As the flight in question was to Newfoundland, it could well have been on a smaller turboprop aircraft, many of which have cargo holds located behind the aft pressure bulkhead.
201 karma · joined October 8, 2015
[1] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/tpm_firmware_update#TOC...
(Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/costco-wholesale-teamsters/u...)
This is well outside my area of expertise, but I think it may have been as much a chipset or bus issue as anything (e.g. other limitations presented by the motherboard), as all the issues I've observed or heard about have been with onboard NICs. Even the cheapest add-on cards performed loads better...
Most people don't appreciate how long a Google Fiber roll-out takes. I waited nine months to be connected and I was lucky. My parents had to wait two years. Google offered very little visibility into when the install would take place. (We've been waiting two years now for a hookup at my small business, with no end in sight and no way to get an estimate from Google.)
These realities gave Comcast a giant head start to perform customer retention jujitsu. It basically took a steely determination (or an implacable hatred of Comcast) to resist the deals being offered in all the calls, letters, and emails. You could accept their deal -- and be enjoying 12x faster internet within a week -- or hold out for Google Fiber at some undetermined future point.
So many folks were taking the bait that Comcast brought a great many contractors in from out of state to handle the volume of upgrade service calls. For months, nearly every room at a Residence Inn near my home was occupied by out-of-town Comcast crews. Every space in the parking lot was filled with a Comcast van at night (hilariously, each van had its orange cone deployed in front as per company requirements).
When I finally was able to contact Comcast to cancel after our Google installation, the rep had a special script for Provo customers. It centered around questions of whether we were actually achieving gigabit speeds in real-world situations. Though I still proceeded to cancel their service, it was a pretty devastating critique as no one connecting over wifi (which was almost everyone) could even achieve the 250 Mbps speeds Comcast was offering, to say nothing of the gigabit speeds Google had sold you.
I'm happy with Google Fiber overall and I certainly don't miss Comcast, but they wound up being a more capable competitor than I'd ever have suspected possible.
It turns out that delivering gigabit fiber to the home, though a remarkable technical achievement, isn't transformative in the way that all of us living here assumed it would be.
It turns out that almost none of the internet resources commonly consumed in the home are even remotely provisioned for gigabit residential connections. ESPN.com loads about as quickly as it always did. Your Netflix streams don't look any different (the absence of buffering, while nice, is a pretty subtle thing). Even Google services, which you'd expect to be optimized for Fiber subscribers, are no faster than before. Downloads from Google Drive at my home are just as pokey as they are on my Comcast connection at the office.
A few things are amazing (Apple downloads are so fast you feel like you must be on the company LAN in Cupertino) and, if you're the rare person who can make use of it, the fact that Google Fiber also provides 1 Gbps UPSTREAM... well, words don't exist to express what that's like.
But those are the exceptions. And those exceptions are only achievable by the rare person who actually wired the house with Ethernet. Oh, and it turns out that you've also got to upgrade all of your NICs (every technically-inclined person in the city quickly discovered that Ethernet controllers in consumer PC's can't come close to pushing gigabit Ethernet, regardless of what's printed on the box).
If you're on wifi, forget it, especially if you're one of the vast majority connecting solely via the underpowered 802.11n wifi router that Google provided.
It was a source of enormous community pride when Google made the announcement. (And a source of validation for the politicians who years earlier had pushed through the municipal fiber network that Google purchased for a dollar.) Everyone was so excited to sign up, and it was great to celebrate with your neighbors as the blue and white Google Fiber vans slowly moved up your street.
But now, a couple of years in, no one really talks about it anymore. It's definitely nice. The Google folks are great to deal with if you ever have an issue (which, in any case, is exceedingly rare). The pricing is straightforward and easy to understand. But, to your average household here in Provo, on an average evening doing average things on the Internet, it just doesn't seem very different than what we had before.
Their instance performance is better than DO in my experience, though I don't know how they compare to Linode.