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Bandwidth whine

One doesn’t really appreciate ADSL until one clicks on “Fish Fillets NG” on one’s dialup computer (Ubuntu #3 for me) only to discover that this few-hundred kilobyte game has sixty-odd megabytes of data files in tow, which are going to take most of a day to download, or that your updates include a new version of OpenOffice, which will take a day all by itself.

In case anyone thinks this is Linux-specific, I plugged a USB mouse into a ratty old Win98SE system we were using for CD-based edu-games (the PS/2 mouse was pretty close to cactus) & the system died — won’t boot — & it wants about 3 days worth of full-on downloading to fix that — only, being a MicroSoft system, it won’t officially let me download that.

The same mouse flawlessly & painlessly (& instantly) replaced a PS/2 mouse on this Ubuntu system into which I’m typing — only it constantly colour-cycles its entire suite of high-efficiency LEDs, making it not well suited for use in a dark room.

Meanwhile, back on the bandwidth whine, wanting to download a couple of few-thousand-word HTML pages alongside the updates completely knackers the link, so that your neighbour(-ish) can’t log in to her webmail. As to watching videos & such... in which lifetime? Ah, well, some day somebody’s going to run a fibre link down the Murchison Highway. Looking forward to that day.

Comments

Trendkill said…
that very well may be the case, but keep in mind basic dsl is now something along the lines of $10 a month through aapt or some other smaller provider!

i do feel your pain with win98 though, being a system admin at a medium size company i have had to deal with a few in-need-of-a-few-major-update machines, and even with a large internet connection felt more pain as newer updates conflicted with others being applied leading to a blue screen of death.
16 September, 2007 07:12
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