Communicator 4.0b2 is out

[Thomas Dowling]

>      I downloaded it to my home machine yesterday morning - from the
server 
>      at the University of North Carolina - and got a routine 140+ Kps

>      transfer rate on my residential ADSL line.  It took just a
couple of 
>      minutes to download the file.  I mention this because ADSL is an

>      emerging technology considerably cheaper than ISDN (and a great
deal 
>      faster) and is beginning to show in both the Pac Bell and Bell 
>      Atlantic service areas.  The era of long downloads will end
soon.

Depending on what you mean by "soon" I think you put too much faith in
the farsightedness of at least some of the RBOCs.  And the fastest line
in the world won't fix the increasing number of bottlenecks at your
neighborhood DNS server or at the remote host.  For what it's worth, my
neverending download yesterday was from our office LAN, which goes
right across the street into OARnet's Columbus SONET ring--line speed
wasn't the problem.  

That said, I can recommend many better ways to spend your time than
downloading Communicator PR2.  The two features that caught my eye were
CSS support ("flaky" is one phrase that crossed my mind.  "Totally
whacked" is another) and the enhanced kiosk mode ("This program has
performed an illegal operation...").  At least this release comes with
an Uninstall option.  :-\

Thomas Dowling
Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu