I just got done explaining, or trying to explain, the concept of bandwidth to my mother. That was… well, to put it nicely, not a very feel-good endeavor. She doesn’t quite the idea that just because your connection to the internet *can* be faster on DSL than it is on dial-up, it isn’t gonna feel faster when you’ve got a network of 3 computers, 1 of which has decided to upload half its hard drive to whoever asks. Well, okay, scratch that. It’ll feel faster if you’re on that 1 computer. The other 2, though… let’s just say my 56k modem goes faster.
And it just so happens that I could use our network as an example. Until about 15 minutes ago, it was crawling at about 1/4 of a turtle’s pace on the computers we have up here. So, to prove my point, I had mom go down and turn off my brother’s laptop, as I know damn well he’s been downloading and/or uploading crap all day in spite of not being home. And, of course, as soon as she’d shut it down, our DSL connection that’s supposed to be 1MB/s actually *was* 1MB/s. I love it when demonstrations are so easy to pull off. I just hope she actually caught on… or I’ll be explaining the concept to her again the next time he does it. In other words, tomorrow morning when she wants to pay her bills.

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