Welcome to tech stuff, a production from I heart radio. He there, and welcome to tech stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I heart radio, and how the Tech Are you? You know, there's a good chance you've heard the Term Ping before. If you're a golfer, you probably associated with equipment like clubs and bags, but that's not what I'm talking about today. If you're a submariner, well, your concept of paying is closer to what I'll be talking about in this episode, and specifically in this episode, I'm talking about Ping as a way to judge network speed between two different machines. Now, with some stuff that you know we use in our technical world, the history can be a little muddled or hidden. Right. Might be one of those things where we have some common tool that we all use, but no one really documented where that tool came from or who first came up with it, and so we have to use a lot of qualifiers to talk about it. But in this case we can point to a specific person as the originator of the paying function, at least the first paying function, and that person was Mike Muss sadly, must passed away in two thousand in a car accident. So uh, that is really a tragedy. must seemed like a really entertaining and innovative guy, based upon the stuff I've read that he wrote. Must had studied sonar and radar while he was in college. He had been modeling those systems and he worked for a while at the Ballistic Research Laboratory, or B R L, which we also have to talk about in the past tense. The army established the army research laboratory in Nineteen two. That would absorb the old brl. So the B R L is no more. It is part of the A R L. Anyway, while must was working at the B R l, he noticed something hinky seemed to be going on with the I P network within that organization. Now, this was in nineteen eighty three and at that point, I think you're most folks had never even heard of internet protocol, or I p. that's what I p means in this case, not intellectual property, but Internet Protocol. I Doun't that most people had ever heard of that back in nineteen three. I know I had never heard it. The concept of the Internet was a pretty foreign one to anyone not working in a military organization, a research institute or a number of universities that we're doing pioneering work in the field. Computer networking in general was something that was a pretty foreign concept to folks. This was early on when people could actually get access to a personal computer, let alone the thought of how do I connect this computer to that computer? So it would take a decade before the rest of US would start to understand that you could actually connect computers together and make a network and then create networks together to create a massive interconnected system, a k a the Internet. But must was really familiar with computer networks. He worked on the IP network at Brl all the time, and so when he knows things weren't quite behaving the way they usually should, he decided to find out what was going on and to do that he needed a diagnostic tool. That didn't exist, so he had to create a program to do it. Now he had heard about other methods of testing things like network speed between machines that used other methodologies, but those weren't really applicable to his network. So he had to make the tool from scratch and he programmed it on a UNIX system. This is a family of operating systems that computer science scientists at the Bell Labs Research Center of a t and t created back in the nineteen sixties uh and then ended up releasing it for others to use in the nineteen seventies. So your average person would likely find vanilla UNIX to be intimidating, because it is a system that programmers made for other programmers for the purposes of being able to create programs within this framework and then used on those machines or similar machines. It is not a particularly user friendly operating system, at least not if you're someone who's unused to command prompts as opposed to graphical user interfaces or Gooey's Um. Back in the day, when I first started using muters, command prompts were the way to go. In fact, I remember being incredibly reluctant to move from the DOSS system that was in use on IBM compatibles back in the day to migrating to Windows, because I thought windows was a huge waste of resources, that your computer had to use so many resources just to run the operating system that it completely hindered the sort of programs you could run on that sort of computer, and I did not like the idea of moving from doss to Windows. These days, if you put me in front of a line prompt kind of of operating system, I'm sure I would be completely lost. UH, as I get older, it gets harder to navigate those kinds of things. Anyway, what must wanted to do was create a small program that could measure the quote unquote, distance between two different machines. Except we're not really talking about physical distance here, although that can be a factor and we'll get to it. Instead, what we're really talking about is the amount of time it takes for one machine to send a message to a second machine and then receive a message from that second machine. So how long does it take you to send a message out and get a reply back? In that way, it's a lot like an echo. So an echo is when you make or you hear a sound and then you hear that sound repeated. And it happens when sound waves bounce off of some hard, smooth surface, and the smoother and harder the surface, the better it is for creating echoes. So let's say that you are in a canyon, maybe it's a box canyon, and you got a red base on one end and a blue Basse on the other, and no one can explain why. So you're in this box canyon and you decide to shout text stuff, rules or you know something that you would actually shout. Well, the echoes you would hear are actually the sound waves that you generated that came from you. Those air fluctuations originated from you and then they bounced back to you after they hit the canyon walls. So if you're in a place where there are no hard, smooth surfaces, you're not going to get an echo. Doesn't matter how loudly you scream. There are no surfaces for the sound to bounce off of and come back to you. It's just gonna travel outward until it's essentially too weak for it to be heard by at least human ears. Now, when we talk about stuff like sonar, we're talking about using sound to get an idea about how far away objects are from the sonar mechanism. And if we break down what sonar is from a technical standpoint, essentially what you have is a speaker that emits the sound and a microphone that picks up echoes of the sound and then some word of the system to calculate the amount of time between making a sound and getting the echo. These systems could be human powered or it could be modern systems use computers, but in the old days it could actually be someone with a stopwatch and very quickly reacting in order to get an idea of how long it took to send a sound out and to get the echo back. This is really useful if, for example, you're in a submarine that doesn't have windows. Those submarines don't because windows are a point of failure and you don't want those when you're in a metal tube that goes under the water. So you use the sonar to beam out a sound and you know how fast sound travels through water. It's a standard sort of thing. It actually travels faster through water than it does through air. We typically say that sound travels at about three forty three per second through the air, but in water it's one thousand four hundred eight meters per second. So if you send out a sound in a specific direction and you time how long it takes for the sound to come back to you and then you essentially divided by two, you know how far away you are from, say, and underwater cliff face. It's pretty common to call the sonar sound a Ping, because that's what it sounds like. If you've seen the film adaptation of the hunt for Red October, you know there's a scene in which sean connery, who's playing a Soviet Submarine Commander, tells his Sonar Operator reverify our range to target one ping only. Now, in that case he's using the Ping to secretly communicate with the Americans, but he's selling his sonar operator the reason is just to make sure they know exactly how far the Americans are in case they need to fire upon them anyway. That's why must called his tool a ping. It was using a similar sort of approach. A message goes out from on computer to a different computer and the message essentially says hey, send us back to me, and the target computer follows instructions and sends the message back. The amount of time between sending the message and receiving the reply can give you an idea about the network speed between those two machines. If it's slower than expected, something's going wrong. Maybe there's too much traffic on the network, maybe there is an actual switch that's down somewhere on the network and it necessitates traffic to route around the issue. So it's really a diagnostic tool for measuring path latency. We'll talk more about latency in just a second, but first let's take a quick break. All right, let's talk about latency. You can think of latency as the delay between the cause of something and it's effect. I always use video game examples for this, because anyone who has played enough video games has experienced this at one point or another. Um and it's, you know, one of the contexts in which we really talk about paying. Anyway, in most video games you really want the game to respond instantly, or at least appear to be instant according to our limitations of perception when you work the controls. So when you push that jump button, you want that lousy little plumber to jump and squash that Gumba Gush. Darn it when there's a delay. So you push the jump button but the plumber waits a second before jumping. It makes the game way more difficult to play. Some Games do the so on purpose. Sometimes it's up to the player to try and learn and adjust to the timing of the game, and it was all part of the design. Other Games didn't do it on purpose. They're just poorly made. Or they're running on inadequate machines, and so there's this latency introduced in to the experience and there's a lag between input and output. Now must decide to create his ping tool back in nine three on a whim. He didn't intend for it to be some sort of glorified feature that would be put to use countless times afterwards. He just thought it was an interesting exercise. He described the Ping Program as a quote, thousand line hack end quote, and he wrote it in a single evening and he says that if he had known how much it was going to be used moving forward, he might have spent a little more time and effort in designing it. He also mentions that, of course, in Classic Uh fate, by the time he finished designing the tool, the original issue that made him think about it in the first place had already been fixed. Someone else had gone into the network, discovered it and fixed the problem. But the tools usefulness obviously went beyond the single use case that inspired must to create it. Must also joked about how people tried to interpret Ping, the word paying, P I N G, as an acronym. There was a common assumption in the network Admin field that Ping stood for packet Internet grouper, but must dismiss that right away. It was pretty common to create wacky acronyms and government projects. In fact, that's still true to this day. If you look at any law or bill that has like a cool or cool ish name associated with it, there's a good chance that name is said to represent a tortured acronym, and I am positive that in the overall majority of cases lawmakers come up with a name for the legislation. First they come up with their cool name and then, retroactively they try to justify the name by creating a phrase for which the name is supposedly an acronym, and it's almost always terrible anyway. must say that's what people were trying to do with paying, but he was adamant pain justed for paying, like with Sonar. Now, if you're an online Gamer, you're likely very aware of the importance of paying. With online multiplayer games, each player is connecting to a game server and to be clear, multiplayer games have lots of servers. Right. Each game has tons of servers, and it's just that a player logs into a single server into which lots of other players are also logged, and once a server reaches capacity, players will have to connect to other servers. Well, it's pretty common practice to try and log into servers that are geographically close to the player, because that helps cut back on latency. Now, it's not always true that the closest server provides the fastest data speeds between the client machine, in other words the Gamer's rig, and the server itself, but it's usually the case. If you log into a server that's halfway across the world from you, that means the messages coming from your machine and going to your machine have to travel halfway across the world and while data moves very, very fast, it's not instantaneous, so you start to encounter a bit of latency. That latency or lag means there is a delay between when a Gamer does something in their game on their machine and when the server finds out about it, and sometimes that lag is enough to cause problems in gameplay. In fact, the LAG does not have to be very long for issues to pop up. Well, less than a second in fact. I'll give you an example. So let's say you and I are playing in a one on one first person shooter game. It's me versus you, and you've got me in your sights. You're clear across the map. You've spotted me. You've got a sniper rifle, so you take aim at me and you shoot from your perspective. You've got a clear shot. There's no way you can miss. But then there's the latency. Let's say my connection is lagging just a bit, that I've got a very high ping rate to the game server and in fact, while you appear to be aiming straight at me, because from your side the game server thinks that is where I'm at, on my side I was doing the old Serpentinam and the server gets my input commands and the game essentially decides that your shots don't connect because it turns out I wasn't really in the spot where you were aiming the whole time. There are some gamers who use this kind of thing to cheat at Games. So back in the early days of Halo, to Multiplayer, there was a tactic called stand by. A lot of modems had a standby feature that would let you temporarily pause a connection to a server. So it's like disconnecting, but it was just doing it for a moment. so by using it strategically Halo, two players could appear to be in one place in the game because the game server couldn't verify where the player was and so would just essentially keep the player on the course that they were on before the connection severed, but it would hold off on dropping the player entirely in case the connection repaired itself. And so that meant that if other players were trying to do damage to that character, nothing would happen and once the connection reestablished, the game would reconcile the players actual position. So to someone else it would look like your opponent had gone invincible for a few seconds and then would suddenly teleport to a different location. And this got to be a real problem because people were using it to get an unfair advantage over others. But generally these days players do not want a High Ping rate. It makes playing the game very difficult and if you're a really competitive player, like you're in the elite echelons, you really want to minimize all the external factors that could make a game harder. You want things to be a nice level playing field for everyone. So it really is skill versus skill, maybe some luck thrown in, but it's not some external factor that you have no control over. Giving one party and advantage over the other. So you really want that Ping to be low, and by low I'm talking about milliseconds. Competitive gamers really want a super low ping, like if you managed to log into a server and you find out that Your Ping rate is fifteen milliseconds or less, that would be amazing. It would also mean you're probably living like a mile away from the game server and you're connecting straight to it. A Ping between fifteen and forty five milliseconds is really good and it's not ideal, but it's not enough of a delay to measurably impact the game. Between forty five and one hundred milliseconds, you start to get into an area where the lag can be noticeable. Not necessarily a game breaking mechanic, but you can start to notice little issues. Between one hundred and two hundred fifty milliseconds, you've gotten experience that can make a game unplayable, and beyond two fifty you might as well just disconnect and try a different server. But it also depends on what type of game you're playing. Right not all games are equal. If you're playing a turn based game, that's not nearly as sensitive to paying issues, like if one player gets to go and then the other player gets to go and you're not simultaneously battling um at every moment, then a little delay is not going to be a big problem. It might make the game play a little irritating, but it's still totally playable. But if you're talking about a twitch based first person shooter style game, Players Need Really Low Ping for the game to run smoothly, particularly if you're talking about those elite levels of play. As an example of how this can give one player an edge over or another, imagine a scenario in which two players are about to come into view of each other. Both of them are going to have line of sight to the other players, so like they're both cresting a hill or something. But let's say player one's Ping is much lower than player two's Ping. That means player one has much less path latency to the game server. That could mean that player one will be able to see player to a moment earlier, which can give player one an advantage in the encounter. If you've got two players of similar skill, that could push a fair fight into unfair territory. All right, we're gonna take another quick break. When we come back we'll wrap up this discussion about paying. Okay, so now we understand that ping is a way to measure the latency between a client machine and a server machine. You could also do it between servers. You know, it's it's really between any two machines that are connected on a network. But what Affects Ping? What makes ping go from low to high? Well, as I mentioned earlier, physical distance between the client and the server is one thing that can certainly affect Ping. The further your information needs to travel to get to a server and then return to get to you, the more latency you're going to encounter. That just makes sense, right. So if you're in the United States then you're connecting to game servers that are located in Europe, chances are Your Ping is going to be on the higher side compared to Europeans who are connecting to that same server. The other big factor is the amount of traffic that's on your personal network. Just like with roadways, more traffic leads to congestion and it slows things down. So if you want to jump into war zone while you're house made is busy downloading a ton of four K films, chances are you're paying is going to suffer because your network bandwidth is finite. It's a limited resource. There's only so much of it and if the game is having to fight for some of that bandwidth compared to the downloading of these massive files, that means you're paying is probably going to go up as a result. For that reason, there are a lot of pro gamers out there who will have to dedicated network connections, one just for their gaming and the other for everything else, which to me is crazy. But everything about pro gaming is crazy to me because I'm a casual Gamer right I can't imagine dedicating eight hours or more per day to playing, streaming, you know, cutting together videos of my gameplay. That just is. It's daunting to me anyway. Other things that can affect paying can include the type of connection that you're using. If you've got a hardwired connection, they go straight from your computer to your router. That is going to Minimize Ping on your end, at least as far as connectivity between router and machine goes. Uh, if your housemaid is still downloading the complete works of the fairly brothers, you're still gonna have issues with paying. If if you're sharing a network connection, if you're relying on Wifi. Then things like your distance between your computer and the Wifi router or the fact that there may be walls or ceilings or floors between you and the router. All of that can have an effect on paying. So general rule is you want to be closer to the router rather than further away, and if you can have a hardwired connection it's better. Again, these really have more of an impact at the higher levels of Gameplay. If you're a casual player, it can still be something that might you might notice, but it's not likely to have as critical and impact on your level of play. It's also possible for there to be issues beyond your own network that you have no control over. So perhaps your Internet service providers network is having an issue, or a network that your I s P connects to Um that might have an issue and there's not much you can do about that other than maybe you can try and switch to a different server to see if the routing between you and that server is better. But if it's a problem with your I s P, if it's between like if it's in that last mile, there's really nothing you can do because everything is funneling through that last mile connection to your home and you can't step around that, at least not without somehow magically switching to a different I s p. obviously, if you are reliant on something like satellite networking, then that's going to introduce enormous paying. In fact, with satellite connectivity really aren't going to be able to compete in things like first person shooters because of the latency between messages. I mean these satellites are in outer space, so it does take a little bit longer for the data to get between you and the satellite then if you were using, you know, fiber optic cable, for example, and that can be enough to make it impossible for you to play the very fast paced twitch based games. You can still play things like, uh, turn based Games, maybe even mmos that kind of thing. But yeah, for the stuff that's reliant on a very fast connection, uh, you really wouldn't be able to to manage that. Anyway, that's the story of paying. Maybe someday I'll do the story of Pong. That was a terrible joke. Also, I have kind of covered the story upon when I talked about the history of Arcade Games. So it was a terrible dad joke and it was moot so I apologize to each and every one of you, but I hope you enjoyed this episode. This look at what Ping is, where it came from, why it has that name and what it means Um just the one thing to keep in mind is that you want the number to be low. The higher the number, the greater the latency between you and the machine when you do speed tests on your device, like if you've ever wondered if there's an issue with your network and you're you know, maybe things are taking a long time to download or you're getting a lot of buffering and streaming video and you do a speed test, it's essentially a ping. Is What's going on. It's it's although there are more involved speed tests that actually have a they maintain a connection in order to get essentially an average of network throughput, how how much data is being able to pass between your computer and the network over a given amount of time. But it's an extension of this paying concept. Al Right, if you have suggestions for topics I should tackle in future episodes of tech stuff, please reach out to me. 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Welcome to tech stuff, a production from I heart radio. He there, and welcome to tech stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I heart radio, and how the Tech Are you? You know, there's a good chance you've heard the Term Ping before. If you're a golfer, you probably associated with equipment like clubs and bags, but that's not what I'm talking about today. If you're a submariner, well, your concept of paying is closer to what I'll be talking about in this episode, and specifically in this episode, I'm talking about Ping as a way to judge network speed between two different machines. Now, with some stuff that you know we use in our technical world, the history can be a little muddled or hidden. Right. Might be one of those things where we have some common tool that we all use, but no one really documented where that tool came from or who first came up with it, and so we have to use a lot of qualifiers to talk about it. But in this case we can point to a specific person as the originator of the paying function, at least the first paying function, and that person was Mike Muss sadly, must passed away in two thousand in a car accident. So uh, that is really a tragedy. must seemed like a really entertaining and innovative guy, based upon the stuff I've read that he wrote. Must had studied sonar and radar while he was in college. He had been modeling those systems and he worked for a while at the Ballistic Research Laboratory, or B R L, which we also have to talk about in the past tense. The army established the army research laboratory in Nineteen two. That would absorb the old brl. So the B R L is no more. It is part of the A R L. Anyway, while must was working at the B R l, he noticed something hinky seemed to be going on with the I P network within that organization. Now, this was in nineteen eighty three and at that point, I think you're most folks had never even heard of internet protocol, or I p. that's what I p means in this case, not intellectual property, but Internet Protocol. I Doun't that most people had ever heard of that back in nineteen three. I know I had never heard it. The concept of the Internet was a pretty foreign one to anyone not working in a military organization, a research institute or a number of universities that we're doing pioneering work in the field. Computer networking in general was something that was a pretty foreign concept to folks. This was early on when people could actually get access to a personal computer, let alone the thought of how do I connect this computer to that computer? So it would take a decade before the rest of US would start to understand that you could actually connect computers together and make a network and then create networks together to create a massive interconnected system, a k a the Internet. But must was really familiar with computer networks. He worked on the IP network at Brl all the time, and so when he knows things weren't quite behaving the way they usually should, he decided to find out what was going on and to do that he needed a diagnostic tool. That didn't exist, so he had to create a program to do it. Now he had heard about other methods of testing things like network speed between machines that used other methodologies, but those weren't really applicable to his network. So he had to make the tool from scratch and he programmed it on a UNIX system. This is a family of operating systems that computer science scientists at the Bell Labs Research Center of a t and t created back in the nineteen sixties uh and then ended up releasing it for others to use in the nineteen seventies. So your average person would likely find vanilla UNIX to be intimidating, because it is a system that programmers made for other programmers for the purposes of being able to create programs within this framework and then used on those machines or similar machines. It is not a particularly user friendly operating system, at least not if you're someone who's unused to command prompts as opposed to graphical user interfaces or Gooey's Um. Back in the day, when I first started using muters, command prompts were the way to go. In fact, I remember being incredibly reluctant to move from the DOSS system that was in use on IBM compatibles back in the day to migrating to Windows, because I thought windows was a huge waste of resources, that your computer had to use so many resources just to run the operating system that it completely hindered the sort of programs you could run on that sort of computer, and I did not like the idea of moving from doss to Windows. These days, if you put me in front of a line prompt kind of of operating system, I'm sure I would be completely lost. UH, as I get older, it gets harder to navigate those kinds of things. Anyway, what must wanted to do was create a small program that could measure the quote unquote, distance between two different machines. Except we're not really talking about physical distance here, although that can be a factor and we'll get to it. Instead, what we're really talking about is the amount of time it takes for one machine to send a message to a second machine and then receive a message from that second machine. So how long does it take you to send a message out and get a reply back? In that way, it's a lot like an echo. So an echo is when you make or you hear a sound and then you hear that sound repeated. And it happens when sound waves bounce off of some hard, smooth surface, and the smoother and harder the surface, the better it is for creating echoes. So let's say that you are in a canyon, maybe it's a box canyon, and you got a red base on one end and a blue Basse on the other, and no one can explain why. So you're in this box canyon and you decide to shout text stuff, rules or you know something that you would actually shout. Well, the echoes you would hear are actually the sound waves that you generated that came from you. Those air fluctuations originated from you and then they bounced back to you after they hit the canyon walls. So if you're in a place where there are no hard, smooth surfaces, you're not going to get an echo. Doesn't matter how loudly you scream. There are no surfaces for the sound to bounce off of and come back to you. It's just gonna travel outward until it's essentially too weak for it to be heard by at least human ears. Now, when we talk about stuff like sonar, we're talking about using sound to get an idea about how far away objects are from the sonar mechanism. And if we break down what sonar is from a technical standpoint, essentially what you have is a speaker that emits the sound and a microphone that picks up echoes of the sound and then some word of the system to calculate the amount of time between making a sound and getting the echo. These systems could be human powered or it could be modern systems use computers, but in the old days it could actually be someone with a stopwatch and very quickly reacting in order to get an idea of how long it took to send a sound out and to get the echo back. This is really useful if, for example, you're in a submarine that doesn't have windows. Those submarines don't because windows are a point of failure and you don't want those when you're in a metal tube that goes under the water. So you use the sonar to beam out a sound and you know how fast sound travels through water. It's a standard sort of thing. It actually travels faster through water than it does through air. We typically say that sound travels at about three forty three per second through the air, but in water it's one thousand four hundred eight meters per second. So if you send out a sound in a specific direction and you time how long it takes for the sound to come back to you and then you essentially divided by two, you know how far away you are from, say, and underwater cliff face. It's pretty common to call the sonar sound a Ping, because that's what it sounds like. If you've seen the film adaptation of the hunt for Red October, you know there's a scene in which sean connery, who's playing a Soviet Submarine Commander, tells his Sonar Operator reverify our range to target one ping only. Now, in that case he's using the Ping to secretly communicate with the Americans, but he's selling his sonar operator the reason is just to make sure they know exactly how far the Americans are in case they need to fire upon them anyway. That's why must called his tool a ping. It was using a similar sort of approach. A message goes out from on computer to a different computer and the message essentially says hey, send us back to me, and the target computer follows instructions and sends the message back. The amount of time between sending the message and receiving the reply can give you an idea about the network speed between those two machines. If it's slower than expected, something's going wrong. Maybe there's too much traffic on the network, maybe there is an actual switch that's down somewhere on the network and it necessitates traffic to route around the issue. So it's really a diagnostic tool for measuring path latency. We'll talk more about latency in just a second, but first let's take a quick break. All right, let's talk about latency. You can think of latency as the delay between the cause of something and it's effect. I always use video game examples for this, because anyone who has played enough video games has experienced this at one point or another. Um and it's, you know, one of the contexts in which we really talk about paying. Anyway, in most video games you really want the game to respond instantly, or at least appear to be instant according to our limitations of perception when you work the controls. So when you push that jump button, you want that lousy little plumber to jump and squash that Gumba Gush. Darn it when there's a delay. So you push the jump button but the plumber waits a second before jumping. It makes the game way more difficult to play. Some Games do the so on purpose. Sometimes it's up to the player to try and learn and adjust to the timing of the game, and it was all part of the design. Other Games didn't do it on purpose. They're just poorly made. Or they're running on inadequate machines, and so there's this latency introduced in to the experience and there's a lag between input and output. Now must decide to create his ping tool back in nine three on a whim. He didn't intend for it to be some sort of glorified feature that would be put to use countless times afterwards. He just thought it was an interesting exercise. He described the Ping Program as a quote, thousand line hack end quote, and he wrote it in a single evening and he says that if he had known how much it was going to be used moving forward, he might have spent a little more time and effort in designing it. He also mentions that, of course, in Classic Uh fate, by the time he finished designing the tool, the original issue that made him think about it in the first place had already been fixed. Someone else had gone into the network, discovered it and fixed the problem. But the tools usefulness obviously went beyond the single use case that inspired must to create it. Must also joked about how people tried to interpret Ping, the word paying, P I N G, as an acronym. There was a common assumption in the network Admin field that Ping stood for packet Internet grouper, but must dismiss that right away. It was pretty common to create wacky acronyms and government projects. In fact, that's still true to this day. If you look at any law or bill that has like a cool or cool ish name associated with it, there's a good chance that name is said to represent a tortured acronym, and I am positive that in the overall majority of cases lawmakers come up with a name for the legislation. First they come up with their cool name and then, retroactively they try to justify the name by creating a phrase for which the name is supposedly an acronym, and it's almost always terrible anyway. must say that's what people were trying to do with paying, but he was adamant pain justed for paying, like with Sonar. Now, if you're an online Gamer, you're likely very aware of the importance of paying. With online multiplayer games, each player is connecting to a game server and to be clear, multiplayer games have lots of servers. Right. Each game has tons of servers, and it's just that a player logs into a single server into which lots of other players are also logged, and once a server reaches capacity, players will have to connect to other servers. Well, it's pretty common practice to try and log into servers that are geographically close to the player, because that helps cut back on latency. Now, it's not always true that the closest server provides the fastest data speeds between the client machine, in other words the Gamer's rig, and the server itself, but it's usually the case. If you log into a server that's halfway across the world from you, that means the messages coming from your machine and going to your machine have to travel halfway across the world and while data moves very, very fast, it's not instantaneous, so you start to encounter a bit of latency. That latency or lag means there is a delay between when a Gamer does something in their game on their machine and when the server finds out about it, and sometimes that lag is enough to cause problems in gameplay. In fact, the LAG does not have to be very long for issues to pop up. Well, less than a second in fact. I'll give you an example. So let's say you and I are playing in a one on one first person shooter game. It's me versus you, and you've got me in your sights. You're clear across the map. You've spotted me. You've got a sniper rifle, so you take aim at me and you shoot from your perspective. You've got a clear shot. There's no way you can miss. But then there's the latency. Let's say my connection is lagging just a bit, that I've got a very high ping rate to the game server and in fact, while you appear to be aiming straight at me, because from your side the game server thinks that is where I'm at, on my side I was doing the old Serpentinam and the server gets my input commands and the game essentially decides that your shots don't connect because it turns out I wasn't really in the spot where you were aiming the whole time. There are some gamers who use this kind of thing to cheat at Games. So back in the early days of Halo, to Multiplayer, there was a tactic called stand by. A lot of modems had a standby feature that would let you temporarily pause a connection to a server. So it's like disconnecting, but it was just doing it for a moment. so by using it strategically Halo, two players could appear to be in one place in the game because the game server couldn't verify where the player was and so would just essentially keep the player on the course that they were on before the connection severed, but it would hold off on dropping the player entirely in case the connection repaired itself. And so that meant that if other players were trying to do damage to that character, nothing would happen and once the connection reestablished, the game would reconcile the players actual position. So to someone else it would look like your opponent had gone invincible for a few seconds and then would suddenly teleport to a different location. And this got to be a real problem because people were using it to get an unfair advantage over others. But generally these days players do not want a High Ping rate. It makes playing the game very difficult and if you're a really competitive player, like you're in the elite echelons, you really want to minimize all the external factors that could make a game harder. You want things to be a nice level playing field for everyone. So it really is skill versus skill, maybe some luck thrown in, but it's not some external factor that you have no control over. Giving one party and advantage over the other. So you really want that Ping to be low, and by low I'm talking about milliseconds. Competitive gamers really want a super low ping, like if you managed to log into a server and you find out that Your Ping rate is fifteen milliseconds or less, that would be amazing. It would also mean you're probably living like a mile away from the game server and you're connecting straight to it. A Ping between fifteen and forty five milliseconds is really good and it's not ideal, but it's not enough of a delay to measurably impact the game. Between forty five and one hundred milliseconds, you start to get into an area where the lag can be noticeable. Not necessarily a game breaking mechanic, but you can start to notice little issues. Between one hundred and two hundred fifty milliseconds, you've gotten experience that can make a game unplayable, and beyond two fifty you might as well just disconnect and try a different server. But it also depends on what type of game you're playing. Right not all games are equal. If you're playing a turn based game, that's not nearly as sensitive to paying issues, like if one player gets to go and then the other player gets to go and you're not simultaneously battling um at every moment, then a little delay is not going to be a big problem. It might make the game play a little irritating, but it's still totally playable. But if you're talking about a twitch based first person shooter style game, Players Need Really Low Ping for the game to run smoothly, particularly if you're talking about those elite levels of play. As an example of how this can give one player an edge over or another, imagine a scenario in which two players are about to come into view of each other. Both of them are going to have line of sight to the other players, so like they're both cresting a hill or something. But let's say player one's Ping is much lower than player two's Ping. That means player one has much less path latency to the game server. That could mean that player one will be able to see player to a moment earlier, which can give player one an advantage in the encounter. If you've got two players of similar skill, that could push a fair fight into unfair territory. All right, we're gonna take another quick break. When we come back we'll wrap up this discussion about paying. Okay, so now we understand that ping is a way to measure the latency between a client machine and a server machine. You could also do it between servers. You know, it's it's really between any two machines that are connected on a network. But what Affects Ping? What makes ping go from low to high? Well, as I mentioned earlier, physical distance between the client and the server is one thing that can certainly affect Ping. The further your information needs to travel to get to a server and then return to get to you, the more latency you're going to encounter. That just makes sense, right. So if you're in the United States then you're connecting to game servers that are located in Europe, chances are Your Ping is going to be on the higher side compared to Europeans who are connecting to that same server. The other big factor is the amount of traffic that's on your personal network. Just like with roadways, more traffic leads to congestion and it slows things down. So if you want to jump into war zone while you're house made is busy downloading a ton of four K films, chances are you're paying is going to suffer because your network bandwidth is finite. It's a limited resource. There's only so much of it and if the game is having to fight for some of that bandwidth compared to the downloading of these massive files, that means you're paying is probably going to go up as a result. For that reason, there are a lot of pro gamers out there who will have to dedicated network connections, one just for their gaming and the other for everything else, which to me is crazy. But everything about pro gaming is crazy to me because I'm a casual Gamer right I can't imagine dedicating eight hours or more per day to playing, streaming, you know, cutting together videos of my gameplay. That just is. It's daunting to me anyway. Other things that can affect paying can include the type of connection that you're using. If you've got a hardwired connection, they go straight from your computer to your router. That is going to Minimize Ping on your end, at least as far as connectivity between router and machine goes. Uh, if your housemaid is still downloading the complete works of the fairly brothers, you're still gonna have issues with paying. If if you're sharing a network connection, if you're relying on Wifi. Then things like your distance between your computer and the Wifi router or the fact that there may be walls or ceilings or floors between you and the router. All of that can have an effect on paying. So general rule is you want to be closer to the router rather than further away, and if you can have a hardwired connection it's better. Again, these really have more of an impact at the higher levels of Gameplay. If you're a casual player, it can still be something that might you might notice, but it's not likely to have as critical and impact on your level of play. It's also possible for there to be issues beyond your own network that you have no control over. So perhaps your Internet service providers network is having an issue, or a network that your I s P connects to Um that might have an issue and there's not much you can do about that other than maybe you can try and switch to a different server to see if the routing between you and that server is better. But if it's a problem with your I s P, if it's between like if it's in that last mile, there's really nothing you can do because everything is funneling through that last mile connection to your home and you can't step around that, at least not without somehow magically switching to a different I s p. obviously, if you are reliant on something like satellite networking, then that's going to introduce enormous paying. In fact, with satellite connectivity really aren't going to be able to compete in things like first person shooters because of the latency between messages. I mean these satellites are in outer space, so it does take a little bit longer for the data to get between you and the satellite then if you were using, you know, fiber optic cable, for example, and that can be enough to make it impossible for you to play the very fast paced twitch based games. You can still play things like, uh, turn based Games, maybe even mmos that kind of thing. But yeah, for the stuff that's reliant on a very fast connection, uh, you really wouldn't be able to to manage that. Anyway, that's the story of paying. Maybe someday I'll do the story of Pong. That was a terrible joke. Also, I have kind of covered the story upon when I talked about the history of Arcade Games. So it was a terrible dad joke and it was moot so I apologize to each and every one of you, but I hope you enjoyed this episode. This look at what Ping is, where it came from, why it has that name and what it means Um just the one thing to keep in mind is that you want the number to be low. The higher the number, the greater the latency between you and the machine when you do speed tests on your device, like if you've ever wondered if there's an issue with your network and you're you know, maybe things are taking a long time to download or you're getting a lot of buffering and streaming video and you do a speed test, it's essentially a ping. Is What's going on. It's it's although there are more involved speed tests that actually have a they maintain a connection in order to get essentially an average of network throughput, how how much data is being able to pass between your computer and the network over a given amount of time. But it's an extension of this paying concept. Al Right, if you have suggestions for topics I should tackle in future episodes of tech stuff, please reach out to me. 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