I was amused today to read (on Microsoft.Com, natch) of Microsoft winning the Internet Land Speed Record - a competition to see who can transmit data from one side of the US to the other the fastest using purely off-the-shelf system components.

By bringing the might of the Evil Empire to bear, they managed to coax a dual-Pentium equipped PC (with a gigabit ethernet card, running Windows 2000, connected to a super-fat OC-48 fibre link) into consistently transmitting 957 million bits per second (over 100MB/s) across a distance of 5,626 km.

This is a fairly impressive feat bearing in mind that the system was allegedly entirely constructed from shop-bought components.

Obviously this was something of a PR coup for Microsoft, enabling them to remind the world that indeed, Windows 2000 is the hard-core, high-performance system for every man and his net-savvy dog to use.

Mind you, what did they transmit over this waffle keen uber-net-connection?

Random garbage, that's what.

..They're clearly gearing up for distributing Windows 2001 over the net...

Mind you, I wouldn't mind one of those setups for Napster, although it'd still take nearly 10 minutes to transfer my MP3 collection! ;-)

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P.S. As I write this, I've gone to Microsoft's web site to check the details and.... The server's down. Oh dear.