swestrup | Rise and Shine

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... as the actress said to the bishop.

Someone asked me in a comment what online comics I read, and if 'Argon Zark' was one of them. I started to write a reply, but then I decided to post my answer here:

I've been reading 'Argon Zark' since shortly after it started many years ago. Now that it only posts one new page every 6 months, I'm not so sure it counts as a comic, but I do check back on it occassionally. In that same category is SuperMegaTopia which I check every month or so for new stuff.

Other online comics I read are:

Dilbert of course.
Queen of Wands.
MegaTokyo
Sexy Losers
Goats
Sinfest
User Friendly (not as good as it used to be).

And, of course, my two favorites, the only real reason I have for waking up any more:

Sluggy Freelance and Schlock Mercenary!

... So now you know. The question is, are you going to use this knowledge for good, or for awesome?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

swestrup

All of the main computers in the house are on a Lan which connects to a router I built out of an old 386 box. The router plugs into an ADSL modem. My connection is at 100 Mb/s on the Lan and 1.7 Mb/s on the ADSL link. Depending on where I'm talking to, I can do a download at up to 200 KB/sec.

From: (Anonymous)

I took a quick look at the comics; pretty neat. You should throw up a quick-and-dirty website with some of this stuff.
I'm afraid I don't quite understand your connection description: how can you get more throughput (100 Mb/s) inside your house than you get via your connection to the outside world, i.e., when it all comes through a 1.7 Mb/s link? What am I not understanding right?
-Jim
...On a clear disk, you can seek forever...

From:

swestrup

Its a 1.7 Mb/s (Small 'b': Megabit per second) link which is a raw 216 KB/s (Large 'B': KiloByte per second) link. On a good day I can get most of that as download speed, and I just heard that they've been working to upgrade it to 3.0 Mb/s so my speed should be going up soon.

From:

sps.livejournal.com

That's like saying, how can you have a highway on your island if it's connected to a ferry? Think about it.

But do you know how many years it's been since a LAN has run at less than 2Mbps? Typically nowadays they're at 1G or more.

From: (Anonymous)

OK, so you can only get your 100 Mb/s (small b - bits) inside your house whereas it can only enter your house at 1.7 Mb/s (still small b - bits). Meanwhile that effective 1.7 Mb/s that you can actually get from outside might be able to do 216 KB/s (Large 'B': KiloByte per second) if everything works perfectly. Are those Bytes 8-bit octets or do they need support bits which would make them 10 bits each? 8 bits, it appears to me, since 8x216=1,728 Kb which is a little more than the nominal 1.7 Mb per second that you can expect. -- Scream loudly if I still hopelessly misunderstand.
-Jim
...Beer: not just for breakfast anymore...

From:

swestrup

Ya got it. The 1.7 Mb/s is the throughput rate they quoted me. I think my raw speed is higher but is reduced by the overhead of the various layered protocols (I'm using PPP over Ether which is layered on whatever ADSL uses which is probably layered on something else).