Adobe the Optimistic
Posted by Pierre Igot in: TechnologyJuly 8th, 2005 • 7:42 am
Nothing like a sympathetic message from a software company to alleviate one’s no-broadband blues…
Today, when I launched InDesign, Adobe’s updater automatically launched, and found a couple of available updates for me. When I checked them to see how big they would be and how long it would take to download them, I saw the file size first:
and then I saw the time estimate:
1 minute and 51 seconds to download 6.258 MB over a dial-up connection? That’s some dial-up connection we’re talking about here! Based on my calculation, this represents a through-put of 56 KB per second. The only problem is that the absolute maximum through-put achievable with a dial-up connection is 56 Kilobits per second, not 56 Kilobytes per second. (And that’s assuming that a 56K modem ever manages to achieve such a rate — which is simply impossible. Mine is still stuck at 28 Kbps most of the time.)
No wonder the Adobe folks think nothing of releasing gigantic 100 MB updaters with no interesting bug fixes in sight!
Still, if software engineers don’t know the difference between bits and bytes, that’s a bit of a concern, isn’t it?