Slashdot Mirror
Stopping The 56K Hate
A just-barely-Anonymous Coward writes: "Every day, hundreds of people are discriminated against by their Internet connection, banned from video/audio downloads, video/audio streaming, gaming, webcasts, and many other everyday Internet activities. The damage starts small -- hurt feelings, a little anger -- but soon it all escalates into pure rage that often leads up into the cutting of the aggressors' broadband line.
The broadband users of the internet are the ones that torment the little people. All too often they forget their true origins; where they came from back in the good old days before there were even 56k modems.
This website is dedicated to
stopping the hate of 56k modems. Show your support by joining the ranks." No accounting for taste, but I laughed from this end of a 53K connection to my ISP.
Wonderful, hard to read GIF banners added to thousands of sites around the world will surely help the needs of those of us who often surf through lynx to cut through most of the crap that people decide is 'better said' with an image.
:wq ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
It seems like a good point - broadband people can get used to high-speed access etc., and it's a good thing in general to have broadband, but it's also socially divisive - in the UK it's high-cost for high-bandwidth.......
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
Feel sorry for the modem user - put more images on your page.
I get the feeling that the targetted point has been missed by a wide margin.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
I don't expect folks who own a Honda scooter to feel discriminated against because they can't ride their wind-up toy on the highway, I expect them to keep out of my way, and on the side roads until they can buy something to get them where they're going faster. (Full disclosure: I had one of them there scooters, cheap and fun! But, Lordy! SLOW!) But I don't expect scooters riders to shout about The Man keeping them down because there are folks going faster.
If you've got a 56K modem, turn off the graphics until you find something you want to view, and save playing Flash games until you're at work. But don't try to make the rest of us feel bad because you don't have bandwidth. Ante up, then you can bootleg MP3's with the big boys!
Memes don't exist. Tell your friends.
Theoretically part of "stopping the hate" of 56k modems would be to make websites cleaner with less "junk" graphics... yet they want people to add a banner to their site? Am I missing something?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
One of the other posts so far in this topic has commented that bandwidth is a privilege, not a right.
That may be - but it is a privilege only available to a select few. In Ireland, where I live, broadband access is commercially available only in very small areas of Dublin - we're talking a few thousand people, tops.
Many people would be prepared to pay for bandwidth if they could get it - but the fact is, they can't. There is no alternative to modem (or ISDN) dialup for the majority of people here. Worse, local calls are not free - so an hour at 56K costs the equivalent of US $1.00. It adds up.
How much is Cable/DSL in the states? US $50/month? For that, your average Irish modem user may have been lucky enough to get about 300MB of traffic through.
Fortunately it looks like this may change soon - thank god - but for now, we're stuck with V.90.
http://www.themeparks.ie
So your point is that on trunk roads and motorways low performance cars should leave at the first exit to let through the faster ones?
This is a frankly disgraceful point of view! The Internet was not developed as a plaything for the technically rich, but as a medium available to anyone who could access, at a speed their hardware could cope with. Read the other posts: not everyone has either the financial means or the physical access to a broadband connection, and banning them from the net is not an option.
Frontpages using Flash are the online version of an SUV. Someone somewhere might really need it to get their message across but for most people it's just a titanic waste, IMVHO.
Read between the lines, you know what he's really bitching about is how all the warez and divx ftps and fservers have a minimum cps that's higher than some puny dial up can meet. This guys just mad cuase he can't get any warez.
If there is a max user limit, you'll clog up the server for other people who would get the download done much faster.
A 10Mbps-linked server can at fullspeed feed 10 1Mbps clients. Or 200 50kbps clients. I would prefer to be one of the 200 people who can actually download something than being one of the 190 people who have to wait until they can finally login.
Mirroring is the solution, banning isn't.
bash$
People who optimize for lines faster than 56K are just plain lazy. Do you think people would have bothered creating heavier and heavier forms of compression for media if it weren't for the slowness of our connections? As the speed bar gets raised, people lose sight of the challenge of packing a crapload of content into a quickly downloaded page.
This happens in everything. Look at computer game designers who fancy up essentially 2-D games with resource hogging 3-D graphics. Look at the apathy with which consumers approach fuel economy of vehicles in the US because gas is so abundant and cheap.
The goal must be to think big in a small box if we are going to challenge ourselves.
Why should we believe that these are real Slashdot stats? I'ld love to see 'm, but any one can just post a link to some made up numbers.
I get it, you use the wave of users to the 56k site, coming from Slashdot. Very smart. :)
There are some problems with those statistics though. I think they switched IE 2.0 and 4.0. Furthermore, where is IE 6? It's available as a download and it's in XP. All beta, but a lot of people are using it, I don't think there's more Amiga users reading slashdot than XP users..
For the rest, interesting stuff, hope the Statistics are mostly Slashdot referers otherwise they could be screwed.
We have choices in the US? really? I'm in the middle of a very sizable city and I still can't get any broadband. So fuck off with your "move if you don't like it" attitude.
Maybe when mommy and daddy stop paying all your bills you'll begin to understand what the real world is all about.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!