4 ms·

U.S. Net access not all that speedy ("Pathetic")

4 points by gibsonf1 19y ago

willarson 19y ago
I remember reading a post by Matz about how he hated to leave Japan because his connection there was so much faster than what he ended up with elsewhere. This kind of reminds me of the the gas consumption issues though, maybe instead of complaining about slow download speeds, we should also focus on making websites that are not bloated to all hell. I was on a "web 2.0" website a few days ago and each page load was coming with 250-500k of data. Each page! We seriously need to figure out a way to integrate the javascript libraries (prototype, etc) into browsers, or to just stop making everything sparkle just because we can.
- davidw 19y ago
  One solution is to host JS libraries in centralized, very highly available places. http://foobar.com/scriptaculous/1.12/foo.js http://foobar.com/scriptaculous/1.12/foo.js So that once a user gets it from any site, it's good for lots of sites. The trick is to find a place to do that hosting...
- far33d 19y ago
  And we should get rid of images too! Everyone should use lynx! The market will drive the technology - not the other way around. If people want sparkle, connections will get faster.
  - willarson 19y ago
    Yes, which is how the American car market has worked for the past seventy years, and also the reason why we'll hit the peak oil point in the next -5 to 30 years. But you're right, learning from mistakes is so passe.
tx 19y ago
In many of those countries people live in big and tall apartment buildings, so dropping an expensive fiber to just one block of those gives you TONS of users. Compare that to a typical rural suburbs in US, where you have to put down miles and miles of cable just to cover a big subdivision of standalone houses. Besides, raw download speed is not that important IMO. Well, perhaps for video. I wish browsers could download more than two files at the same time. I believe this limitation is pretty much obsolete these days.

4 ms·

U.S. Net access not all that speedy ("Pathetic")

4 points by gibsonf1 19y ago

willarson 19y ago
I remember reading a post by Matz about how he hated to leave Japan because his connection there was so much faster than what he ended up with elsewhere. This kind of reminds me of the the gas consumption issues though, maybe instead of complaining about slow download speeds, we should also focus on making websites that are not bloated to all hell. I was on a "web 2.0" website a few days ago and each page load was coming with 250-500k of data. Each page! We seriously need to figure out a way to integrate the javascript libraries (prototype, etc) into browsers, or to just stop making everything sparkle just because we can.
- davidw 19y ago
  One solution is to host JS libraries in centralized, very highly available places. http://foobar.com/scriptaculous/1.12/foo.js http://foobar.com/scriptaculous/1.12/foo.js So that once a user gets it from any site, it's good for lots of sites. The trick is to find a place to do that hosting...
- far33d 19y ago
  And we should get rid of images too! Everyone should use lynx! The market will drive the technology - not the other way around. If people want sparkle, connections will get faster.
  - willarson 19y ago
    Yes, which is how the American car market has worked for the past seventy years, and also the reason why we'll hit the peak oil point in the next -5 to 30 years. But you're right, learning from mistakes is so passe.
tx 19y ago
In many of those countries people live in big and tall apartment buildings, so dropping an expensive fiber to just one block of those gives you TONS of users. Compare that to a typical rural suburbs in US, where you have to put down miles and miles of cable just to cover a big subdivision of standalone houses. Besides, raw download speed is not that important IMO. Well, perhaps for video. I wish browsers could download more than two files at the same time. I believe this limitation is pretty much obsolete these days.