In our first Computer Networks class, Dr. Sanghi had encouraged us to think like an engineer... To illustrate he asked a question as to what mode of data transfer would you suggest if in some experiment lot of data is being collected at IITK as well as IITD and for collaboration, it needs to be transferred between the two places. Someone from the front row immediately answered, "Dedicated line". Equally immediately did he respond, "This is exactly how a scientist would think. Can you think like an engineer?"

In the course of discussion it turned out that the first thing that should be asked is how much of delay is acceptable? If 24 hours of delay is not a problem the most efficient way would be to write the data on a disks and physically send the disks there!

And I have realized the importance of such solutions in real life. The crossover office installation file was of approximately 11 MB. I was sent it via mail in two files on sizes 6 and 5 MB respectively. But thanks to the network speed in hostels here, was unable to download them for last 15 days! And had wasted God-knows-how-many hours on it. Then as was pointed out yesterday, it was more time efficient for me to take a trip to IITK, download stuff, write it on CD and come back :-) Well, that's what I finally did. And well, as I said in the previous post, I am a Linux user again...

Categories: Cribbings, TimePass, IIML, IITK