"The Internet is not a truck"

With today being the much anticipated No More Bush Day, a ridiculous number of people flooded to DC and to the interwebs to bask in the glory.  Unfortunately, the limitations of my employer’s network has become painfully obvious as enormous amounts of material caused the tubes here to become clogged.  At it’s peak, the download speed was a whopping 170kbps.  Yes, an entire medical center and university being served with the equivalent bandwidth of 3 56k modems.  Epic fail.

A contributing factor to the deluge, was appearantly the Octoshape Grid Delivery “enhancement” for Adobe Flash that CNN.com users were prompted to install in order to view the live coverage.  While it was not mandatory to view the proceedings, anyone who chose to enhance their experience, became a part of CNN’s video serving psuedo-P2P network.  Octoshape promises higher quality video by sharing some of the distribution load with other clients using the plugin.  Once you initially opt in to The Grid, you are forever a participant anytime your browser is accessing a Grid-enabled video.  You can however, uninstall the plugin in Add/Remove Programs if you so choose.