Linux 3.3: Finally a little good news for bufferbloat

I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Linux 3.3: Finally a little good news for bufferbloat – Cringely on technology.

Bufferbloat, as you’ll recall from my 2011 predictions column, is the result of our misguided attempt to protect streaming applications (now 80 percent of Internet packets) by putting large memory buffers in modems, routers, network cards, and applications. These cascading buffers interfere with each other and with the flow control built into TCP from the very beginning, ultimately breaking that flow control, making things far worse than they’d be if all those buffers simply didn’t exist.

Bufferbloat was named by Jim Gettys of Bell Labs, who has become our chief defender against the scourge, attempting to coordinate what’s become a global response to the problem.

What AQM does is monitor the buffer, and signal the end points to slow down any time the buffer starts to fill, either due to that one transfer or competing transfers, by dropping or marking packets.  So the buffer is kept (almost) empty, except when it is handling a burst of traffic. So the steady state latency of the buffer, rather than being the size of the buffer, is set by the size of the bursts in traffic.  The size of the buffer becomes almost irrelevant.

Solar ‘towers’ beat panels by up to 20x

Now, a team of MIT researchers has come up with a very different approach: building cubes or towers that extend the solar cells upward in three-dimensional configurations. Amazingly, the results from the structures they’ve tested show power output ranging from double to more than 20 times that of fixed flat panels with the same base area.

via Solar ‘towers’ beat panels by up to 20x | ScienceBlog.com.

Huawei claims 30Gbps wireless “beyond LTE”

Huawei says it has “recently introduced…Beyond LTE technology, which significantly increases peak rates to 30Gbps – over 20 times faster than existing commercial LTE networks.”

via iTWire – Huawei claims 30Gbps wireless “beyond LTE”.

However it appears that Huawei is using much greater bandwidth. Its announcement goes on to say: “Key features include: innovative antenna structure [that] greatly improves performance and meets wideband requirements [and] next generation direct radio frequency technology [that] reduces costs and power consumption, and realises ultra broadband carrier aggregation.” (our italics).

The LTE-Advanced specification is for up to 100MHz of bandwidth, which need not be contiguous and up to 8×8 MIMO (eight transmit and eight receive antennas) and a maximum downstream bandwidth of 3.3Gbps.

HTML5 roundup: magazine-style Web layouts with CSS regions

The feature allows Web developers to specify that a single body of text should flow through certain regions of the page. For example, you could create several div elements in a specific arrangement and have the overflow text fill those consecutively. Another feature proposed by Adobe, called CSS Exclusions, makes it possible to have inline text automatically wrap and flow to conform with a specific shape.

via HTML5 roundup: magazine-style Web layouts with CSS regions.

HTML span tag

The <span> tag is used to group inline-elements in a document.

The <span> tag provides no visual change by itself.

The <span> tag provides a way to add a hook to a part of a text or a part of a document.

When the text is hooked in a <span> element you can add styles to the content, or manipulate the content with for example JavaScript.

via HTML span tag.

From The SPAN Tag

Use span tags when you don’t want any changes to the layout other than exactly what you specify in the styles of the span. For example, if you use a <div> or <p> most browsers will add space around the element, because they are block elements.