There are a lot of problems we students encounter when working with Meteor. We all have different operating environments and this can lead to issues that are unique to a small group of students. This isn’t necessarily a problem with Meteor. It’s a problem with the Meteor assignments in general.
I have three computers that I might use for my work. My desktop at home is a Windows 10 machine. My new laptop runs Mac OS (Unix). What I am currently using to write this is my ThinkPad. It runs a distribution of Linux called Fedora.
I prefer to use my ThinkPad for anything that involves heavy amounts of typing. The keyboard is nice but the problem is that Linux is a pain in the ass to get working properly. Nowadays, at least there is some mainstream support for Linux, but these are more often then not made with Ubuntu in mind. This laptop is also not the fastest. To give you an idea, its keyboard is not the new island-key type.
To cut to the chase, I tried to import the Meteor application template during class and it took more than the entire class period to download needed files. I couldn’t even get started on the actual assignment. I thought this was just me and my shit laptop so I asked around and, it turns out, I was not alone. Almost everyone who had to download in class also said that it was taking forever.
Now I knew that this wasn’t an issue of time of day, where maybe downloads were slow because of heavy traffic. No, I was on campus a week prior to try and get ahead with the assignment and same thing: the download took ages! Mind you, I was attempting this late at night. Traffic should not have been a problem.
While my download finished at the end of class, I went home and decided to test the import and download on my desktop computer. I was bracing up for another long download but when I hit enter, the download finished in almost an instant! How could this be? I’m sure the connection on campus is much more robust and speedy. I was shocked.
I have come to the conclusion that someone in ITS decided to somehow heavily throttle anything related to meteor and/or JsNode on campus. What a bunch of stinkers they are.