now this is broadband…

Posted on August 23, 2007 by ward

The above screenshot was taken at a colocation facility.

… unfortunately this kind of speed is totally unaffordable at home, at least in this country. Thanks so much, dear politicians and FCC – your deregulation policies and over $200 billion worth of subsidies to the big telcos have brought us… ‘broadband’ that is slow and overpriced. I say we demand the money back, use some of it to buy one of the big telcos – Verizon’s market capitalization is only $112 billion, hmmm – and build out some *real* broadband infrastructure with the rest of the money.

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Dell 1420N, preloaded with Ubuntu

Posted on August 21, 2007 by ward

My laptop died a couple weeks ago – an almost 4 years old Inspiron 5150 which despite all its overheating problems was quite reliable. Of course it came with Windows XP, but I only ever ran Debian and Ubuntu on it,

Fast-forward to 2007, and now laptops with GNU/Linux preloaded are available.

Of course the perfect laptop would be AMD based with Intel graphics and Ralink wifi. That would have allowed a chance of LinuxBIOS support, free software 3D accelerated graphics, and free software wifi without binary blobs. But this machine does not currently exist, so I ordered a ruby-red Dell Inspiron 1420N with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn preloaded. It arrived today, and here are some first impressions.

First of all, here’s an lspci:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile Memory Controller Hub (rev 0c)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 02)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI #5 (rev 02)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI #2 (rev 02)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 02)
00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 6 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI #1 (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev f2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile LPC Interface Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation Mobile IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Mobile SATA AHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
03:01.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd Unknown device 0832 (rev 05)
03:01.1 Generic system peripheral [0805]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 22)
03:01.2 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd Unknown device 0843 (rev 12)
03:01.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 12)
03:01.4 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd xD-Picture Card Controller (rev 12)
09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation Unknown device 1713 (rev 02)
0c:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)

The laptop has a built-in SD/MMC slot which is great – it does not have bluetooth though… I’ll have to buy a usb dongle. I like that the machine has 4 usb ports, 2 on each side. There are a series of buttons for sound, and they actually work out of the box. Very nice.

The highest screen resolution available is 1440×900, but only in glossy. I was worried about reflections, but if you turn up the brightness all the way it’s not too bad. This is brightness at less than full strength, which demonstrates the problem with glossy screens:

Free software support for modern hardware is largely problematic in 2 areas: wireless and (3D) graphics. This machine has Intel graphics and wireless; for the former 100% free software drivers are available, but the wireless is still a bit of an issue:

Unfortunately having Intel wireless apparently means having to run a closed-source binary as root (!):

root      3811  0.1  0.0   1704   380 ?        S< 15:37   0:02 /sbin/ipw3945d-2.6.20-16-generic --quiet

I really, really don't like that. However, it looks like there is hope - though even a driver without regulatory daemon running as roomt will not be 100% free software because of its dependency on a binary blob (the 'microcode'). I'll have to give the iwlwifi driver a go with the 2.6.22 kernel.

Unfortunately this machine still has a 'windows' key:

But it's really refreshing not to have that Microsoft sticker:

No Microsoft tax was paid on this laptop :)

More later, no doubt...

Posted in Free Software/Open Source | Leave a comment

monitor power consumption

Posted on August 16, 2007 by ward

I got a ViewSonic VP2030b today, and given all the recent commotion about blackle.com, I figured I would verify the claims in Google’s blogpost.

Description Brightness Power consumption
Sleep mode (no signal, orange light) or switched ‘off’ with the front switch N/A 0.01A at 120V
Google.com (1024×768) 100% 0.69A at 120V
Blackle.com (1024×768) 100% 0.68A at 120V
Google.com (1024×768) 50% 0.58A at 120V
Blackle.com (1024×768) 50% 0.58A at 120V
Google.com (1600×1200) 100% 0.71A at 120V
Blackle.com (1600×1200) 100% 0.69A at 120V
Google.com (1600×1200) 50% 0.60A at 120V
Blackle.com (1600×1200) 50% 0.58A at 120V

These measurements were made with Firefox in full-screen mode (F11). The built-in USB hub was not connected to the computer.

As you can see what Google says is correct for this 20″ LCD monitor at 1024×768 resolution: there is no difference in power consumption between http://google.com and http://blackle.com. However, at native resolution (1600×1200), there is a small difference in power consumption (0.02A). Most people can be expected to run the monitor at this resolution.

The effect of changing the brightness is much more pronounced than the difference between Blackle and Google (previously I erroneously mentioned that changing the brightness had no effect; I was in fact changing contrast, the on-screen-menu for this monitor is not the most userfriendly).

Viewsonic claims a typical power consumption of 52W, which is very close to what I’m seeing here at 1600×1200 with brightness set to 100% (48W). But the VA value is 85, which means this monitor has a pretty crappy power factor (PF) of 0.56. Compare that with the Antec EarthWatts 380 power supply I bought for this new computer, which has a PF of 0.99! The wikipedia page on power factor correction is pretty fascinating reading if you want to know what Viewsonic could have done to improve the power factor.

The ‘sleep’ power consumption is not so bad at about 1W, but I will still switch the thing off when I’m not using it. One Watt 24/7 is over 8.5 KWhr per year, which is a lot of energy to waste.

The monitor has a power off switch on the front, but that makes no difference in terms of power consumption compared to sleep mode; it still sips 0.01A. Fortunately there is a real off switch at the back next to the power plug as well.

Posted in Environment | Leave a comment

more GPL’d chip designs from Sun

Posted on August 8, 2007 by ward

After the T1, Sun has now also pledged to release the core design files and test suites for the UltraSPARC T2 chip under the GPL. Way to go Sun! The T2 specs are quite impressive – 8 cores with 8 threads each; dual 10Gb embedded NICs; PCI-E embedded; etc – and a power consumption of less than 95 watts!

I’d love to give Debian or Ubuntu’s UltraSPARC releases a go on one of these…

Posted in Free Software/Open Source, Open Standards | Leave a comment

routing mess in Amsterdam

Posted on August 4, 2007 by ward

Sometimes internet routing goes seriously haywire. The routing for AS13127 (Versatel, a subsidiary of Tele-2 in Europe) seems to be completely messed up for (some) traffic that originates from outside of Europe. Here’s what that looks like from Boston (screenshot from this morning):

The traffic gets lost on teleglobe’s backbone in Amsterdam.

I got the first problem report from a user in Australia around 7.15am EDT (that’s GMT -4). For lack of a better option (it’s a long story), I filed a ticket with Speakeasy (who provide my DSL), who escalated it to VSNL (teleglobe.net) where the routing goes haywire, who ‘informed the local carrier’ i.e. Versatel. It’s pretty unbelievable that the folks at Versatel still had not noticed the problem, more than 9 hours after the outage began.

Speakeasy‘s support is first class, as always – but Versatel seems pretty clueless… Next time I’ll contact the Versatel hostmaster immediately rather than assume that they are already aware of the problem. They obviously need some encouraging. Now let’s hope they get their bloody network fixed sometime soon.

Posted in Completely clueless | Leave a comment

google and spectrum auctions

Posted on July 20, 2007 by ward

Google is putting it’s money where it’s mouth is: it has pledged to bid $4.6 billion for the upcoming 700MHz spectrum auction if the FCC sets rules that require this spectrum to be used in a non-proprietary way: open applications, open devices, open services, and open networks.

Let’s hope the FCC will listen. We desperately need more competition in the US broadband market.

Posted in Open Standards | Leave a comment

le ‘dézonage’

Posted on July 17, 2007 by ward

We headed over to the local ‘media markt’ to buy a couple of cheap DVD players yesterday. All players were labeled as ‘multi-zone’ and when I asked about that, the sales guy happily explained that all the players they sell can play DVDs from any region. One simply takes the player to the service counter after purchase, where the service guy takes about 15 seconds to remove the region restriction from the player, free of charge. Just like that.

Sometimes the Swiss are pretty enlightened…

Posted in DRM | 2 Comments

didn’t move that far after all

Posted on June 22, 2007 by ward

Maybe there’s more to my move to Massachusetts than I suspected. Check out this map comparing the GDP of US states with various countries around the world.

Posted in Everything else | Leave a comment

belgium doesn’t exist

Posted on June 14, 2007 by ward

It’s clearly true. I think I might have to get one of these stickers:

the Belgian...

Posted in Everything else | Leave a comment

google and privacy

Posted on June 11, 2007 by ward

Privacy International has released a report stating that Google’s privacy policies are “the worst on the web”, ranking it dead last in a list of “internet service companies” that includes names like Microsoft, Ebay, Last.fm, Livejournal, the BBC, Amazon, etc.

That report turns out to be rather poorly researched, and the conclusions are to be taken with a big grain of salt, according to this analysis over at SearchEngineLand. And here’s another analysis, admittedly by someone who works for Google. I’m inclined to agree with their criticism.

While I applaud what Privacy International is trying to do, and I do think that there are privacy issues with a lot of what Google does, this report feels like something that was made up without much thorough research or investigation.

The fact alone that Google was the only search company to refuse turning over search data to the US Department of Justice, while Microsoft and Yahoo happily obliged without even pretending to want to protect the privacy of their users should be a clear indication of just how flawed the ranking in this report is.

And as a more general point, I’m a bit fed up with the whole ‘cookies are bad’ nonsense. Http is a stateless protocol folks! Cookies are pretty much necessary to retain state between page views. There are some alternatives for cookies, but none that are technoligically equivalent. Should web services set their cookies to be removed when the user closes the browser, or ideally after the user logs out of the service? Absolutely. But if they don’t, it’s no big deal. Just use a decent web browser like Firefox, and tell it to delete all cookies when you close the browser. Cookies are not a big privacy threat because the user has full control over them. There are much bigger fish to fry when it comes to online privacy.

Conclusion: dear Privacy International, I support your cause, but this report is fundamentally flawed. It uses questionable methodology and the conclusions seem to be rather unscientific.

Posted in Privacy | Leave a comment