Are we Greedy for Speed?

I'm sitting here watching over my download from MSDN for the Longhorn 7.2 SDK, and I constantly find myself suspending and resuming the download. But, why? Well, because I think downloading the 700MB file at 40 KB/sec is just too darn slow, so if I suspend and resume, it'll jump to above 100KB to 200KB for about 1 more minute.

This just kind of got me started thinking, why are we so greedy for speed? I remember the days of the old 14.4K modems and (of course) the old baud modems that were slower than crap. I remember rejoicing whenever I was downloading at about 1.5KB, and thought it was so extremely cool.

Now adays, that 1.5KB seems to just be insane, and unable to do anything on the internet. When did this shift change? Was it the when the wide popularity grew for broadband access? No, I believe it to be whenever ISDN was starting to become available to residential areas. However, ISDN still is slow and sluggish in most of our eyes.

So, why am I thinking that 40KB a second is so darn slow? I don't know, I guess I'm just speed greedy like everyone else in the world with broadband access. Are you greedy?

3 Comments

  • Funny, I did the exactly same thing for the Longhorn download! I thought I was really on to something big, but apparently not. I don't even know if it's actually downloading faster or if their speed algorithm just needs a few seconds to adjust. Oh well..

  • I wonder just how many of us do the pause+resume speed burst trick!

  • And here I thought that I was the only one to do that! We've noticed at work when downloading from MSDN, that over time the transfer rate seems to get slower and slower. However, if you suspend/resume, the speed jumps back up. At least we're not the only ones. ;)

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