Month: September 2016

Over the course of 2015, I noticed a trend. Rather than replacing routers when they literally stopped working, I increasingly needed to act earlier—swapping in new gear because an old router could no longer keep up with increasing Internet speeds available in the area. Famously around the Ars forums, this problem soon evolved into our homebrew router initiative. In January, I showed my math as a DIY-Linux router outpaced popular off-the-shelf options like the Netgear Nighthawk X6 and the Linksys N600 EA-2750. And in August, I shared the steps necessary to build one of your own.

After readers got a look at the performance charts, I got a ton of outraged "why didn't you test my favorite brand?!" comments. If you were one of those skeptics, congrats—today is your day! The Ars homebrew router special has been coaxed out of retirement to test its speeds against an entirely new lineup of gear. And to raise the stakes a bit further, the Ars team has broken out some new and improved methods that test more hardware and a couple of purpose-designed router distros. This time, we're even offering power consumption figures as well.

On the right: our test server Monolith, newly upgraded with an Intel server-grade gigabit NIC, plus a trusty Kill-A-Watt power meter. (credit: Jim Salter)

Methodology updates

For our new and improved testing, we're still hammering everything with streams of HTTP connections and varying filesizes. But we've tightened down the time that the HTTP sockets are allowed to respond (from 240 seconds down to 20) mostly in order to make prettier graphs. Wait, did I say graphs? (Yes!) This time around, we're going to look at real time bandwidth graphs of the testing as it's being performed, which lets us see what's happening with the contestants more clearly than we could the first time around. We'll also look at power consumption for each device, both idle and under (routing) load. And when we look at raw throughput numbers, we're going to look solely at completed downloads, since we care more about "how much can we successfully download" rather than "how much useless noise this thing can make on my network."

Enlarge / A surgeon performs a robot-assisted prostate tumorectomy using ultrasound imaging. (credit: Getty | JEFF PACHOUD)

In the wake of a cancer diagnosis, deciding to sit back and see how things play out may seem like a ballsy move. But, if that diagnosis is for early-stage prostate cancer, it might be the smart one.

In a trial of 1,643 men diagnosed with early prostate cancer, those who actively monitored their cancer instead of immediately starting treatment had the same minuscule risk of death in a ten-year study as men who underwent either radiation therapy or surgery straightaway. The finding, reported Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggests that it’s safe to hold off on the often slow-growing cancer when its caught early and only seek treatments—which can have devastating side effects, including incontinence and impotence—if the disease progresses.

Disease progression (i.e. the cancer grows and spreads to other parts of the body) was more common among the 545 men randomly assigned to the monitoring group. About half ended up getting either radiation or surgery by the end of the ten-year study. However, they still had the same low death rate from the cancer as the radiation and surgery groups—about one percent. And the remaining portion that didn’t progress and go through treatments were able to dodge needless side effects.

Enlarge (credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images News)

One quarter of all body-worn camera footage from the Oakland, Calif. police was accidentally deleted in October 2014, according to the head of the relevant unit.

As per the San Francisco Chronicle, Sgt. Dave Burke testified on Tuesday at a murder trial that this was, in fact, a mistake.

This incident marks yet another setback in the efforts to roll out body-worn cameras to police agencies nationwide.