tempest in a teacup

Amazon's going to be filing for my H-1B visa on Tuesday.

Just for some perspective, there are 65,000 H-1B visas given out every year to foreigners who want to work in the United states. The actual number of applicants is something like ten times that number, so what USCIS ends up doing is running the applicants through a lottery and picking 65,000 names at random.

Yes, whether or not I get to stay in this country will depend on some programmer's implementation of int rand(). You can probably imagine what I think of this process, so I won't vocalise it.

If I fail to get it with this filing, I can only apply next April…and my existing visa expires on July 9th, meaning I'll have to leave the country. I'll have to do this even if I get the visa (since it only takes effect on October 1st) but in the event of a longer delay I'll have to look at the possibility of moving to another Amazon location. Truth be told, the prospect of having to uproot myself from a fairly comfortable existence isn't really doing much for my peace of mind at the moment. It was easy enough to push to the back of my mind when the date was months away, but now it's pretty much all I'm thinking about.

Maybe I'll try to drown it out with caffeine tomorrow morning.

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It's almost April, and it SNOWED while I was at lunch today, for a good 2-3 hours or so.

WTF.

Pictures as soon as I can get them off my cell phone (Bluetooth refuses to work for some reason).

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:3

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I came across this interesting article at Slashdot a while ago (warning, link contains technobabble. I'll do my best to explain it below)

One thing that has become a big issue in the past year or so in the tech world is the problem of “net neutrality” - i.e. that all traffic on the Internet should be treated equally. This has become a particularly acute issue over the last few months, with Comcast's practice of filtering peer-to-peer traffic (like BitTorrent) becoming perhaps the best-known recent incident. The argument put forth by those who support ISPs' right to control what goes through their networks suggest that the explosion of services like BitTorrent, streaming video and HD content in recent years means that today's ISPs are unable to meet capacity demands, and thus should use whatever means necessary to prevent bandwidth needs from spiralling out of control. Some have even suggested that ISPs should shape traffic in order to prevent people from swapping files over P2P illegally.

There is some element of truth to this argument, if only because broadband infrastructure in the US is in a woeful state - The FCC's definition of “broadband” is data services above 200Kbps. As a point of reference, I had a 256Kbps ADSL line in Singapore…nine years ago. There are plans afoot to raise the bottom bound to 768kbps but this still doesn't resolve the major infrastructure and cost issues with getting quality broadband access in the US - people in Asia and Europe are much better off. So I say that if ISPs find themselves in a capacity constraint situation, they probably have themselves to blame for not investing in infrastructure while they had the chance.

Well, at least, until I read the article above. It claims that the capacity constraint brought upon by the advent of P2P services can be relieved not by legislation or political wrangling, but by good old network engineering.

The article should be a good enough summary for the techies who might be reading this, but let me attempt to explain it for the less technically-inclined.

At the bottom of the problem is the protocol used to handle the majority of the Internet's traffic, the Transmission Control Protocol or TCP (Just like how a real-life protocol dictates how two humans might interact, a networking protocol is a description of how two computers can communicate over a network). Just about all traffic that requires reliable delivery from one endpoint to another uses TCP, and this includes a lot of P2P services like BitTorrent. The article suggests that TCP's built-in congestion control mechanism - i.e. the safeguards put in place to ensure that the networks aren't flooded with TCP packets - is inherently biased in favour of traffic similar to that generated by P2P applications. This is for a couple of reasons:

1. P2P applications use multiple connections, and thus aren't constrained by TCP's congestion controls
2. P2P applications transmit data continuously over long periods of time, while other applications like HTTP (web pages) and e-mail tend to use “burst” or intermittent tranmission

The combination of these two factors means that P2P traffic tends to “crowd out” regular TCP traffic on most networks (probably not on your home PC, since TCP congestion management focuses on upstream transmissions rather than downstream, but this would certainly be an issue for an ISP).

The immediate solution proposed by the article (or rather by a researcher at BT) is to change the TCP protocol to weight applications that use fewer connections more heavily, so that they don't get drowned out by P2P traffic. P2P transmission speed will take a hit while other applications use burst tranmission, but will recover once they're done. There are a few other, longer-term solutions discussed as well, but the main thing the article reinforced for me was that this should be treated as an engineering problem, nothing more. It can't be legislated away.

It also casts a somewhat different light on ISPs, in that they really shouldn't be subject to the vitriol they are these days. This resonates with me to an extent, in that as owners of a network, they're obliged to do whatever they can to prevent traffic from exploding. However, I still think that filtering is really only a short-term solution at best. I'd say it's better to invest in better infrastructure and long-term technical fixes (like the one discussed in the article, whether or not it ends up being feasible) than trying to stop a leaking dam from bursting.

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I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.

It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.

(Thanks to , who found it at Kotaku, who in turn got it from somewhere else)

GlaDOSたん大好き～

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These are some screenshots and cutscene pics supposedly retrieved from Sega's FTP server. Could they be of the mystery new Sonic game “Sonic Unleashed?”

Judging by the graphics (and the fact that the screenshots are at 720p), it looks like it'll be on 360/PS3, but the game seems to follow the same template as Sonic and the Secret Rings (which is a good thing, if you ask me). I'm quite liking the graphical style, too.

Hopefully a trailer or something will surface soon.

EDIT:

…

What

the

fuck?!

EDIT #2:

http://www.sonicstadium.org/board/index.php?showtopic=33148&st=480#
http://forums.exophase.com/showthread.php?t=6266

Argh, so conflicted…the game looks great but…wtf is up with that werewolf Sonic thing?

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SNK Playmore recently released some information on the upcoming King of Fighters XII in Famitsu magazine. Having been impressed by the initial trailer for the game from AOU 2008 last month, I read the developer interview near the end. One thing in particular jumped out at me.

–What kind of a matchup will KOFXII feature?
SNKP: Rather than the multishift system from KOFXI, this game (KOFXII) will adopt the traditional 3-on-3 elimination style battle system that’s been used since KOF94. By returning to the traditional format and revising the game system that’s gotten too complex, we’re aiming for a game balance that’s playable even for beginners. Instead of complicated combos that makes full use of the game’s system, we want to put emphasis on “reading the opponent’s mind”.

This has me more than a little irritated.

First off, I thought KOF XI’s tag system added a lot to the game. It was the first KOF game I had played in a long time that actually felt new and fresh without being bad, and I think the series was better for it. I was looking forward to seeing how the tag system evolved for the next instalment. And yet, they’ve gone and done away with it together, and gone back to the traditional 3 on 3 elimination format. This is particularly infuriating when you consider that they’ve just released a remake of what is probably the most-loved classic KOF game (KOF’98 Ultimate Match), which you think would satisfy most people’s needs for classic 3-on-3 KOF. Do we really need another game that apes it?

The graphical overhaul is stunning (if you don’t believe me, check out these direct-feed screenshots from Famitsu) but if it continues to keep alive the ghost of old games rather than try new things, I will be quite disappointed.

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I think I love you.

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Part of me hopes that this won’t be a pile of rubbish like almost every single console Sonic game since 2001, but the rest of me knows better than to put hope in Sonic Team.

We’ll see, I suppose, but the days I would give Sega the benefit of the doubt about anything are long gone.

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So Epic Games is on Steam now.

This is probably because I’m weird, but the first thing I thought when I saw the lineup was “Where the hell is Jazz Jackrabbit?!”
I mean, sure, I liked Unreal as much as, if not more than Quake II back in the day (never really played any of the UT games), but if id software can get Commander Keen, of all things, on Steam, surely Epic can post up one of the best PC platformers of all time! And its sequel, for that matter.

Heck, they could probably get One Must Fall 2097 on there too, since it’s technically freeware now.

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My mom has started making suggestive noises about my supposed need to go and, uh, get more “involved” with meeting people of the opposite sex (to which my dad more or less just rolls his eyes). You may recall that I’ve talked about this subject before. Not much has changed regarding my ineptitude since then. My concerns are also, as you might expect, unchanged.

It seems like any efforts I have to make on this front will require a significant investment of time and effort, which I’m not sure I’m willing to do. On the other hand, I’m not a big fan of matchmaking systems. So I’m pretty much stuck between a rock and a hard place at the moment, at least as far as this problem goes.

Oh well, at least I have more important things to deal with that can put this out of my mind. Like my visa situation -_-

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