Edgeblog: It's still the latency, stupid

Edgeback Consulting talks about how network speed isn't just about bandwidth throughput. It's about latency. Though I don't like being called stupid--I get enough of that from my ex-girlfriend.

I was reminded of Cheshire's article and the underlying principles recently when working on an international WAN design. What Cheshire noted was that light signals pass through fibre optics at roughly 66% of the speed of light, or 200*10^6 m/s. Regardless of the equipment or protocols you use, your data cannot exceed that theoretical limit. This limit equals the delay between when a packet is sent, and when it is received, aka latency.

In the US, we tend to focus on bandwidth and carrier technology when ordering circuits, completely ignoring latency.

If latency was a five year old, it would grow up with severe emotional problems - that's how ignored it is. We agree with this article - in fact, we actually have our own latency calculator as part NetPerformance.com's suite of tools.

Ars Technica: Universities respond to decline in computer science students

Apparently, there are fewer computer science majors out there since the tech bubble burst. Whodathunkit?

It's no secret that there are fewer undergraduate students majoring in computer science today than there were in the late '90s. The Computing Research Association's statistics show that the number of freshman who list computer science as a probable major has fallen by 70 percent since 2000. According to the Associated Press, universities are responding to this trend by attempting to spice up computer science education and make it more appealing to incoming students.

Such as, for example, allowing students to treat college like a World of Warcraft game. For example, there are organizations that are much like guilds on college campuses, called "fraternities" and "sororities." Improvement is done through grueling, repetitive tasks - grinding "homework." And of course, recurring fees. (Many people stick with it a few months but then get bored with it and drop out.)

I have less than fond memories of my own experiences with computer science education. I was frustrated with the emphasis on niche commercial development tools that I had never used before and have rarely used since. I also got frustrated with the emphasis on technical minutiae that aren't particularly relevant to general application development. Assembly programming and compiler design skills acquired in college aren't going to be very useful for software developers who enter the workforce and get paid to write web applications with ASP.NET or Ruby on Rails.

I was a computer science major for two semesters. When I objectively evaluated my chances that the skills I developed learning assembly language specific to a VAX machine would come in useful, I decided to switch majors to history.

ZDNet: Google Gears vies to be defacto tech for Web apps

Online applications are great. The only problem is that they're only as good as your internet connection - the "offline problem" means that if you go offline, you can't access your data or even save your work. Google Gears is a technology (one of many) poised to solve that problem.

The technology consists of three primary components. First, a local "server" which is not really a local Web server but rather a means for capturing all of the Javascript and HTML-based logic that drives the functionality of an application. Second, a local database using the open source-based SQLite for persistence of any data associated with the offline functionality. For word processing, one record could theoretically hold the entire contents of a document. For something like Google Reader (an RSS reader app from Google and, in a proof of concept, the first to take on the offline capability using Google Gears), one record might hold an RSS item. To the SQLite project, Google also contributed the necessary Javascript APIs for accessing SQLite from Javascript.

Thirdly, Google took a look at the single-threaded mentality of most Web browsers and realized that any hangup in a Javascript-based application could easily hang the entire browser (something that has happened to me several times!). So, Google solved that problem by making it possible for Javascript threads to run as background tasks.

My only problem with it: Doesn't "Google Gears" sound like a 1980's toy-based Saturday Morning Cartoon Show?