The Lounge - CodeProject

One of my greatest disappointments was seeing Robert Flack in concert in Singapore about 2012, the lady had lost the crystalline voice she one had and no longer had the stamina to maintain a performance. a truly sad outcome.

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP

"Fantasy football is just Dungeons and Dragons for people who like sports.

Real programmers use butterflies

Surely FF isn't that exciting?

"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!

Troll.

Truth. And I played the original a long, long time ago. I realized things were going sideways when adults started showing up in chain mail and wizard cloaks (I was 15 at the time).

Maybe the only difference is now you can gamble...

Charlie Gilley

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759

Has never been more appropriate.

FF is more a stats play.
Multiple games play out on an identical playing field.

DD has some stats, but more imagination. Individual games play out on a diversity of playing fields.

Seems like more of an opportunity for friends to trash talk each other.

Some serious research goes into some leagues. Like figuring out what positions your friends pick in which round of the draft, etc.

Both my wife and I work from home. We both have to connect to our work networks over VPN, and I also run a daily 8-hour Zoom session for my dev co-workers. We use Spectrum (we signed up about 15 years ago, when they called themselves Time Warner).

Over the last couple of months, I noticed that I've been having bandwidth problems which manifested most notably during Teams meetings, and for me, I was having to wait as long as 30 seconds for my VS windows to update when I scrolled (I have to RDP to a jump box, and then RDP from the jump box to my dev box to be able to write code). I was kinda okay with it, but on Wednesday, my wife complained, and I was in the process of waiting for a 30-second scroll update, so I decided it was time to do something about it.

On Wednesday, I decided to do a internet speed test, and found out I was only getting 4.8-5.5Mbps down.I think everyone can agree that's abysmal performance. I found that we were on the old Time Warner "Internet Extreme" plan which claimed up to 60 Mbps download speed. It was not "extreme" by any means. So why are we only getting 5Mbps? that question will be relevant later on.

I called Spectrum and discovered that they had an almost 2.5x faster plan (200 Mbps) for the same money we were already spending, but for $20 more, we could get 400 Mbps. I jumped on that, big time. They told me that my current modem could ntot provide the bandwidth I was paying for, so they offered to send me a DOCSIS 3.1 modem for free, so I jumped on that, too, but I made plans to get my own modem (sans built-in router) and a separate router so I could change the DNS server IPs, because on Spectrum's router, you cannot change the DNS settings. At all.

I rebooted my modem after getting off the phone, and I immediately started getting 225-230Mbps down. My VPN bandwidth improved, and my my remote session into my dev box so vastly improved, that scrolling delays were reduced to 0.5-1 second.

So I got the new modem and found that it had a 2.5 Gbps WAN port, so I got a TP-Link AX6000 router ($240, 2.5Gbps WAN port, Wifi6, mesh compatible, 8 Gb LAN ports, and two USB ports, and to guarantee max possible throughput, a CAT-8 cable to connect the model to the router. When I got everything configured and provisioned the new modem through Spectrum, my download speed jumped to 435 Mbps (early in the morning, it's as high as 485 Mbps).

My standard internet usage hasn't changed, except it takes less time for the various streaming services to start up on my Roku, but my VPN/RDP connectivity is out-f*cking standing now. I also connected a 500gb and a 1tb SSD to the router and can use those drives for backups, and/or sharing files.

Merry xmas to me!

So here's my question... If I was paying for 60 Mbps, and only getting 5Mbps, why am I now seeing MORE Mbps than I'm paying for? I didn't move, no techs came to my house, and I'm still using the same coax that connects the modem. Is it going through better equipment at the main Spectrum facility? Curious minds, and all that...

".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013

I ran into a similar thing with XFinity, including being on a grandfathered plan.

Here's what they told me:

The old plans don't work that well with new equipment, which has to talk to old modems to make the old plans work. They aren't perfect, especially as the equipment gets upgraded.

It could be as simple as the ISP making an upgrade that downgraded your performance on the old plan. That's my read of what happened with my XFinity account.

Now I'm on a 650mbs per second plan but I regularly get at least 700Mbps.

Real programmers use butterflies

I think it comes down to how their throttling works. Apparently it works better with the newer equipment. That's purely speculation on my part since I haven't had cable internet for more than ten years. I have been stuck with various satellite and large scale wi-fi ISPs since that time. I have StarLink now and it is terrific. Not quite as good as what you have but better than anything else I have had in the last ten years.

"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"

#realJSOP wrote:
If I was paying for 60 Mbps, and only getting 5Mbps

As @code-witch said, it was probably updates to both hardware and software. Let's say that, as an example, when you got your old equipment the norm was to use AES128 and that is the maximum your device supports. Today the norm is probably AES512 and your device does not have a function for that built in so it must be calculated using CPU time, which will slow your connect a lot. Also, there are hardware protocol changes (signal encoding on the wires), package formats (today is almost all IP based and back then it were dedicated protocols), etc that will have to use CPU time too.

#realJSOP wrote:
why am I now seeing MORE Mbps than I'm paying for

Might be due to the way your are measuring and the your ISP advertises it's speed. If you are measuring using a speed test tool, you might actually be measuring your burst speed. Most ISP allow for burst of data for small periods at a speed that is higher than your subscribed maximum.

My ISP has (had?) a policy in which they advertise a certain speed but in reality (as explained by a technician at the time I subscribed) they feed their fiber cable into a building and then just split the bandwidth equally by all subscribers. This means that if there is any bandwidth not assigned to a subscriber, it will be used to increase (even if temporarily) the bandwidth of everyone on that backbone fiber.

More or less same scenario for me. I paid $25 more per month and my entire family is flying on the net.

my wife and I work from home.
my kids stream movies, gaming, school.

all 4 of us can be on the internet at the same time, and not be impacted anymore by bandwidth issues.

I have Spectrum too.

To quote “The IT Crowd”:

Did you power cycle your modem and/or router before you called support?

An old modem probably had lots of known vulnerabilities. I wonder if someone had commandeered it via a worm?

It might have been busy helping bad actors look for log4j exploits. Log4j probing spiked in our IIS logs, mostly from elastic cloud clients.

englebart wrote:
Did you power cycle your modem and/or router before you called support?

To quote everybody that is even semi self-aware- "Of course, I did."

englebart wrote:
An old modem probably had lots of known vulnerabilities. I wonder if someone had commandeered it via a worm?

I think not. When I called Spectrum to upgrade, they told me the modem I had (which was fully updated to the latest firmware, FWIW) couldn't give me the speed I had just ordered, and said they'd send me a new one. In the mean time, I rebooted the modem and when it came back online, I was getting 225 Mbps. This tells me that my modem was not the issue.

This also ruled out the coax/ethernet cabling, or the outside box as the possible issue.

englebart wrote:
It might have been busy helping bad actors look for log4j exploits. Log4j probing spiked in our IIS logs, mostly from elastic cloud clients.

Again, not likely. I'm not running a web server.

".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
-----
You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
-----
When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013

I have about $800 worth of fancy equipment out being shipped right now, mainly an RTX 2080ti and an EVGA 1000watt power supply to drive it.

The card comes today or Monday. The power supply comes on Tuesday.

I've already got hours of 4k game time planned.

I'm beside myself, and I'm not even a real gamer, but Fallout 4 in 4k has me giddy.

Hurryuphurryuphurryup Big Grin | :-D

Real programmers use butterflies

honey the codewitch wrote:
an EVGA 1000watt power supply

When I was a kid, that was what we used to heat the living room ... Unsure | :~

"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!

At this rate by June my computer will be gas powered.

Real programmers use butterflies

honey the codewitch wrote:
EVGA 1000watt power supply

I'm pretty sure I've used hair dryers that didn't need that sort of power...

My latest computer has a 1000W PSU and since the laws changed last summer it can no longer be shipped to this state, or yours for that matter. Parts can still be shipped but not fully assembled computers.

"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"

Whoa. I had no idea. How do you power something like an RTX 3090? Do they have a California model? Laugh | :laugh:

Real programmers use butterflies

Yes, it is a 3090 and a 5900 CPU with a liquid cooling system. I got it in May and the laws when into effect in July. I think six states have these laws: WA, OR, CA, CO, VT, and MI I think is the sixth.

FWIW, I have been working with CUDA and it's great to have 10K GPU cores. Having 24 CPU cores rocks too!

"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"

I don't know what I'd do with 24 cores. I've got 8 cores/16 HW threads on my Ryzen 7 and I never use it all. Most of what I peg a single core with are long compiles, and you can't parallelize those (although you could build several projects at once, and I wish Platform IO did that).

Consequently, I've never been able to peg my CPU. Not even close. I mean if I ran Prime95 on it I probably could, but that seems kind of pointless.

Real programmers use butterflies

I'm so old that I think 3090 is an IBM mainframe.

My kid has been trying to get a new graphics card for a while now, but just hasn't been able to get one when they become available (I'll have to get the model when he emerges from lair).

But he has decided to "give up" and just buy everything else (with my money of course), so he now has a new motherboard, CPU (i9-12900K), and RAM. He's awaiting delivery of a cooler, then we can rebuild his system using current graphics card. So glad to have two weeks off of work. Sigh | :sigh:

I'll likely snatch up his current parts and build myself a new(er) system.

I got super lucky. Found someone on a forum I haunt who had one collecting dust in a linux box he had that's not even turned on. I asked him what he wanted for it. Not only is he sending it to me for $500+shipping, he insists I try it first before I send him the money. Can't beat that!

Real programmers use butterflies

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