
Stupid long route - zdw
http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/stupid_long_route/
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cyberferret
I miss the early versions of Netscape, when they used to show the server
domain lookups that the packets were transiting through to get to you in the
status bar.

I remember being amazed at the 'magic' of the internet back then, when I would
sit in Australia and request a page in the UK, and see responses flickering
through at the bottom from France, Japan, Malaysia etc. Really brought home
that each packet was coming to you via bouncing around all over the world, and
two consecutive packets could come by incredibly different pathways.

That was dial up days too. Now I complain when NetFlix take an extra second to
begin streaming a show. The magic has become mundane. I wish someone would
bring out a Chrome extension that could display what the ancient Netscape
browsers did...

~~~
xelxebar
Hmm... I'm not sure how you'd reliably do this. AFAIK routers don't usually
bounce back a notification to origin every time they route a packet.

You'd have to do some kind of traceroute and then look up the ips in the geoip
database. The former is pretty slow in my experience, and the latter might be
pretty noisy data.

Makes me wonder what Nexflix was doing way back when!

~~~
kinos
When Netflix first started they only sent out DVDs via mail, and it was three
DVDs at most at once. You paid a monthly fee, and you would mail back DVDs
when you wanted a new one on your queue. It took them three or so years to get
streaming set up, long after YouTube had made the idea of streaming video
realistic. I believe VidX had also put a lot of effort into making high
quality streaming realistic before YouTube supported it. This all occured
before Netflix offered any streaming.

~~~
aptwebapps
I think GP meant to type 'Netscape' in the last sentence ...

~~~
xelxebar
Whoops :/

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chrismorgan
This past week, I, living in country Australia, a few hundred kilometres from
Melbourne, needed to help a coworker in Melbourne to diagnose something on his
VM. It was easiest for us both to hook the SSH connection via a server in New
York—increasing 30ms of round-trip latency to about 560ms. A terminal alone
was fairly painful to use, but this is the part that I found really
interesting: stdout line buffering goes from being a performance optimisation
to being a significant slow-down—nay, a _nightmare_. Installing packages via
Yarn, for example, suddenly took _minutes_ , where it took only _seconds_ with
`> /dev/null`, because of a progress bar that kept on flushing its stdout
buffer.

~~~
predakanga
This is one of those issues that Mosh handles well - it essentially emulates a
terminal on the server and sends snapshots to the client, varying the rate
based on network conditions.

~~~
chrismorgan
I contemplated mosh while waiting for things to install, and wondered whether
it’d resolve that issue; but I’ve never set it up, and would seldom indeed
have any use for it, so I expect I’ll continue to not use it.

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JeanMarcS
I remember back in the 90´s when phoning from the US back to France you had a
second of latency, forcing you to do like journalists on TV when they have to
wait for the answer to travel to space and back.

You needed to be a little bit focused !

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ythn
Come on, the juiciest tidbit was the latency and he left it out what it ended
up being! I'm guessing the latency was around 1.5 seconds. It can't get much
faster than that; the speed of light is too slow.

~~~
sml156
The only thing I noticed was it took a full second

> And finally, after 178000 and change miles of data transfer, the letter I'd
> typed a full second ago appeared on my screen.

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ironjunkie
The black magic behind those complex communication pipes is what made me love
computers back in the days. Ever since then I have been obsessed by networking
and how It just works even though things are thousands miles apart. I'm still
amazed today but somehow the magic is gone for me. Everything is transparent
in the modern internet and nobody really cares anymore about the complexity.

Everything is now about frontend and javascript design. Hard problems are not
cool and trendy anymore, and that is sad.

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linkmotif
This was cool. But what interested me more is the site it’s hosted on
branchable.com. Is anyone else drawn to the ability to fork things on the net?

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GrumpyNl
Fun to do and something to think about.

