[Bloat] Two d-link products tested for bloat...

[Dave Taht]

I spent a bit of my vacation porting my old blog over from blogger,
and the ikiwiki "successor" to that blog also. It took quite a few sed
scripts, but it is mostly done...

I switched to using hugo ( https://github.com/spf13/hugo ). Hugo is a
surprisingly useful language, and *fast*.

the 940+ postings render to a static fairly nicely formatted website
in under a second. (took minutes, with ikiwiki) It was really nice to
have regained control of my canon, and to be able to grep through
things, and use tools like sed on it, and coming up with some way of
copying with the chaos of the bufferbloat site was kind of my
subconcious goal... but

and in reading all that old blog material, I remembered I had a life
before bufferbloat... and still, as things started re-taking shape, I
started scribbling down a whole bunch of new things in the easy to
write in markdown format, ranting, getting things out of my system,
and it was starting to feel productive to be able to edit in a real
editor again and not have to use the web for *anything*...

but, boy, I am not sure if the web is ready to see a side of me that
frustrated and angry and fed up, and dripping sarcasm and scorn at
every turn, again.

http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2003/06/when-youre-staring-at-brick-walls.html

I really, really, really hated ham the marketing monkey way back when.


On Fri, Feb 20, 2015 at 12:47 AM, Jonathan Morton <chromatix99 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Out of curiosity, perhaps you could talk to A&A about their FireBrick
> router. They make a big point of having written the firmware for it
> themselves, and they might be more interested in having researchers poke at
> it in interesting ways than the average big name.  A&A are an ISP, not a
> hardware manufacturer by trade.
>
> Meanwhile, I suspect the ultimate hardware vendors don't care because their
> customers, the big brands, don't care. They in turn don't care because
> neither ISPs nor consumers care (on average). A coherent, magazine style
> review system with specific areas given star ratings might have a chance of
> fixing that, if it becomes visible enough. I'm not sure that a rant blog
> would gain the same sort of traction.
>
> Some guidance can be gained from the business of reviewing other computer
> hardware. Power supplies are generally, at their core, one of a few standard
> designs made by one of a couple of big subcontractors. The quality of the
> components used to implement that design, and ancillary hardware such as
> heatsinks and cabling, are what distinguish them in the marketplace.
> Likewise motherboards are all built around a standard CPU socket, chipset
> and form factor, but the manufacturers find lots of little ways to
> distinguish themselves on razor thin margins; likewise graphics cards.
> Laptops are usually badly designed in at least one stupid way despite the
> best efforts of reviewers, but thanks to them it is now possible to sort
> through the general mess and find one that doesn't completely suck at a
> reasonable price.
>
> As for the rating system itself:
>
> - the Communications Black Hole, for when we can't get it to work at all.
> Maybe we can shrink a screen grab from Interstellar for the job.
>
> - the Tin Cans & String, for when it passes packets okay (out of the box)
> but is horrible in every other important respect.
>
> - the Carrier Pigeon. Bonus points if we can show it defecating on the
> message (or the handler's wrist).
>
> - the Telegraph Pole (or Morse Code Key). Maybe put the Titanic in the
> background just to remind people how hard they are failing.
>
> - the Dial-Up Modem. Perhaps products which become reliable and useful if
> the user installs OpenWRT should get at least this rating.
>
> - the Silver RJ45, for products which contrive to be overall competent in
> all important respects.
>
> - the Golden Fibre, for the very best, most outstanding examples of best
> practice, without any significant faults at all. Bonus Pink Floyd reference.
>
> I've been toying with the idea of putting up a website on a completely
> different subject, but which might have similar structure. Being able to use
> the same infrastructure for two different sites might spread the costs in an
> interesting way...
>
> - Jonathan Morton



-- 
Dave Täht

thttp://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/Upcoming_Talks