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 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
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)
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.
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.