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How Microsoft Degrades Their Users (In a Good Cause)
blackbearnh writes "We all know that slow Web pages drive users crazy, but where is the boundary between too slow and too simple? As Microsoft's Eric Schurman points out, the fastest-loading page of all is a blank one, but it's also the most useless. In an interview with O'Reilly Radar leading up to his appearance at the Velocity Conference, Schurman talks about his experiences working on some of Microsoft's highest-volume sites, including the home page and Live Search. In particular, he discusses how Microsoft will selectively degrade the performance of pages to small sets of users so that they can see how various amounts of delay at different times and places affect user behavior. 'In cases where we were giving what was a significantly degraded experience, the data moved to significance extremely quickly. We were able to tell when we delayed people's pages by more than half a second, and it was very obvious that this had a significant impact on users very quickly. We were able to turn off that experiment. The reasoning... was it helps us make a strong argument for how we can prioritize work on performance against work on other aspects of the site.' He also talks about what it's like to be one of the most often-targeted DDoS sites on the planet."
In other words, Firefox, Opera, XP, and Linux users. And the experiment will get turned off, once they switch back to IE8 on Vista.
Funny, Interesting, and Insightful! A Slashdot Trifecta!
A week or so ago I tried to download the Windows 7 RC. I tried to get the x64 and x32 version, both from within Firefox. 3.0 on Linux (x64 Ubuntu). Neither would actually start the download.
At the time, I was wondering if they were throttling or somehow inhibiting me from downloading, intentionally. The little spinning pie kept spinning, and nothing happened; no data was being sent or received, according to wireshark - it was just an irritating graphic to keep me occupied. Now I'm wondering again if it was intentional.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I don't know what it is (I still use Firefox 1.5 on an old Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) and /. is so slow that I hesitate to visit it. (There is always a busy script I have to stop, GoogleAds or something takes an eternity to load; not to speak about the FLASH adds... Unfortunately, RSS does not help as it is so full of advertizing that the text is difficult to find. I thing I will ditch Slashdot and digg elsewhere.
It's become the Internets equivelant of Fox News. Accolades, comments and opinions are not based on ideas or content, they are instead based on the company suggesting them and the party line. It's just a fanboy echo-chamber hell bent on promoting an agenda, with the whole concept of discussing an idea or product based on merit being entirely alien.