My thought is what if a LAN client, C, is sending UDP traffic through the AP to A. As long it blasts, B can barely speak. It would be interesting if they were dynamically altering the multi-rate retry algorithm to decrease retries as the queue filled and to even turn on ack requests when the queue was all the way filled. That can help at the cost of reliability. Send it and forget it.
I wonder if they experimented with traditional router methods of dealing with queuing issues. Things like Random early drop may help as well.

While the AP is sending faster and more often, clients will suffer. If the AP is blasting to client A, client B will struggle to upload. This may cause client B to disconnect or reassociate. It isn't clear how they prevent starvation at the client transmit side.

As their txqueue fills up they are just shifting packets from the best effort queue to the video queue and then to the voice queue (highest priority). These queues use more air time and have less space between packets. I am curious how it performs under a variety of traffic conditions (upload vs. download vs. mix). It would seem that if uploads and downloads are done at the same time, the downloads will block the uploads. What if the clients do the same thing?

I think enjoying programming is some kind of genetic mutation. No matter who good the software jobs market is, few people get CS degrees or otherwise want to be software engineers or programmers. It isn't quite a mono-culture but programmers and software engineers have so much in common that one can almost forget about how the rest of the world thinks. As you move out to other engineering disciplines, there are still an amazing number of personality traits and interests in common.
This is all good for those of us who enjoy programming and would like to be paid well to do it but it is strange to me. I often see IEEE and ACM articles about how to "fix" this issue but I don't think it can be fixed. Most folks would not like what we do even if they were totally capable of doing it.

It sounds like advice to other folks to hire people without a degree in the field so that they will be more loyal to you and less expensive. Without a lot of experience this is true. Folks with a year or two of experience with a degree will earn more than folks with a year or two of experience without a degree. That said, after a few more years it events out.

In the end, you have to judge the individual, what they learned, and how they learned it. I have met idiots who had a degree (even multiple degrees!) and idiots who had no formal education. They come in all shapes and sizes. Anyone who thinks in blanket statements like, "All college graduates in CS are worse than self taught" is proving my point.

I found my programs at West Chester (CS undergrad) and Villanova (master computer engineering) to be very useful and improved my abilities at work. I learned a lot in both and I had been programming since I was 7 or so on my TRS-80 Model III. They also made me more marketable. I feel it was totally worth it.

The military is using meshing products from the company I work at, Rajant, http://www.rajant.com/. They are secure enough for their use. As for reliable, we are used in open pit mining operations with 100s of mobile nodes in vehicles that are like multistory buildings on wheels. These folks loose tons of money if they are down for just the smallest amount of time and they rely on our meshing networks for their fleet control.

I work at http://www.rajant.com/ so I may be a bit biased but our BreadCrumb line will work great for rugged meshing. We support 4.9 GHz radios that are reserved for emergency responders. We are in use by the military and large mining operations that require 24/7/365 networks with 100s of nodes and lives on the line.

They used 10 GigE with a very advanced set of switches that support OpenFlow so that they could get the full bisectional bandwidth. They could have use InfiniBand and probably done much better with FDR adapters capable of 56 gigabit per second. Even "old" IB adapters were faster. Most of the IB switches supported full bisectional bandwidth right out of the box. MS should look at the High Performance Computing world. They need to do handle large amounts of data with low latency.

http://ospreyflyer.blogspot.com/p/microsoft-financial-performance.html

Microsoft still prints money at an insane rate. They are one of the most profitable public companies in the world year after year and Balmer gets no respect as if he is just coasting on what was there before. It doesn't work that way in tech. You can't coast. Vista was a problem but Windows 7 is a massive success. Windows phone struggles but XBox does well. Windows Server and Office are still cash cows. They are moving up in the virtualization market. People want growth levels out of MS that are just not possible given their size and dominance.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2012/performers/companies/profits/
#4 just below Apple and they did it with much less revenue.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2012/full_list/

It used to be that being massive profitiable and having better margins meant something.

They use sprint's network and are $19/month. You can't get much better than that. Even though the phone costs about $200, you will make it back pretty quickly compared to other plans.

I know about this...I worked on the SilverStorm's Fabric Manager while I was there. I remember going into the VT System-X room and seeing piles of bad cables from earlier setup. If I remember correctly, the very first network had more switch ASICs than hosts...both were around 2000 or so. I think the first switches used 8-port ASICs internally. We made massive improvements to our fabric scan time and reaction time to moving cables, nodes going down, etc. This was a good thing because the non-silverstorm IB switches that were there were at the start were having a failures all the time. I believe System-X eventually moved to SilverStorm IB switches (those 288s and 24 port switches). That 288 was fun to work on. Moving to 24-port ASIC based switches really cuts down on fabric scan and setup time.

They claim they will use 56 gigabit InfiniBand. Has anyone tested Mellanox's FDR adapters and switches? From what I understand, that is 14 gigabit over 4x cabling. I remember all the problems just getting 10 gigabit to work over 4x 2.5 gigabit copper. I imagine this must use fiber to get any distance from the server to the switch.

Their asic seems to support only 36 ports. Building a 2000 node network with 36 port switches will take a lot of interconnected switches. I wonder what topology they are going to use. Is anyone building bigger switches based on many interconnected 36-port asics?

According to this article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/11/top-jobs-for-grads-nace-2_n_847505.html engineering jobs are doing quite well. This http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2008/tc20081113_488542.htm seems to suggest it might even be sexy!

It seems the first article in the main post talks about STEM but doesn't provide any real evidence but may be talking about an article noting the brain drain of the finance world and that the percentage of MIT grads going into finance increased. It was not the majority. This isn't a bad thing. I am a software engineer with a BS in computer science and an MS in computer engineering. I worked on financial software, device drivers, internet advertising software, remote control car embedded software, and wireless meshing software. STEM can take you into all sorts of industries. I don't know why this is a bad thing and I don't think that was what the President was saying.

The author says, "First, American culture has always realized this 'stuff' is important." I find that hard to believe. When I was in school, there were almost no computer science majors. My graduation had 3 CS majors walk with me with over 10,000 students enrolled at the university. Other STEM majors did a bit better but the reality is that our society looks down on STEM folks. It is considered weird and odd. Hollywood uses this stereotype often because the public believes it. We are geeks, nerds, dorks, etc. STEM really does need better PR since keeping the world running doesn't seem to matter much anymore.

The second article attacks pure science jobs. Most folks that major in STEM probably do not go on to pure research jobs. Why is this a bad thing? Many folks become engineers and use the research to create other things. They compare school teachers to scientists even though many are both. Many "pure" researches are college professors. "The women I know who are university professors, by and large, are unmarried and childless. By the time they get tenure, they are on the verge of infertility. " My wife is a university professor and we have two kids thank you. I know several other professional female mathematicians who married and had kids. It seems they these folks get married at the same rate as most other folks and have kids at about the same rate too. Also, the author ignores that the PhD can go into public school teaching and will be paid extra for having the degree. They can leave college and go into the private sector. Some do both. My wife programmed for a while and then came back to teaching because she liked teaching a lot more.

"men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question 'is this peer group worth impressing?' " That is an incredibly sexist statement. Does the author have any proof that women do not do the same? As far as I can tell the sentence should be changed to "people sometimes lack perspective..."

"When Albert goes to graduate school to get his PhD, his choice will have the same logical foundation as John Hinckley's attempt to impress Jodie Foster by shooting Ronald Reagan. " The author compares getting a PhD to being a stalker. This is why STEM needs better PR! Americans see most PhDs as potential stalkers who are just trying to impress the other potential stalkers. Maybe someone gets a PhD because they are actually really interested in the field and really want to study it for its own sake. Maybe someone cares about something other than money. Maybe there is more to life satisfaction than just making more money. Do you want a job that pays 20% more that you will hate or a job that you will love? Perhaps the PhD candidate is actually smarter enough to do what he/she loves.

"What about women? Don't they want to impress their peers? Yes, but they are more discriminating about choosing those peers." Really? There are many pieces of media about who girls get caught up trying to impress the wrong peers. Are they all wrong? I have female friends and relatives that have fallen into this trap just as much as my male friends and relatives.

"If you are extremely introverted, you might prefer to work as a computer programmer. " I work as a computer programmer and I have developed many great friendships through this field. I met my wife through a fellow programmer. I have friends that have been there for well over a decade through my career as a programmer. Contrary to popular belief, computer programmers do have to talk and work with other people, even non-programmers. I have work with folks in documentation, testing, marketing, sales, accounting, finance, etc. I find that introverted folks are only good at a very limited subset of programming. Most complex problems require teamwork.

"For whatever reason we've decided that science in America should be done by low-paid immigrants." What? 1. What is wrong with immigrants? 2. Who says that immigrants are the majority of scientists? 3. Who even cares? I have worked with folks from many corners of the earth and been richer for it. It has not hurt my career and in fact has helped it as I have seen things from very different points of view. If someone is going to try to outwork me for less money, than I will just try to make myself more valuable to justify earning more than them. Life is competitive. Get over it when someone from another country out works you. Prove that you deserve your salary but being more productive than the other person.

"Imagine if one of those kind souls that Summers was speaking to had taken Condoleezza Rice aside and told her not to waste time with political science because physics was so much more challenging. Just think how far she might have gone... " She seems smart. Perhaps she would have discovered something that would have changed the world for the better. Perhaps should would have changed our view of the universe itself. But perhaps she would not have made as much money. Perhaps that isn't always the most important thing.

I wonder when a GPU will be able to directly access a network of some sort. Right now, you would need glue code on the CPU to link multiple GPUs in different systems together. I imagine that some HPC applications would run quite well with 100 GPUs spread over 25-50 machines with a QDR InfiniBand link between them.

I wonder what the interconnect will be? An earlier Riken system uses lots and lots of 4X SDR InfiniBand (10gbps) . They used lots of 32 port IB switches from InfiniCon Systems (I worked there at the time). Now IB is up to 12X SDR (30 dbps) 4X QDR (40 gbps). I wonder what IB company will get the deal. InfiniCon become SilverStorm and is now owned by QLogic. There are also Mellanox, Voltaire, and Sun.