While I think to something more interesting to write, I'll deal with something which is just technically astonishing. But it's also an example of the infrastructure difference that prompted me to move here. So one could probably invent a philosophical meaning for this post. Like "the Author is trying to suppress his homesickness with the reasons for which he moved to a place with better infrastructure". Well, I didn't move just for what is discussed below, but hey, it's a nice bonus.

OK, in practice: here's what I got today on my console:

$ ping www.google.com

PING www.l.google.com (72.14.221.104) 56(84) bytes of data.

64 bytes from fg-in-f104.1e100.net (72.14.221.104): icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=3.46 ms

64 bytes from fg-in-f104.1e100.net (72.14.221.104): icmp_seq=2 ttl=54 time=3.64 ms

[...]

^C

--- www.l.google.com ping statistics ---

5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4006ms

rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 3.290/3.486/3.707/0.170 ms

Noticed something? Like the fact that it's contacting in 3 milliseconds a Google server in the US (click the link if you don't believe me)?

$ wget 'http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/10.04/release/ubuntu-10.04-dvd-amd64.iso'

--2010-05-21 17:43:14-- http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/10.04/release/ubuntu-10.04-dvd-amd64.iso

Risoluzione di cdimage.ubuntu.com... 91.189.88.39

Connessione a cdimage.ubuntu.com|91.189.88.39|:80... connesso.

HTTP richiesta inviata, in attesa di risposta... 200 OK

Lunghezza: 4418144256 (4,1G) [application/x-iso9660-image]

Salvataggio in: "ubuntu-10.04-dvd-amd64.iso"

45% [=======================================================> ] 2.029.255.408 8,13M/s in 4m 52s

Hey, it's downloading at 8 MB/s! It varied between 5 and 10MB/s... with this network, one can even conquer the world!