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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.
and once again.. it's porn. Certain porn-sites use a 'plugin' that basically makes your modem call a commercial dialin point owned by the porn-server. This makes for easy billing.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
I'm a condescending broadband cable internet user. For transfers of even 100 megabytes can take hours on a modem. My dialup backup auto-kicks me after six hours of usage. I see very good reasons for 56Kbps users to be banned from file servers that serve such large files.
1) Chances are, your download will fail.
2) If there is a max user limit, you'll clog up the server for other people who would get the download done much faster.
Now, even with these good reasons, 56K people are gonna feel discriminated against. I would be. So there's no way to please everyone, so I guess I don't really see the point of this little movement.. Also, most people with 56K probably don't want to keep it, and would rather have broadband.
56K isnt even bad, when I left NJ, I could get either ISDN (total rip off, love mah bell), a T-1 or frac to the house (I love mah bell, they can run a t-1 (which is a circuit that has been around for 30 years) in 90 days (much, much less if you pay much much more, and give you 1.5 up down flawlessly), pray for DSL or cable to come around, they never did, and now probably never will, OR use my two trusty couriers to aggregate bandwidth and 26400 x 2. (Note, this kind of dialup account no longer exists anymore, RIP netcom =( ].
Anyways, 56K in that town was like 10 ft from the CO or less. Forget 56K at 10,000 ft.
I'm very upset that web pages are inline image laden, its very hard to navigate the web with all this super bandwidth sucking stuff lying around. sure its optional, but as unix admins know that in a pinch without X its VERY hard to use links/lynx and get anywhere usefule without the images! ITS terrible!
This is probably why usenet is still very popular around the world.
AFAIK, only 5% of the people in this country have broadband.
And in case you havn't noticed all "internet" companies having a hard time, thank you AT&T, Verizon, GTE, (Insert Bell here). They love it when the internet does bad because it threatens to deprecate thier sources of income! If 768/768 SDSL was $100 a month - and it was available everywhere, everyone everywhere would have it, and no one would use the phone (things like dialpad would replace it.) Remember, these idiots at PacBell charge me $30 a month just to have a phone number. Give me a break. I'm all for paying for bandwidth - but the DSL you may never get was destroyed by the Bells to protect their territory...
I'm hoping that "lite" versions of sites pop up so that when my broadband goes dark I can enjoy the net just the same.
- NOTE TO SUN, IBM, COMPAQ ET AL. FIX YOUR BROKEN NON-ECN AWARE FIREWALLS PLEASE.
Two more cents =)
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
Feel sorry for the modem user - put more images on your page.
When I took one of the banners, I made it 10 times smaller by converting it from JPG to an indexed PNG posterized to 6 levels, ending up with a 500 byte version that travels over a 50 kbps link in the time of the average eyeblink (100 ms). I also notified the webmistress of the location of this smaller PNG.
Will I retire or break 10K?
When you build things, you dont build them for the lowest common denominator.
I'm sorry, but sometimes you do, or at least you should!
Take a look at these two UK sites:
John Charcol Finances and
Intelligent Finance
Note how the IF site is clean and slick, while you have to wait for the entire Charcol page to load before you use it. Even when you are on a broadband connection the "snappiness" of the site matters.
The main web design problems in the world are caused by people trying to make the most of those flashy graphic design courses they were sent on, and less on delivering the appropriate level of functionality for the site. I just don't trust a web site which bloats out on every link & load.
Check these links!
.... go boys go!!
OS being used and
Browser being used
and
9 poor saps are surfing at 640x480.
IE5 on Windows 2000 easily the most popular OS amongst current readership (probably UK readers in their offices).
It seems some people are using IE2.0 (don't believe it), and Konqueror is beating Opera.
I'm most impressed by the fact 2 people just read the page using Amigas