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This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

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Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#161

Post by rahulroy9202 »

majewsky wrote: post #159
yakubin wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN traffic isn't all that demanding[1]. Websites falling under the load are a testament to the poor quality of the software stack used to host them. [1]: https://xyrillian.de/thoughts/posts/latency-matters-aftermat... >

Hey look, it's my blog. It's a small world. :) Since we're here, I did a quick grep through today's access log. It appears that your link got me 573 visitors to that article and 56 people clicking through to the other article linked therein.

I was thinking of much larger numbers here.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#162

Post by earth_walker »

oblio wrote: post #20
fouc wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's probably about the same ram & cpu as my desktop 16 years ago.

I started with a Pentium I, 166Mhz, 16MB, 1GB HDD, and I'm not even that old. I imagine we have folks here that started on a PDP :-) My P1 would stutter while playing MP3s :-))

When I was a kid my school got a Sinclair ZX81 with 1k of memory. One 1k computer for the whole school! Once in a blue moon we would get class time on the computer - Our class got to program a 'turtle' to draw shapes on a big piece of paper.

I was so excited about it, and my mom had done some punch-card programming in university and so knew that this was going to be the future.

The Sinclair Spectrum 48k had just come out, and so we splurged and bought one.

We lived in Asia at the time, and games on cassette were difficult to get, so at 10 years old I spent hours typing in BASIC games from magazines, debugging and POKEing and PEEKing to see how things worked.

Great times.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#163

Post by monocasa »

marcodiego wrote: post #142

These modems are way powerful. This reinforces the need of open source firmware for them. They run their own OS and can stay on independent of the rest of the hardware consuming very little power. Imagine putting your computer to sleep while downloads continue and can survive geographical network migration. A fully open source firmware for GPS/LTE modem is badly needed.

And you see some of what you're talking about in closed systems too, where the system integrator can control both sides.

The Wii, and PlayStations since the PS3 have had system control processors that can perform downloads, updates, and general system maintenance on a low power processors even while the majority of the system is off. In the Wii that processor was also responsible for the majority of the network stack even when accessed from the main processor. On the PS4 that processor even ran a relatively complete FreeBSD.

Democratizing these techniques would be killer.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#165

Post by bmcahren »

dcposch wrote: post #156
rsync wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They run their own OS and can stay on independent of the rest of the hardware consuming very little power." It's worse - there's a second, independent computer inside your phone that you have no control over: the SIM card. The SIM is a standalone computer with its own processor and memory which your carrier can communicate with and upload programs to run on it without your knowledge ("OTA updates", etc.) https://osm…

Do esims fix this problem? Increasingly the norm, no physical sim card at all.

No

https://www.hologram.io/blog/what-is-an-esim-and-how-is-it-u....

> The eSIM (embedded SIM) is a small chip soldered directly to a board inside a device

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#166

Post by vmception »

bogwog wrote: post #80

So a modem on a pine phone can survive the HN hug of death (and the number one post no less)? Am I missing something here? Because there's no way I believe that!

Its uncached database hits that crash sites.

You pretty much never need that, but many/most sites do it somewhere anyway.

A static site running on a modem should be fine, but there is nothing saying they cant/arent using a CDN too, which would be even better.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#167

Post by monocasa »

ashkankiani wrote: post #90
scoutt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really wonder why modem manufacturers feel the need to encapsulate everything so much. The alternative would be using an RTOS of some sort, implementing a full network stack (with > 100Mb throughput) and a USB device, as the bare minimum. Then you also have I2S audio, GNSS, etc. It probably makes more sense using an entire OS at some point. BTW, this is typical Qualcomm, that makes the chipsets for these modems.

I've been playing with the ESP32's a lot more recently (which go the RTOS route), and in reading the code for network stacks for these devices, it did occur to me how simple they were in terms of features. I wouldn't say that one needs the entirety of the Linux kernel to be able to implement all of those things, but it does build off of a more well used stack and reuses a lot of well-tested components. So from this p…

LTE et al is wayyyyy more complicated than WiFI/BlueTooth for what it's worth. I can get the idea that process boundaries help the large heterogeneous teams needed to ship a full featured LTE modem, similar to how microservices help large heterogenous teams ship code at FAANGs. It's infrastructure for dealing with human inadequacies rather than a technical requirement.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#168

Post by [deleted] »

ashkankiani wrote: post #90
scoutt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really wonder why modem manufacturers feel the need to encapsulate everything so much. The alternative would be using an RTOS of some sort, implementing a full network stack (with > 100Mb throughput) and a USB device, as the bare minimum. Then you also have I2S audio, GNSS, etc. It probably makes more sense using an entire OS at some point. BTW, this is typical Qualcomm, that makes the chipsets for these modems.

I've been playing with the ESP32's a lot more recently (which go the RTOS route), and in reading the code for network stacks for these devices, it did occur to me how simple they were in terms of features. I wouldn't say that one needs the entirety of the Linux kernel to be able to implement all of those things, but it does build off of a more well used stack and reuses a lot of well-tested components. So from this p…

[deleted]

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#170

Post by de6u99er »

rsync wrote: post #145
marcodiego wrote: post #142

These modems are way powerful. This reinforces the need of open source firmware for them. They run their own OS and can stay on independent of the rest of the hardware consuming very little power. Imagine putting your computer to sleep while downloads continue and can survive geographical network migration. A fully open source firmware for GPS/LTE modem is badly needed.

"They run their own OS and can stay on independent of the rest of the hardware consuming very little power." It's worse - there's a second, independent computer inside your phone that you have no control over: the SIM card. The SIM is a standalone computer with its own processor and memory which your carrier can communicate with and upload programs to run on it without your knowledge ("OTA updates", etc.) https://osm…

Yeah, that's nuts and frightening.
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