• Roph@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    If it works, why change it?

    That’s why it’s so bizarre that people support losing the ability to plug in headphones on their smartphones because the 3.5mm jack is “old”.

    …so?

    • manek101@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      With how stable my new WiFi 6 router is for me, personally I don’t feel the need for ethernet anymore even for gaming.
      So I have no issue if I buy a laptop that can be thinner without RJ45
      Will I appreciate it if they still manage to fit it? Sure, a little bit? But it’s definitely not a make or break decision for me.
      Same case with headphone jacks, I love the benefits of wireless enough to ignore the benefits wired bring, so my purchase decision isn’t considering a headphone jack, sure if a phone I have has it, it’ll be a nice little thing, but I’ll probably not be using it.

    • Helpdesk_Guy@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      That’s why it’s so bizarre that people support losing the ability to plug in headphones on their smartphones because the 3.5mm jack is “old”.

      Please stop using the term ‘old’! You won’t stop them refusing it that way. All you do is to induce FOMO.

      It’s not old, it’s proven … Proven to be sturdy, robust and long-serving technology and just reliable.

      • Glittering_Chard@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        IMO there should be a thin form factor standard for ethernet, plenty of devices would benefit from it which is pretty apparent given how many thin devices don’t have ethernet; I would not mind using an adapter for it if it meant more devices had ethernet.

      • Glittering_Chard@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        IMO there should be a thin form factor standard for ethernet, plenty of devices would benefit from it which is pretty apparent given how many thin devices don’t have ethernet; I would not mind using an adapter for it if it meant more devices had ethernet.

    • Tman1677@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      I didn’t support the loss of the 3.5mm jack at the time, but at this point? Digital is obviously the future, I see no reason why I should be held hostage by the atrocious DAC included in my phone when my nice headphones can do so much better.

      Bluetooth vs Wired is still a discussion worth having but defending the 3.5mm headphone jack is where you lose me. Headphone manufacturers should have hopped to USB as a standard a long time ago and they didn’t solely to milk more money out of analog audiophiles.

    • hypermog@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      Why change it? To improve it. That’s why there have been dozens of changes and improvements to it.

      • TheMysticalBard@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        Nobody removed it because it’s old, but OP is just saying that people defend the removal by saying “it’s old”, when that’s neither a valid reason nor the actual reason.

    • einmaldrin_alleshin@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      I would love to plug headphones into my phone, but I hate 3.5 mm. It’s like mini-USB in the way that it will easily break the plug or the socket when you accidentally rip it out. Or even worse, it can pull devices out of pockets or off desks, because it’s not designed to pull out when sideways forces are applied.

      That’s something that Apple’s lightning connector, USB C and USB Micro are specifically designed around. Any significant force in any direction will slip out the plug without damaging either end.

  • Stevesanasshole@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    Man they really glossed over the part where it switched over to twisted pair from coax. It’s like saying pancakes used to be waffles and then not bothering to explain.

    • Pollyfunbags@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      Yeah. Very significant thing, coax ethernet was different enough to really be its own thing given how the networks were built.

      I tend to split Ethernet into hub-era collision fest ethernet (coax and early twisted pair) and the current twisted pair connected via switches era.

      • Brufar_308@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        Was always fun when someone would remove the terminator from the end of the coax and the network would go all screwy. For some reason our coax run ended in the demo room and they would randomly remove equipment and just disconnect the coax. Network is down again!!

        • JJisTheDarkOne@alien.topB
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          1 year ago

          Was waiting for this.

          We used to have LANs when we were teenagers and EVERY TIME a T-Piece or Terminator would go missing.

          Went to my mate’s place one day and he’s got 15 Terminators in his drawer. Prick was taking them every LAN and screwing the network up every LAN because he thought it was hilarious. Making us dick around wondering why it wasn’t working (back then it was a fiddly thing to have everyone working properly) all the time.

      • spacepenguine@alien.top
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        1 year ago

        Just in time for us to bring the old tech back like it’s new again - now as 10BASE-T1S!

        (This is mostly a joke and the new medium is reasonable.)

      • spacepenguine@alien.top
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        1 year ago

        Just in time for us to bring the old tech back like it’s new again - now as 10BASE-T1S!

        (This is mostly a joke and the new medium is reasonable.)

      • Brufar_308@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        Was always fun when someone would remove the terminator from the end of the coax and the network would go all screwy. For some reason our coax run ended in the demo room and they would randomly remove equipment and just disconnect the coax. Network is down again!!

    • LittlebitsDK@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      oh yeah, I remember the ole coax networking what was it 10Base2 or something weird? with terminators in each end of the cable and all the machines spamming the same cable… but hey we got to game on a network and it was fun but it was a pita to run and and setup

      then we moved on to hubs… still lots of collisions… and THEN the golden age of SWITCHES dawned… that was the times :D

    • wintrmt3@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      That was a very visible but in the grand scheme of things it was just a small change, it still carried almost the same electric signal and the same Manchester code, the real big change was at gigabit ethernet, it’s pulse-amplitude modulated since.

    • tomytronics@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      Don’t forget the thick net cable.

      And I hated base2 network, so fiddy to work with and can be unreliable if a terminator was removed by a prankster or if there’s a faulty network hardware somewhere. BaseT was the best of both reliable and cheap.

      I still remember a trick to remember which is which: hub, switch, and router. A hub is like an intersection with only stop sign. Good for low traffic but high collision risk with high traffic. Switch is like an intersection with traffic light, better for high traffic. And router is like an intersection with police car present to enforce traffic.

      • Coffee_Ops@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        Switches are better for low traffic too though because they don’t flood and they regenerate the signal. These days I don’t know that you could detect a latency difference between a hub and a switch.

        • LittlebitsDK@alien.topB
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          1 year ago

          interesting analogy… we learned that it was just a computer standing with a megaphone screaming to all other pc’s on the same hub… where a switch was like sending a papernote to your classmate during class ;-)

        • LittlebitsDK@alien.topB
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          1 year ago

          interesting analogy… we learned that it was just a computer standing with a megaphone screaming to all other pc’s on the same hub… where a switch was like sending a papernote to your classmate during class ;-)

    • Nitrozzy7@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      pancakes used to be waffles

      I cook both. The differences elude me. One’s got more flour and a bit of vanilla flavor? Or is it just a shape thing? Have I been making waffle shaped pancake crêpes all this time?

    • Prince-of-Ravens@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      I still remember early lanparties, where you couldn’t leave early because you could not just unplug your T connector from the Coax without messing up the line termination!

      That was a fun aera.

    • LittlebitsDK@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      oh yeah, I remember the ole coax networking what was it 10Base2 or something weird? with terminators in each end of the cable and all the machines spamming the same cable… but hey we got to game on a network and it was fun but it was a pita to run and and setup

      then we moved on to hubs… still lots of collisions… and THEN the golden age of SWITCHES dawned… that was the times :D

  • bg370@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    I’m still amazed that CSMA/CD works at all. We got hit with the Nimda virus in the early 2000s and our network utilization was over 50% and I’m like yup we’re going down. Once Ethernet gets bad it blows up pretty quick

    • cp5184@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      It does and it doesn’t. Most wired ethernet isn’t on shared media, so it doesn’t need/use csma/cd… But wireless is based on ethernet and uses csma/cd (wifi) presumably

      • Coffee_Ops@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        Wireless uses csma/CA, IIRC. It avoids collisions rather than detecting and responding.

      • bg370@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        I wonder if we were still using hubs back then. We bought a bunch of Cabletron switches around that time

      • DeliciousPangolin@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        Also, most 10Gb switches lack 2.5Gb support. Enterprise switches don’t give a shit about 2.5. And high-end consumer stuff is only supporting 2.5Gb. Plus copper 10Gb is significantly more expensive than fiber optic 10Gb.

        You can find a huge range of 1/10Gb switches for enterprise, but it’s nearly impossible to find something at a reasonable price that has 1/2.5/10 copper ports.

        • cas13f@alien.topB
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          1 year ago

          Most of those old enterprise 10Gb switches pre-date 2.5/5 by a fair bit. That’s why they don’t support the NBASE-T speeds.

        • cas13f@alien.topB
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          1 year ago

          Most of those old enterprise 10Gb switches pre-date 2.5/5 by a fair bit. That’s why they don’t support the NBASE-T speeds.

      • deefop@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        I mean, it’s because 1gbps is and has been enough for 99.99% of workloads.

      • username____here@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        I agree, I’m replacing 1Gb switches with 1Gb switches this replacement cycle. 2015 switches with 30w PoE+ being replaced by basically the same thing but with a different OS. I thought we would be to 2.5Gb and 45 or 60w PoE at the price point of those last generation early 2010’s switches by now.

      • Tman1677@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        I feel like a big part of it is just that there’s absolutely no reason a regular consumer needs >1Gb equipment when (essentially) no home internet providers provide internet speeds that fast and no regular consumers need it.

        The prosumer market only gets cheap for new equipment when you can convince regular consumers they need it and that has barely happened for 1Gb, let alone 10Gb.

        • someguy50@alien.topB
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          1 year ago

          … when (essentially) no home internet providers provide internet speeds that fast and no regular consumers need it.

          I think while second part is true, first part definitely isn’t. Comcast/Xfinity and ATT Uverse both offer >1Gbps now. I even have a small company offering 8Gb fiber here

  • observant_hobo@alien.top
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    1 year ago

    What I never understood is the name. Would have been cooler if wireless was Ethernet and wired was Cablenet.

  • balrog687@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    1gbps is still perfectly fine for most domestic applications and office work, and it is still 1:1 with most domestic fiber optical internet access available today at a reasonable cost.

    You “can” find a use case, like downloading a 140gb game in steam faster, using a 2.5 or 10 gig connection, but you will need good luck finding an ISP at a reasonable price.

    Most streaming services will never stream high bitrate content because of the networking cost, and AV1 will save even more bandwidth in the future. So we will be fine in that regard.

    Professionals who work with 4k raw video probably use Thunderbolt 4 storage solutions.

    The only use case where 10gig makes sense imho is in larger distributed teams working collaboratively in video projects, where you need a 10Gig NAS, a 10gig switch, and 10gig NIC on every single workstation.

  • xyz17j@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    I was wondering about this. We keep increasing network connection speeds and using the same cable standard… what is the max speed we can put through and Ethernet connection?? My mind goes to USB A standard… for usb 3 they added more pins in the same connector shape.

    • ferret
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      1 year ago

      The cable standard has not remained the same. Cat5 and Cat7 are quite different despite using the same connector (sort of) and having the same number of conductors. Also Cat8 can push 40Gbit/s, so you have at least until then to look forward to.

    • The_Umlaut_Equation@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      what is the max speed we can put through and Ethernet connection??

      Copper-based Ethernet and DSL share quite a few similarities. So why can’t you just keep easily increasing DSL bandwidth? Because to send more information you either have to send it at a faster clock rate, use fancier encoding (e.g. instead of just on/off you could also carry information using light polarisation or colour, if we use light of course) or literally increase the bandwidth and use more frequencies.

      A larger bandwidth means using more frequencies, and higher frequencies drop off more quickly with distance, to say nothing about cross talk and other effects. You also get cross talk, interference, and other effects which raises the noise floor and makes it harder to tell a genuine signal from background noise.

      Frequencies don’t propagate at the same speed either, which also poses limits on the clock speed, because over a small enough time scale the signals blur out. You’re also capped by hardware limitations.

      Encoding more information not only requires more processing (see above), but you need to be able to hear what’s being said. Same principle as talking in a quiet room, vs. yelling and having to repeat yourself a lot very slowly in a crowded area (fall back to slower speeds, retransmission of data, increasing redundancy).

      You can add more pins and wires as you say, but then that means you need more wires, more shielding, it can make the cables harder to work.

      I would estimate 40GBASE-T is probably a reasonable limit for copper-based Ethernet. If you switch to fibre that limit keeps going up and up, for now. And given the ability to multiplex different wavelengths of light over the same fibre, while I’m doubtful that’s going to be needed in consumer grade equipment for a long time, that gives Tb/s of capacity using today’s technology over a single fibre. And even single wavelengths are doing around 400Gb/s.

    • tobimai@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      We don’t use the same cable. Cat 8 is the current standard, it can go up to 10Gbit for 100m or something like that.

    • RingOfFyre@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      Usb can’t handle throughput over the same distances as ethernet. 3 meters is generally the stated max for high speed usb-c transfer, which can be increased a bit with some active cables. But the spec also doesn’t officially allow for extension cables.

      • DJSamkitt@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        Usb can’t handle throughput over the same distances as ethernet. 3 meters is generally the stated max for high speed usb-c transfer,

        The maximum length for a USB 3.2 Gen 2 cable is one meter. Anything more is not a rated 3.2 Gen 2 cable (amazon is notorious for selling 3m “3.2. Gen 2” cables)

        USB4 is 0.8M

  • ischickenafruit@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    Ethernet is one of the most successful tech marketing campaigns of all time. 25 different technologies that operate fundamentally differently are all called Ethernet. It’s a brilliant brand name. But no, the Ethernet that we use today is not 50 years old. Only the name is.

  • Constellation16@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    At least for home use it’s really not. The de-facto is still 1G Ethernet from 1999.

    10GBASE-T exists since almost two decades (2006) and is still expensive, and even the “affordable” NBase-T 2.5G stuff (2016) is only really cheap for the cards itself, most “router”/gateways have no or only a single 2.5G port and 2.5G switches are overpriced, unmanaged, and still in a “premium niche”.

    In contrast, you had Wifi6 APs for some while now that could do ~1.8Gb/s to clients and now with Wifi7 you can reach ludicrous wireless speeds of 5Gb/s+ to clients, but I’m doubtful switches or even 5/10G cards will get much cheaper because of this. It seems manufacturers don’t want to address the market of people having cabled infrastructure and instead everything is supposed to wireless with be wireless mesh-backbone now.

    • rafradek@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      Yeah the issue is unreliable ping though. And if you have multiple rooms you need multiple ap to reach max speed in each room And the more ap you chain the higher ping instability is

  • hackenclaw@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    It is kinda shame the ethernet for transferring digital AV signal never really take off.

    We got HDMI, display port instead. It would be so much more simple if we can run internet & transfer AV in 1 single cable.