Okay, so this is a slight tangent from my intentions with this site, but I must share the following quote from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, neatly summarizing (with only slight exaggeration to reality) my experience as a graduate student in physics.

I finally got DSL again a few months ago, after 2 years of dial-up. Worked like a charm on my iBook, but not so on the Linux box. Actually, it wasn't so bad at first, but the DNS lookups were taking forever. Then it started dropping carrier. Often. To the point where, after a few minutes of using the computer, it was dropping every few seconds. Here's how I fixed it.