Steven Bellovin wrote:
When I was in grad school, the director of the computer center (remember those) felt that there was no need for 1200 bps modems -- 300 bps was fine, since no one could read the scrolling output any faster than that anyway.
Right now, I'm running an rsync job to back up my laptop's hard drive to my office. I hope it finishes before I leave today for Denver.
I understand the sentiment, but the comparison is flawed in my opinion. The speeds back then were barely any faster than you could type, I know all too well the horrors of 1200/75 baud connectivity. Luckily nowadays now it's about getting your dvd torrent downloaded in 2 minutes, vs. 20 minutes, or 2 hours. Or your whole disk backed up before your flight leaves. You're now able to back it up online to begin with. The thing here is that I talk about *necessity*. Once connectivity has reached a certain speed threshold having increased speed generally starts leaning towards *would be nice* instead of *must*. And so far the examples people gave are almost all more in the realm of luxury problems than problems that hinder your life in fundamental ways. If you have a 100 mbps broadband connection and your toddlers are slowing down your video conference call with your boss by watching the newest Dexter (hah!). Then your *need* can be easily satisfied by telling your toddlers to cut the crap for a while. Sure it'd be nice if your toddlers could watch Dexter kill another victim whilst you were having a smooth video conference talk with your boss, but it's not necessary. Greetings, Jeroen -- http://goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/ http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/plural-of-virus.html