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Dial-Up Users "Don't Want Broadband"
Barence writes "The majority of dial-up Internet users say they don't want to upgrade their connection to broadband, according to a new study in the US. The Pew Internet & American Life research found that 62% of dial-up users had no interest in upgrading to a high-speed connection." (CNN is carrying the AP's story on the study, too.)
If we could dump all the extra garbage on most webpages, we could conserve a lot of bandwidth as it is.
Edit -> Preferences -> Content
Untick load images automatically.
Untick enable Javascript.
Untick enable Java.
Edit -> Preferences -> Applications
Remove any you don't like.
HTH
Deleted
At least one neighborhood in Queens, NY just got broadband within the last year. I don't know where people get the idea that the whole country is wired. Much of the country doesn't even have cable. And most is too rural to get DSL or FIOS.
Developers: We can use your help.
I'm only twelve miles out of a major city (2 million in the metropolitan area) and I have no broadband options. Literally. I can't get DSL, I can't get cable, I can't get fiber. My only options are dial-up, satellite, or EVDO (which is what I use). So trust me, it's really not a matter of speed.
Fear the penguin.
They don't make very effective bots, but they still get botted.
I was checking my mother-in-law's computer because she said the internet wasn't working. I connected and twiddled around with settings a bit. At some point I opened up the connections status and I had to smile a bit as her uploads were something like 5MB and downloads were a few thousand k.
She never patched her system because it takes to long over dialup :) Even antivirus updates are painful.
The other cool thing is that she kept having to unplug the phone line because the computer would dial in whenever it needed a connection, and the bot apparently always needed a connection.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The US doesn't suck because people choose not to get broadband, it sucks because they can't get it even if they want it.
No, you almost certainly don't. Maybe you think you do, because you have cable or DSL, but those are too slow to count as broadband. The only real broadband in the US (not including business leased lines, of course) is Verizon's FIOS, and that's available in so few areas it might as well be mythical.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
From 2005, "The Reader's Digest" version of how it works:
BITS is a cool new file transfer feature of Windows that asynchronously downloads files from a remote server over HTTP. BITS can manage multiple downloads from multiple users while making use of idle bandwidth exclusively. Although the use of BITS is not limited to auto-updating applications, it is the underlying API used by Windows Update. And since it is available to any application, it can be used to do much of the really tough work involved in creating an auto-updating application.
Here is the basic idea. An application asks BITS to manage the download of a file or set of files. BITS adds the job to its queue and associates the job with the user context under which the application is running. As long as the user is logged on, BITS will drizzle the files across the network using idle bandwidth. In fact, the code-name for the BITS technology is Drizzle, which, it turns out, is quite descriptive of what BITS does.
How does all of this work? The technology is actually fairly sophisticated. First, BITS is implemented as a Windows service that maintains a collection of jobs organized into a set of priority queues: foreground, high, normal, and low. Each job in the same priority level is given bandwidth via time slices of about five minutes, in a round-robin fashion. Once there are no jobs remaining in a queue, the next priority queue is inspected for jobs.
Jobs in the foreground queue use as much network bandwidth as they can, and for this reason the foreground priority should only be used by code that is responding to a user request. The remaining priorities, high, normal, and low, are much more interesting because they are all background priorities, which is to say that they only make use of network bandwidth that's not in use.
To achieve this background feature, BITS monitors network packets and disregards packets that it recognizes as its own. The remaining packets are considered the active load on the machine's bandwidth. BITS uses the active load information along with the connection speed and some other statistics to decide whether it should continue downloading files or back off in order to increase throughput for the active user. Because of this, the user doesn't experience bandwidth problems.
The ability to drop what it is doing at a moment's notice is very important for BITS. In many cases, only part of a file is downloaded before BITS must give up the network or even lose connection altogether. The partially downloaded file is saved, however, and when BITS gets another crack at the network, it picks up where it left off. This ability to recover does have some side effects.
Remember that BITS is used to transfer files from HTTP servers. A server should be HTTP 1.1-compliant or at least support the Range header in the GET method for BITS to work. This is because BITS needs to be able to request a portion of a file. In addition, the content being downloaded must be static content such as a markup file, code file, bitmap, or sound. A GET request including a Range header makes no sense when requesting dynamic content such as that produced by CGI, ISAPI, or ASP.NET.
Currently, there are two versions of BITS: 1.0 and 1.5. BITS 1.0 ships with Windows XP and has the following features: interruptible background downloading of files, download prioritization, optional notification of completed jobs and error situations, and optional progress notifications for use with dialog boxes and other UI elements. BITS 1.5 ships with Windows .NET Server. In addition to the features contained in BITS 1.0, version 1.5 has interruptible background uploading of files and authenticated connections using Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate (Kerberos) or Passport. BITS 1.5 is available as a redistributable that is compatible with Windows 2000 and greater (see Background Intelligent Transfer Ser