call rich web applications, or fat clients are usually larger than most web pages, thus requiring a high speed connection to view the content and interact with its services comfortably. (http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/pr/pr_060621.pdf) Nielsen NetRatings states that in 2006 American broadband usage in the home is 75% versus dialup. As fiber optics and telecommunication infrastructure expansion reaches its peak, no doubt broadband will get cheaper as well and we can expect to see high usage of broadband. However, even with the great strides broadband is taking, there are some applications that may never see the move to Web 2.0. These applications are games, multimedia tools and other high performance and resource demanding programs.

The other obstacle is the need to download 3^rd party libraries and program to run the web applications. Some web applications require IE 6 or higher, some require Java 1.5.0 and some even require Window’s Active X. Unified standards though, is attempting to solve some of these problems. Currently though, the Java library is upwards of seventy megabytes when downloaded, and larger when installed. It could take as long as an hour to install if nothing wrong happens. Flash is a common requirement as well and that also takes some time to download and install. The companies responsible for these libraries and supporting software are making all the effort to reduce the time and complexity involved with loading their software. Flash for instance should only take a few minutes and a couple of clicks on their web page.

There is also the problem of availability. Without a connection to the internet, users would not be able to access these services even if the application does not require a constant connection. Google Documents for example should allow a user to edit documents offline. The problem is that there is no way to do this, except to export the document in a format that the PC can handle and even then only when an editor is installed on the computer.

All in all though, it seems that the consensus within the computing community emphasizes that the Web will become a platform more than anything, and that we should build on top of it, instead of for it. What that means is to build software that takes advantage of certain unique characteristics of the Web like its openness, borderless boundaries, 24/7 availability, minimal dependencies and it’s economy.

Community and Collaboration

In addition to new innovative ways of providing services to the masses, Web 2.0 is also about promoting online collaboration and building tightly knit communities. We see this in a lot of instances already as people begin to integrate the internet into their lives more and more. It is not uncommon for people to say that the inter office messenger (Microsoft Communicator for instance) or email is the preferred method of communication. Away from the corporate setting there are forums for enthusiasts of different things. BC Sport Bikes for one is a community of sport motorcycle riders within BC. Regularly, forum members set up group rides and together promote safety and sensible riding. There are also blogs, a sort of online journal publicly published online for subscribers to view.

Global collaboration via the internet is also on the rise. From Wikipedia to internet based programming teams. Having no physical borders means you can work with more people and people from all over the world. Wikipedia would not be possible and to such a degree of success if it weren’t for the efforts of the internet community.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is an open access, free content, global collaborative effort. Its objective is to be an accurate encyclopedia that hosts all imaginable subjects. The achievement of such an objective can only be obtained though a global initiative with hundreds of thousands of contributors, like what Wikipedia as done. Authors can edit and create new articles even with out a user account. This allows everyone access to add or edit information shown publicly. It is estimated that there are ten thousand to thirty thousand page hits a second depending on the time of day. Wikipedia is also rated one of the top ten websites in the world and the only site in the top ten that is non profit. Authors of the content hosted at Wikipedia collaborate together in discussion about what is written. The advantage of this is that experts in the subject can post their knowledge and inform the masses. Sometimes information is obscure and hard to find, requiring multiple page hops on the internet and this is especially the case with lesser known subjects. Before Wikipedia, information about things such as Teflon would require extensive research to get somewhat of an understanding to its history, applications and how it works. However, looking up Teflon on Google, the Wikipedia entry for it is the 4^th entry in the search results. The Wiki contains information to Teflon’s physical characteristics, safety, advantages and disadvantages, history and even a hyperlinked list of similar materials all in one page. In fact, for nearly all major search terms used in Google, there would be a Wiki result for that search term within the top 10 entries.

Forums

Forums have been around for a long time. It’s simplicity of implementation has allowed it to exist almost since the beginning of Http. Forums serve as a place of discussion between users on the internet. Topics are created and replies are posted in response by the users of the forum. Because, the internet is borderless, it is common for people from all over the world to be participating in a single forum. For example, Pelican Parts is an online store for car parts. They specialize in Porsche car parts and accessories. A few years ago they started hosting an online forum for Porsche drivers and mechanics. The forum allowed mechanics and drivers to talk with each other. The reason it was successful with several thousand members and growing, is because of the temperamental nature of old Porsches. Without this forum there would be a lot of drivers paying a lot of money to get their cars fixed but with the forum, drivers can learn to do mechanical work by themselves. I mentioned BC Sport Bikes before, it is a forum for motorcycle riders in BC to talk with each other. Motorcycle news, safety, weather, motorcycles and styles of riding are some of the topics that are discussed in the forum. The forum provides a significant amount of advice for new riders as well as seasoned ones, advice that otherwise, would be hard to come by.

Online Courses

There has been a strong move from courses being taught at classrooms to courses being taught online. Many universities including the University of British Columbia have started hosting some of their courses online. What this means for large colleges and universities is large cost savings through reduced use of classroom resources and manpower. Some institutions like CGA Canada take it to the extreme. CGA Canada’s certification is 99% online. They use a system similar to Web CT where course material is served through web pages. Occasionally, there’ll be an interactive tutorial or demo on the site as part of a course. Most of the readings are also online reducing the amount of text books the students have to buy. In addition to learning and taking exams online, they have a forum that encourages students to help each other out, further elevating the amount of interaction between users and the software system. There also seems to be a rise in the number of online certification programs perhaps due to the economic and flexible nature of an online base.

Facebook

Perhaps one of the most popular social websites growing today, Facebook definitely embodies the Web 2.0 feeling. Facebook allows people to write and post images about their personal lives outside of the internet. It also allows people to communicate and interact with each other within Facebook. Almost anything that you do can be posted on Facebook. Even if the Facebook account holder didn’t post anything himself, other users can post things for him like when tagging photos or event postings. Facebook does draw a lot of people together. Finding long out of contact classmates or co workers is not very hard. Facebook has a lot of potential in many ways. There is potential to continue expanding to every facet of Web 2.0 and there is potential that it can turn right around and be harmful. Again, Facebook, like all Web 2.0 social linking websites, inherit Web 2.0’s advantages and disadvantages (which will be discussed later).

Internet Architecture

The internet as a platform, as said before, is still at its infancy. What we do with it at the moment is vastly limited to ‘read only’ websites. Web 2.0 only defines one way in which the internet can grow. There are a lot of other things can the internet can do, including being the new phone system, new global terminal operating system even operate your vending machine. It isn’t hard to imagine the internet being integrated into everything we use, from security systems, to watches. What the obstacle is right now for the rate of integration of the internet into our lives, is the technological ability of the internet to handle traffic, and also the economy of inserting an internet interface layer in all our devices. So in essence, there needs to be a larger backbone and prevalent internet infrastructure within the world before we really see what the internet can do for us.

For Web 2.0, it is only the beginning. Web 2.0 is sort of trying to be the primer that puts everything into motion. It does this by integrating communities onto the internet, and allowing users to run all their software from a web page. In a theoretical point of view, this is uniformity and order at its greatest. Isn’t that what we all seek? Already we start to see how this is coming to fruition. Google for instance is the world’s best search engine. The unimaginable task of finding something in the vast expanse of the internet seems well achieved by Google’s search algorithms. Simply, the chaos of the internet is organized into search result entries according to the relevance of your search string. Perhaps we may even see a ‘shrinkage’ of the internet as data is consolidated.

Implementation

So what is required to implement Web 2.0? Much of the current physical internet architecture is already in place, that is, Web 2.0 can be implemented on the current form of the internet. With that said, Web 2.0 would benefit greatly if average internet connection speeds for the world were doubled or tripled. This is to allow richer web applications to be run at a comfortable pace. The next step up from this however, is quite difficult for the internet to do, and that is to move to IPv6.

IPv6 solves issues such as the limited number of available IP addresses that we’re having problems with, as well as authentication with IPs, service improvements and provisions for the expansion of the internet architecture. While this is all nice sounding, implementation of the IPv6 protocol is difficult do to its incompatibility with our current internet protocol, IPv4. IPv4 has been around for two decades and has been quite effective during that time. The problem is that IPv4 puts a limit on the number of IP addresses available in the world and we are fast approaching this limit. In addition, the way IPv4 is formed, does not make IP assigning to different companies, routing and managing traffic easy. IPv6 seeks to solve this by offering enough IP addresses to assign an IP to every grain of sand on Earth. In addition, the structure of IPv6 packets will allow the internet to implement new ideas and technologies. For a long time, using IPv4, we have been building on top of the protocol and making workarounds which has restricted what the internet could become. However, even as attractive as IPv6 seems, implementation is a long ways off because using IPv6 would mean out casting IPv4 users.

Aside from the structure of the internet, there are a lot of other software based enhancements we can use to make Web 2.0 more possible. RSS feeds is one way to go. RSS feeds allow users to receive updates from their frequently visited websites. It would be useful when a website is posting new products, issuing bulletins, publishing news or even posting service notices. In this way, the user doesn’t have to actually visit the website, or receive an email to get news from the website. What this means to the user is a more organized view of the ever changing internet. Previously, websites would send notifications over email but it quickly becomes a nuisance trying to delete all the notifications that are not important while sorting out actual email messages.

Mainly though, the move to Web 2.0 is just as much technological as it is psychological. For Web 2.0 to work, users have to willingly integrate it into their lives. Without significant social support from online communities (a requirement of Web 2.0) it would fail before it began.

Motivations for Web 2.0

As we’ve seen, there are a lot of things Web 2.0 promises. There are also a lot of things Web 2.0 brings, both good and bad. But ultimately, why do we want Web 2.0? For starters, it’s a stepping stone to organizing the internet. Bringing the chaos of the internet to some sort of order would be beneficial because more of the hidden and otherwise obscure information would be made available. While Google is doing a good job of this, it is limited mainly to static web pages. With Web 2.0, it is possible to organize all services provided by the internet and also to organize all online communities.

Secondly, Web 2.0 is supposed to make our lives easier by taking advantage of the Web’s flexible interface. Much research is being conducted on HCI, human computer interaction. HCI is aimed towards developing more intuitive and easy to use interfaces without compromising usability and limiting the user’s interaction. Web 2.0 sees that web pages have dynamically modifiable content, for instance, like the moveable containers in Facebook or the editable nature of Wikipedia. Aside from interface, web applications allow users to access applications from anywhere in the world as opposed to being restricted to only the computer on which it’s installed.

Finally, on the software engineering side of it, a lot of software architects would like to see this move because of the ease of engineering software on the Web. Engineers wouldn’t have to worry about problems like finding ways to correct bugs on already deployed software, finding ways to interface with a vender’s 3rd party software or think about the users’ system compatibility.

Consider government resources. Government databases at its current state are a disjointed collection servers and computers. Accessing this data is done by software designed in-house and on specific computers. When another department needs data from another department, often, the data is extracted and exported in its raw form. This method is tedious and lengthy. A consolidated server system with a web front end would clean up the problems significantly. In addition to providing faster resource access, it would cost less to maintain and less manpower to operate.

Problems to Consider

As with any new technology however, there are problems. Web 2.0 is no different, but the types of the problems present in Web 2.0 are rooted mainly in the nature of human beings. While, the problems of implementing Web 2.0 has mainly been solved and thought out pending implementation, the focus will have to eventually be placed on the usage of said technology by its users.

To give an example, there are already cases where people have used Facebook to stalk users. Due to the anonymity of the internet and the social logging nature of Facebook, stalking is significantly easier since it seems like all the grunt work is already done. With that said such problems didn’t start from Facebook though, instead, it’s been around for along time in other forms. The internet in general doesn’t have enough provisions to stop this from happening and even with all the current safeties we have in place, such as user registration, authentication, permission levels, we still see it because it isn’t a catch all solution. But then again, a lot of these problems can be avoided if users were educated enough and restricted themselves from being too public. However, we run in to a paradox. On the one hand, Web 2.0 promotes internet integration and this means more public exposure and on the other hand, Web 2.0 advocates internet safety. Often times in software engineering, we see these two forces work against each other, usability versus security. One of the main problems with Web 2.0 is the way the internet is made. The current internet allows for too much anonymity. I can go to an internet cafe and vandalize open community sites such as forums or even Wikipedia and no one would ever know it was me. This is also why internet stalking is so prevalent. Stalkers have a minimal risk of being exposed without the active efforts of the police force (and even then, it’s hard to track down an internet stalker). Vandalism of open websites, internet predators and black hat hackers can be solved if actions on the internet can be traced easily to a single individual. Perhaps we can use some sort of cryptographic key to identify persons on the internet, or implement some sort of IP tracking system. Maybe we should log onto the internet every time we use it. Though, such solutions would be impossible to implement because users would never accept such intrusive measures.

While regular users can do harm to others, we have to also worry about the corporations and organizations who are in a position to influence the internet. The interesting thing about Web 2.0 is that for it to become a reality, it is likely that corporations and organizations with enough resources will be the only ones able to implement such a system. If left unchecked, these organizations can change the way we use and view the internet in a way that undermines the general public’s best interests yet remain insidious and silent. Already there are examples of this happening. Wikipedia for instance is constantly being edited by political parties as well as some companies. They remove negative information and insert views that are biased. The unsuspecting viewer would read the information written and take it as the truth when in fact it is only part of the truth or an outright lie.

The question is then, how do we enforce rules and protect the internet? The problem here is that the internet is borderless, governmentless. Who can say what rules should be enforced? Furthermore, who is going to police it? The internet itself is not owned by any single government, rather, its infrastructure is owned by the telecommunications companies.

Ethical Implications to Web 2.0

Another thing we have to ask ourselves is whether or not Web 2.0 will be a completely good thing for human kind. As we continue to integrate ourselves more and more into the electronic world, some say that we will start loosing the human side of mankind. Would we eventually degenerate to a level so low, that one day we wouldn’t even be able to type for ourselves? Web 2.0’s aim is to make the internet easier to use, to take the hassle out of accessing what the internet has to offer. At the same time, this removes a lot of the details to the information we should be paying attention to. I have been known to, on occasion, take the shortcut and read Wikipedia for my information and nothing else. The problem with that is, that there is a lack of reference citing on Wikipedia and the information on the page is not in full detail. However, the allure of bringing the chaos that is the internet to order is strong. Scientists, programmers and organizations can’t help but instinctually explore and develop new things. As far as Web 2.0 goes, it would mean an unparalleled expansion on the functionality, openness, accessibility and order of the internet. So things like ethical concerns should be considered when we proceed with any new technology and for an internet revolution as large as Web 2.0, maybe someone needs to sit down for a moment and think about how this can affect people’s lives and future. 

Conclusion

Web 2.0 would no doubt bring a new revolution to the way we interact with the World Wide Web. It will bring a lot of advantages and move the human race forward. At the same time, there will be disadvantages arising from the few that would do harm to the rest of the people. This move all seems quite inevitable too. Corporate forces as well as technologies developed by researchers have a persistent tendency to influence our lives whether we would like it to or not. We as users should consider how technologies affect our lives and Web 2.0 should be no different.

After 5 years, I finally got a new computer. Compared to my older computers of the day, my new one wasn't that remarkable. Back when I had a Pentium 2 400MHz running an ATI Rage Pro 128 on 512MB of SD Ram (circa 1999) that was a big deal. My dad reported that he built the machine at a cost of $1500. Looking back on it as a kid, I never knew my computer was that expensive and when people ask me what graphics card I was using, I would be confused when they replied back, "What?!" It also explains why I never really understood how people were debating about the best cards of the day: Voodo vs TNT vs ATI vs Diamond vs nVidia. Every time a new game came out, I simply ran it on max settings without much fanfare and came to the conclusion that debating which card was better was useless as it seemed that all cards will run new games just fine. Man was I so wrong. (Rainbow 6 Rouge Spear, Need for Speed 2, Need for Speed 3, MS Flight Sim 98 and then Flight sim 2000).

Later on, as new games came out, my system started to not play games very well. The first of these was GTA 3, and then again with Warcraft 3 (I bought that the first week it came out). Overclocking both the proc and the vid card didn't do much good either. Certainly it was faster, but not enough to make the game playable. It wouldn't be until 5 years later that I would get a new system.

2002. High school grad. I got my new system which I used in fact up until just last week. It was a P4 2.4 GHz based on the Northwood core. It was the fastest proc at the time. Northwood 2.4 GHz had just come out a few months earlier and was in a battle against AMD with their Athlon XP. Also in the system was a recently released GeForce 440 MX. Utter Crap. GTA 3 wouldn't run well on this computer either. Apparently GeForce 3 series cards would run faster than the MX ones as the MX versions were the low end of the series. However, surprisingly, it ran Doom 3 not so bad at all. 2 days after getting Doom 3, I dished out $150 for a decent vid card. I was back to ATI with the Radeon 9600 Pro. Readers should note the highest end ATI card at the time was the 9800. I was stuck with the computer for another 5 years. During this time, computer gaming went into decline for me. It was the combination of the lack of power my computer had and the decreased about of time I could spend playing games.

Today, 2008. Close enough to my 5th year, and coincidentally, graduation from University (previous computers all bought close to grad of schools) I went out to buy a new computer.

Recent developments have had computers making breakthroughs by leaps and bounds. This is mainly attributed to the dual/quad/multi core introduction of the processor in combination with a better manufacturing process that reduces power consumption and shrinks the size of the transistor. Graphics cards have been slower to advance, but Direct X 10 and the demand for better vid cards have upped the development of higher end cards with the price to match. DDR 3 is also somewhat new on the market as well as with Sata 2. Now, is pretty exciting in terms of consumer computing.

In any case, after hours and hours of pouring through charts of benchmarks, and pricing lists, enduring the 'advice' from my buddy who's an 'expert' in hardware I finally laid in my order and got my computer. On my desk sat 4 LCD monitors. Two of them I rarely used because my old POS pci card running the 3rd monitor was slow as crap. Now, they are allll used.

Intel Q6600 @ 2.4 GHz, 8Mbi L2 (Quad Core)
2 GB DDR2-8500
Asus P5k P35 motherboard (this has been the component with the most contention)
350 GB Sata 2 HDD
Antec 650W psu (we need 650 watts now?!)
nVidia GeForce 8800 GT
ATI HD 2400

Not a bad system in many respects.

Video card(s): Most benchmarks read were for the video cards. The objective, as with everything else, was to find the best one for the money. The nVidia 8800GT seemed to be the best choice. It offered good performance if I wanted to run current gen games. What I've learned over the years is that most games will have a bottle neck at the GPU. It was my hope that the 8800GT, while certainly being a bottleneck, would at least be good enough to run games at decent settings (mainly high settings). Fortunately, it did the job well. Crysis ran on high settings (only did the demo for now). Crysis is a beaauutiful game in my opinion. Most other games ran on high too. As for the ATI HD 2400, it serves as a card to drive my other two monitors. I specifically chose the HD because I wanted to be able to move the card over to another system to play HD movies. The HD series has hardware integrated to decode 1080p standard video files at perfect frame rates. Plus it was cheap, $30. To note, the Nvidia card was $130.

Processor: Quad core is a bit much, considering most games either run on one core or two. This fact is confirmed when I ran the taskmanager set to processor usage on another monitor as I played some computer games. Crysis uses two on near maximum, most other games only use one. I think I should pick up 3d modeling again and just ramp up the ray tracing and poly count to make me feel better (3d Max renders on 4 cores). What would've been a better choice would be a $30 cheaper proc, a dual core but faster clock E8400. It is also known that Dual Cores can overclock faster than quadcores, so in effect, my bro's 1 year old E6600 is better than my Q6600 for the simple fact that he can overclock his much better than I can overclock mine (the Q6600 is essentially two E6600 glued together).

Ram: At the moment, based on experiments by several independent groups, DDR 3 has minimal to no advantages to DD2 in terms of performance.  So, I bought the second best DDR 2 for $60.

Mother Board: The age old adage, "money buys quality" is sometimes non applicable to computers. Though, in the case of motherboards, I'd have to say that it does show. I noted that there was a lot of contention about what mother board I should buy between my buddy and I. On the forums and reviews, the p35 chipset from Intel has been rated as the best overclocker. However, just a year back, the 680i was supreme. At $300 for the mobo, it was an expensive choice. I selected the 680i for my bro because it was simply the best there was (overclocking beast). Everything you could imagine was on the board. It had two PCIx x16 slots, and I mean TRUE x16 not the crappy 'x16 only if you use ONE of these slots'. Three way SLI by way of another PCIe x 1 if you wanted it. The 680i also had very robust Sata features including all forms of Raid with 6 Sata connectors. There were not only one, but two gigabyte lan connectors, but that's not all, they could be bridge together to form a 2 Gb/s connection (also hardware enhance packet queing)! There was even an LED segment display on the board indicating the status of the system. In addition, to accommodate overclocking ( because the board was designed for overclocking) the board had an extra P4 style power connector port to supply the proc with enough juice for overclocking. The piece du resistance was the bios. It was just sheer perfection. All the settings were adjustable to such precision (we're talking 0.001 increments for core voltage here and fractions of MHz for the FSB), there were on the fly readouts to what you had before, and what the system numbers would look like if you applied the changed settings. The mobo even LOOKED epic! Everything about the board was just so damned elegant and well thought out. Of my bro's system, this was definitely the most impressive thing.

Imagine my difficulty arguing to my buddy about the 680i vs the P35. The P35 was a $120 board with NONE of the features mentioned above. It looked just as plain as my Asus P2B a decade ago. There was no fan for the chipset, only 4 sata connectors with no Raid 5, a single true x16 PCIe slot, hell there wasn't even a small speaker to BEEP at you! Everything else was pretty much standard, a run of the mill motherboard. The reason my buddy argued with me so adamantly about the P35 was because it was the best overclocking motherboard there was to offer (even if the bios looks like crap). Now, it's true that a lot of people reviewed the board and said it was great at overclocking, but is that, and should that be the only thing to consider when looking at a mobo? For me and him, performance was important and the ability of the P35 to overclock was near undeniable. I did eventually go for the P35 but not after a good argument between him and myself. The P35 was cheaper, and a better OCer, but the number of features and just the elegance of the 680i makes the 680i a big contender in my mind. I will always think of the 680i as the highest standard of which to build a motherboard by.

In the end, the cost of this build was some $800. I will be spending more money on it soon mainly for overclocking equipment. Certainly, overclocking at this point in time is not very necessary, but I do want to find out the limits of what my computer can do (as I do with all things).

… will be continued with my overclocking adventures.

Network Neutrality

On the Subject of Network Neutrality

An analysis into the freedom we currently have on the Internet and its existence in the future.

Eric C.  =KaneLupis=

University of British Columbia

Department of Computer Science

March 29th, 2008

Abstract

            A rising concern in the domain of Internet legislation is the issue of net neutrality. Net neutrality affects all participants of the Internet. Non neutrality allows ISPs that are the gateway to the internet to affect how clients view the internet. This paper will analyze the side that supports net neutrality and the side that supports non neutrality. This paper will also come to a conclusion to side with neutrality and illustrate some steps that should be taken to ensure that.

On Net Neutrality

Net neutrality is an issue that is gaining more attention recently. While the subject of net neutrality has been with us in some sense since the days of operator based telephones in the late 1800s, net neutrality with the internet is under debate by a wide range of participants within the internet community. Net neutrality is the move towards an open internet, where data isn’t discriminated by the price assigned to it, the type of data it is, or if it interferes with an ISP’s commercial partners. It is in essence, a move against commercial based regulation of the internet. In this paper I will be arguing for specific policies and regulations for Network Neutrality and in doing so will explore arguments from both sides.        

            The internet has been, for the most part, surprisingly neutral especially since the ISPs and content providers have a lot of power to the data that they serve or traffic. But why would anyone make the internet non neutral? The answer to that is mainly for commercial purposes. One type of non neutrality is tiered service. This is not to be confused with current tiered service from ISP in that you pay for differently levels of broadband or data traffic allowance, non neutral tiered service says that an ISP can allow a company or website to pay for the audience they wish to target. This is different in that companies actually have to pay, if they are to be reached by the consumer. Usually, all that has to happen for a website to be accessible is for the end consumers to have an internet connection. Several key companies have openly opposed this possible practice including Yahoo and Google as well as other content providers citing that they would have to pay a large additional fee to be able to continue operating in their current capacity. At the moment, no ISP or backbone operator has implemented such a policy as there is a significant amount of pressure against it.

            Non neutrality also extends to the consumer level where neutrality is most important. Without the financial advantage companies and large organizations have, consumers are at the mercy of the data that is trafficked by the ISPs. ISPs can decide to shut out access to their competitors, or biased traffic to their own commercial partners. An example could be if Telus made a contract with Microsoft as the sole trafficker of Windows, and Xbox Live data to BC. Shaw and in fact all of Telus’s competitors wouldn’t be able to provide an important service to their customers. What can the consumers do but switch over if they really required those services. Conversely, all other ISPs could start bidding for content trafficking contracts and in the end, each ISP could hold small monopolies over certain content. The result would be that no one consumer under a single internet plan would be able to access the entire internet.

            ISP don’t have to just limit or bias the data from specific sources, they can also choose to filter out or bias data according to the type of data it is. For instance, Shaw might some day offer a ‘unlimited web page viewing’ only plan where data is mainly restricted to viewing web pages while at the same time offer a ’20 gig Bit Torrent’ plan at a significantly higher price. Theoretically, both could consumer the same amount of data if the web page viewer watched You Tube videos all the time, but this kind of strategy would require the consumer to pick one or the other, and depending on the plan, perhaps pay a lot more money. Data type filtering like this falls under a category like called packet shaping. A few years ago, and in fact still today, there is a rumor that Shaw is packet shaping against Bit Torrent data. It isn’t surprising if they did though. There are confirmed reports from many ISPs in the US that they are limiting P2P traffic in an effort to reduce total bandwidth being consumed under the justification that P2P is mainly illegal traffic. Even if it is though, I argue that it is not for the ISP to decide what is illegal or what is not, in the same idea that ISPs are not responsible for serving illegal traffic.

            While net neutrality has been somewhat good so far with respect to what the net could be with the possibility of tiered service and data bias, it has not gone about without small incidents (cbc.ca - July 24^th 2005). According to the CBC, about a year ago, Telus was locked in a fight with their own unionized employees. The labor dispute had been going on for several months. Allegedly, Telus blocked access to certain websites that supported the union and their cause. Such an action is most certainly censor ship regardless of what the website instructs is viewers to to, which in this case was to disrupt Telus’s phone service. The incident was small and only temporary but if Telus could do this without rising much attention, when what else can they get away with? It’s very easy to imagine Telus or Shaw blocking access to certain service promotions and deals by their competitors in efforts to retain clients.

Of course, there are other examples. AOL also participate in acts of non neutrality, including an incident in April of 2006 where they blocked the transmission of emails from a website (news.zdnet.com April 13^th, 2006). There was a movement against AOL’s implementation of their certified email program originating from www.dearaol.com. AOL claimed this was due to a glitch in their system. Verizon also had an incident of its own in September of 2007. Verizon had blocked “controversial or unsavory” text messages according to their own company policy against Naral Pro-Choice America, an abortion rights group (query.nytimes.com – Sept 27^th, 2007). Verizon’s example more than AOL’s or Telus’s incident is a more serious matter that brings but a lot more questions. How far can in ISP go to blocking specific types of content? It seems that if Verizon can write into their own policy to block controversial subjects, who decides what subjects are controversial? In the words of a parodied President Bush in an episode of Robot Chicken against a devastating terrorist attack on the world’s computer system, “And to the one who did this we have only this to say, ‘it’s not funny man! Give us back our porn!’”.

So the question really comes down to what we want from net neutrality and in fact the internet itself. To start with, the examples above shows what non neutrality and lack of legislation and regulation can do. ISPs can discriminate data and service at will and in the way that can stand to benefit the ISP itself. The possibility extends to censor ship of certain topics like Verizon and the pro choice incident. Without turning this paper into a ‘why is censor ship bad’ discussion, I’ll simply say that fighting against censor ship of the internet and discrimination of any of its services or resources by ISPs is the correct course of action to take. Take for example, shipping services. UPS, FedEx, Purolator and various shipping companies around the world are neutral when it comes to delivering packages and mail from one place to another. The internet itself is very much like the postal service and as such, should be a neutral place of data sharing.

Supporters of net neutrality is wide and large. Members include a significant number of online companies including eBay, Earthlink, Google, Skype, Youtube even Ask.com. the Open Internet Coalition has a list of all their supporters including all that were mentioned above. There are others not on this list, including Craigslist. Such a list represents a significant segment of the online content providers on the internet (openinternetcoalition.com ‘Who We Are’). Of course, there is the general public as well. Polls conducted show that of those who are aware of what net neutrality is most are in favor of it. There are however, a large number of people, who are unaware of what net neutrality means, or do not think that it is important (consumersunion.org – January 18^th, 2006). I believe this to be the lack of publicity and the surprisingly neutral state of the internet. If ISPs do start becoming non neutral, I can imagine that most of the public, when becoming aware of the situation, will back neutrality.

With that said, it may seem that what I’ve said should lead to an obvious conclusion that full on net neutrality should be supported by everyone, however, there are several arguments that can be made against net neutrality and in the next section, I’ll be looking into these.

An argument that is often made is one about the evolution of the internet. This particular argument is supported by one of the founders of the internet himself, Robert Kahn (archive.computerhistory.org Robert Kahn). Some people, including Mr. Kahn believe that imposing net neutrality legislation would hinder the growth and evolution of the internet. They say that ISPs and backbone operators would have no need to continue implementing new hardware, protocols and the like to accommodate a non neutral internet. That is, to produce hardware that can bias traffic and assist in non neutral activities. I personally find this a weak argument since a neutral internet would create a larger amount of traffic and a larger many to many access requiring a more sophisticated internet system and possibly the implementation of IPv6. I’ll elaborate on increased traffic in the following paragraph

Another argument, is that a non neutral internet, specifically, tiered service would preserve bandwidth to those that require it. In addition, fees will apply to specific types of traffic. The reason for this is to ease the burden off of an increasingly heavy load on the physical internet network. This, however, seems to contradict the argument above, since decrease traffic loads would not warrant expansion of the internet.

The argument for non neutrality usually ends up as a debate for increased quality of service (QoS) of the internet. The problem many suspect with today’s internet is that there is no regulation on how much traffic one network may dump onto another network. All users are being treated as equals and allowed to transmit as much data in any form as they want. The result is a decreased quality of service for those networks that can’t handle the load. By allowing companies to created a tiered service model or data specific service model, quality of service can be controlled by limiting unimportant data, or data that can afford to have lesser quality of service, such as bit torrent or P2P. Current figures estimate that approximately 60% and higher of total internet traffic is peer to peer traffic. If ISPs were allowed to throttle this kind of traffic, we can enjoy a better quality of service for all other services such as web page traffic, internet video such as You Tube and some argue, we might even be able to begin watching live TV on our computers.

The last might point I’ll talk about is that some people believe that non neutrality and the commercialization of the internet, would increase the amount invested on the internet infrastructure. With companies bidding each other for service contracts, increasing fees for usage of the internet and investment from companies to obtain better ‘quality’ internet, large amounts of money can be invested into ISPs, telecom companies and internet backbone operators without significant amount of hardware modification. But is it really necessary to dump this much money to buy good internet? ISPs and the like are already getting a significant sum from their clients. Backbone operators and those in similar positions may not benefit directly from client subscription fees, but the current way backbone operators get their share is by entering quality of service contracts with ISPs. Though, this practice does beg the question of neutrality when it comes to ISPs buying better service from their backbone operators. An argument against this usually comes in the form of ‘the backbone operators won’t have incentives to increase their quality of service’. I disagree, as long as there are clients such as the home users or companies that demand fast unhindered internet, there will be money that flows for that as long as the fees are imposed on an equal basis to all forms of data and on all people.

With these arguments for non neutrality, there are a lot of supporters. Many of them are industry experts on the matter of the internet structure. As said before, Robert Kahn is an avid supporter. This actually surprised me. There are others as well, Robert Pepper, a senior managing director at Cisco calls non neutrality a necessary step in bringing order. (blogs.zdnet.com Dan Farber Movember 10^th, 2006)

I think that both sides have very good arguments. I’m inclined to side with the advocates of neutrality though. Data and traffic discrimination, as well as censoring of content is something I think most people would not like. Being forced to pay for certain kinds of internet data and content should be left to the content providers and not the service providers. Non neutrality would mean such a large commercialization of the internet, that independent voices would be squeezed out of the picture, turning the internet into a tool merely for the ISPs and the like to make more money. This could theoretically be possible if Xanga’s services and content were bought by certain ISPs, or ISPs agreeing to boycott serving Xanga’s content. Non neutrality, gives ISPs too much power over a supposedly free internet. It’s not hard to argue non neutrality if you boil it down to the basic ‘private companies own the internet’. In this sense, the ISPs and network operators can do as they wish.

When I think about it, it really comes down to two things, either a free and open internet for all to use, or a commercialized network for companies to do business. In reality, it is the telecom companies, universities and other network organizations that ‘own’ the internet, that is, they own all the hardware that make the internet possible. While it is true that some parts of the internet are operated by the government the vast majority of the internet is defined by commercial contracts between network operators. In this sense, the internet is a commercial entity and as such, should be the telecom’s call what they do with it.

However, if we trace back to the origin of the internet, ARPANET, we see that ARPANET was created for the intention of research, collaboration, resource sharing and in general to assist in the synthesis of new ideas. When ARPANET was being formed, chief designers adamantly opposed commercial contribution to the project, and instead, shifted development and research for the project to “the best academic computer centers”. Many believe that if this were not to have been so, the internet itself would have taken a rather different form as companies had intentions for the network that would not have been academic in nature. We can see though, the internet, even while owned commercially, should be free and open. In this day in age, a method to share ideas, views and voicing them is more important than ever. Commercialization of the internet would be detrimental to that cause (dei.isep.ipp.pt History of ARPANET).

The right course of action would be to impose laws that prohibit companies from making the internet non neutral while allowing certain quality of service policies to be implemented. Chiefly, data should not be discriminated in any form, either based on its origin, content or type or discriminated by placing them in different priority levels or speed and performance classes. In general, a data packet is a data packet. The only thing that should be allowed is the number of data packets a customer is allowed to send at a time (rate) or in total (quota) which is what all ISPs do at the moment.

With that said though, it wouldn’t be hampering the internet if a few quality of service policies were allowed to be implemented as exceptions to neutrality laws. First and foremost, viral packets and spam packets including blatant denial of service packets should be allowed to be intercepted at the origin ISP level, so that they do not propagate through the network. I’m kind of tempted to say that it should be mandatory to do such policing by ISPs, but this is a subject area I’m not too familiar with.

I believe the ideas stated above are achievable and in fact not too far off from what we already have. The internet at its current state is quite neutral. I’d say a lot of people are happy with the condition of the internet. To change it from what it is right now would be veering from the true intention of what the internet was made to do. Currently, there are members of the political scene attempting to put in place some form of legislation for network neutrality. It is called the ‘Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2006’ and is an amendment to the Clayton antitrust act.  (frwebgate.access.gpo.gov)  This act unfortunately didn’t become law as there were issues with it being brought up for final discussion with the House of Representatives. There are talks about bringing a new version of the act to the floor sometimes in 2008.

To conclude, the freedom that we have with the internet is only temporary if nothing is done about it. Companies and ISPs are allowed to be the ‘gatekeepers’ of the internet, imposing whatever rules and filters they want in order to promote their own content. Access might be blocked or separate fees imposed for content from Microsoft, Google or Yahoo in favor of the ISP’s own brand. What we should do is prohibit ISPs from discriminating data in any form with the exception of malicious data intent on harming computers or the internet and we should do this via legislation. The US has already once tried to make laws for some form of regulation and while it has not come to fruition, it is certainly a step in the right direction. Canada is not far behind. Polls and statistics have indicated that the general population supports some form of neutrality laws, legislative action should soon follow (www.newswire.ca). With that said, I am quite confident that laws preserving network neutrality will be brought into being as it is inherently the only choice that ensures continued freedom to traverse the world wide web, wherever it goes or whatever it hosts, unhindered by commercial interests.

Bibliography

CBC.CA. July 24^th. 2006. Telus Cuts Subscriber Access to Pro-Union Website

                http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/07/24/telus-sites050724.html?print  

NEWS.ZDNET.COM. April 13^th. 2006. AOL Charged With Blocking Opponent’s Email

                http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-6061089.html  

QUERY.NYTIMES.COM. September 27^th. 2007. Verizon Rejects Text Messages From an Abortion Rights Group

                http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE4D7133EF934A1575AC0A9619C8B63 . 

OPENINTERNETCOALITION. March 28^th. 2008. Who We Are

                http://www.openinternetcoalition.com/index.cfm?objectid=0016502C-F1F6-6035-B1264DD29499E9D0 .

CONSUMERSUNION.ORG. January 18^th. 2006. Importance of the Internet Public Support for Net Neutrality

                http://www.consumersunion.org/pub/press_releases/003060.html.

ARCHIVE.COMPUTERHISTORY.ORG. January 9^th. 2007. An Evening with Robert Kahn

                http://archive.computerhistory.org/lectures/an_eveninig_with_robert_kahn.lecture.2007.01.09.wmv. 

BLOGS.ZDNET.COM - Dan Farber. November 10^th. 2006. Robbert Pepper: Net Neutrality’s False Choice

                http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3929. 

DEI.ISEP.IPP.PT. History of ARPANET

                http://www.dei.isep.ipp.pt/~acc/docs/arpa.html. 

NEWSWIRE.CA. March 27^th. 2008. Canadians rebuff restrictions on their Internet Access

                http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/October2007/01/c6961.html

FRWEBGATE.ACCESS.GPO.GOV. May 18^th. 2007. H.R. 5417

                http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=109_cong_bills&docid=f:h5417rh.txt.pdf  

Comments on this paper are totally welcome. Net Neutrality is a big issue that we should take seriously. Members of the Internet community should take proactive action to ensure the continued neutrality of the Internet.