The real problem with teaching kids to program in to get a problem they want to solve.
You should try Alice. At SC08, I saw a room of 8-14 year-old kids doing Alice, and you could not tear them away from the computer. The original Alice was designed for middle-school girls, but Alice 2 has all the Sims characters, so kids can create a virtual world. And even better, the new Alice spits out a NetBeans project and Java code, so you can make the jump to "real" programming. http://www.alice.org/
The PC Magazine tests were really bad. First of all, tcp/ip cannot get up to speed on small files. If you want to fill a really big pipe (say 10 Gbps), it can take an hour to get up to speed!. Second of all, the route to the chosen Web servers was different depending upon where the user was located.
A proper speed test that will actually help diagnose things is at http://whisper.cs.utk.edu:8234/
With Comcast I get (at the moment) I get 2416 Kbps outbound and 15315 Kbps inbound.
This will drop after about 20 seconds of transmission due to the speed boost which has recently been put into effect on both inbound and outbound connections.
So PC Magazine has unfairly smeared Comcast, which is now giving stellar service.
Another issue is that Comcast uses AT&T's network, and when AT&T bought BellSouth, they agreed to net neutrality, which means that they now peer at many more locations with other networks. It used to be that my packets went twice across the country to go 10 miles from home to work. No longer:-)
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The real problem with teaching kids to program in to get a problem they want to solve.
You should try Alice. At SC08, I saw a room of 8-14 year-old kids doing Alice, and you could not tear them away from the computer. The original Alice was designed for middle-school girls, but Alice 2 has all the Sims characters, so kids can create a virtual world. And even better, the new Alice spits out a NetBeans project and Java code, so you can make the jump to "real" programming.
http://www.alice.org/
http://whisper.cs.utk.edu:8234/
With Comcast I get (at the moment) I get 2416 Kbps outbound and 15315 Kbps inbound. This will drop after about 20 seconds of transmission due to the speed boost which has recently been put into effect on both inbound and outbound connections.
So PC Magazine has unfairly smeared Comcast, which is now giving stellar service.
Another issue is that Comcast uses AT&T's network, and when AT&T bought BellSouth, they agreed to net neutrality, which means that they now peer at many more locations with other networks. It used to be that my packets went twice across the country to go 10 miles from home to work. No longer :-)