Humor: Cargo Cult Programming

[bscott at ntisys.com]

On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, at 6:06pm, jabr at abreau.net wrote:
> I'm on a 56K dialup now, and it's not all that much better. I still get 
> frequent lags of anywhere from a few seconds to occasionally a minute or
> two where the connection simply sits there frozen.

  That's bogus.  I'm on what I think has to be NH's worst dialup feed -- 15
miles from the CO, cannot connect faster than 24 kilobits, takes three times
to connect, drops carrier if the wind gusts -- and I don't have that
problem.  Occasionally, the modem will go off into hyperspace for a bit, and
I have to sit and watch the EC and CS lights blink for a minute or two, but
then two lines worth of text will spew out all at once and I'll be back in
business.

  When I get lags like you're describing, I start running 'ping' and
'traceroute' commands, and will usually find a router well upstream of the
modems that is having a nervous breakdown.

> By that metric, I've never experienced a non-local network connection that
> didn't suck. Not just on dialup, but on attbi, on many corporate networks
> at various contract jobs where both offices were on T1 lines in separate
> cities.

  How exceedingly odd.  Even on 128 kilobit DSL feeds, interactive
performance is good enough that I cannot really tell the difference between
that and a LAN.  We're talking about SSH for a shell prompt, right?  You're
not popping up an xterm over the feed, or something like that, are you?

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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