Wild and crazy times for the development tree

[Pedro Fernandes Macedo]

Callum Lerwick wrote:
> Someone on IRC was arguing that in many parts of the world, bandwidth is
> very expensive. I don't see how 5 CDs to download vs a DVD make a
> difference here. The real question is, how common are DVD burners, and
> most importantly, DVD readers in various parts of the world.
>
>   
Please ignore that comment about bandwith.. I was a bit sleepy at the 
time and my brain was working in a weird way.
The issue really is DVD reader/burner availability as mentioned several 
times on this thread. Checking just two places directly connected to 
internet and technology that I have/had access to, I'd have to say that 
the number of DVD readers and burners is still very small, even in a 
major city here in Brazil (I live in the 3rd biggest city of the 
country). In my workplace (a company that specializes in tech support 
for other companies), we dont have a single DVD burner, we have two DVD 
readers that and all the other machines have CDs. In the university 
where I just finished my CS course, I know for sure of the existence of 
about 10 DVD burners in desktop computers/servers owned by the 
department, while most computers have a CD reader.

Another big issue is the availability of reliable DVD-/+R discs and 
their price. While in the US you can get a 50 pack for a relatively 
small price, here a 50 pack from a good brand is about 50 reais (about 
US$25,00. Just as a reference, the minimum wage here is R$300,00 or 
US$150,00) and you only can find those on ebay. You can also find some 
cheap discs for R$2,00 each, but then you better pray that it lasts 
enough time for you to remove the disk from the burner and put in the 
reader of the machine you want to install

As for the statistics cited by Bill Nottingham, I'm certain they're very 
favorable to DVD isos, specially if you consider that in the release 
notes and in the release announcement it's strongly suggested that 
bittorrent be used to download the DVD images since a few broken 
ftp/http clients and servers may not be able to handle such big files, 
while bittorrent works perfectly.

--
Pedro Macedo