In regards to the question of 'Is it legal to fire this person for this?' at least in California it's a slam dunk - the answer is yes. One of the questions on the harassment training I had to take was for a related scenario, where a boss cut off an affair with an employee and later on fired her because his wife found out and wanted him to, and the whole point of the question was that the firing was legal. If it's legal to fire under that circumstance, it's definitely legal to fire under this one.
A number of things have changed since I made that post. Streaming downloads are long since supported. Peoples's net connections are much faster than they used to be. Flash can be relied on to do playback. And I've just plain figured out a whole bunch of new techniques, reworking from the ground up, to actually get latency under control.
From my sketchy understanding of your description of the algorithm, it seems like a 2d version of the patterns in gaps you see when you look at cornrows.
I did read it, guess I just got too caught up in the title to brush it off (looks like some others here also wondered about that).
Anyway, uTP looks cool, LEDBAT sounds very interesting and BitTorrent is of course, completely awesome. I just don't think TCP sucks. I'm constantly surprised at how well it works for how simple most of it is and how complicated and intractable the rest is.
One thing you have to realize about Hacker News is that people can accumulate pretty good karma points for postings that have a definitive/authoritative tone blended with some truisms. Not to bludgeon the equine or anything, but I think people find them comforting.
I don't think his comment in any way contradicts your post. I thought it added to it; his point is that not only are good protocols hard in practice (which you covered), they are theoretically hard (which you did not cover, hence adding to your point).
That's what you would do IF you were going to be serious about making the router drop packets in a way which actually helps. I don't expect it to happen any time soon.
There's some detailed writeups of the algorithms in the LEDBAT documentation. As for commentary, that's distinctly lacking, and my post is filling in some of the gap.
BitTorrent is using uTP just fine, which is only, you know, most of the upload from consumer internet connections, and we're working on getting the same things crammed into TCP with LEDBAT, but that's a slow process.
I wasn't complaining about RED dropping packets, just describing how it works.
As for the tension, my point is that my solution works and the other one doesn't. If you want to know why the person I quoted was being such a dismissive jerk, you'll have to ask him.
Ok, I don't understand this part then: "With RED the router will instead have some probability of dropping the packet based on the size of the queue, going up to 100% if the queue is full." - that seems to be universally true for any queue with limited capacity. If it's full, it's going to start dropping packets - whether it's those on the queue, or the new ones doesn't matter. Any queue which is full will require dropping as many packets as the number coming in.
Is there some reason this was described as a specific behaviour here?
I believe the focus is more on the first part of that statement. A "standard" queue would only drop packets when it is in actuality full. RED drops packets when the queue is non-full based on some calculated probability. The likelihood of drop simply goes up until the queue is full (and 100% of new packets drop).
They can have their throughput without running a denial of service on their net connection. If you assume that they'll DOS themselves for the fun of it anyway, then I can't help you.
Backing a queue up to seconds of depth doesn't increase throughput.
Most of the bandwidth contention is at the edge, right at your DSL connection, so any battle among network connections is a battle among your own usage at any given moment.
Separately, bittorrent is not a latency-sensitive app, it's throughput sensitive, and uTP was designed for bittorent.
