And we wonder why people are running away from dial-up as quickly as they are - we stopped publishing/optimizing for them.
Just spent a week at the beach - and have once again rediscovered the pain that content publishers have wielded onto dial-up internet users. Man it sucks - the 'simplest' of web pages render so slowly. With the number of roundtrips required to display a simple news story it's not surprising. Latency is a killer. The 'NEW' web model is simple to implement - but a I still call it the lazy solution. There have been better ways to do this - and even on broadband connections it would make sense. But unfortunately - it would require some centralization - something that the DoubleClicks and MediaGroups won't allow.
Given the differences of connect speeds out there - I'm surprised that nobody is automatically scaling content based on connect speed on the web. Dial-up isn't the ONLY slow connection in town. Maybe it's time I start working on my own PHP work.
Speaking of the Beach - it's the second year in a row that I had to sand paper the phone wires in order to maintain a dial-up connection. It's amazing how a little salt in the air will ruin a perfectly good copper wire. The fact I've done it two years in a row, it makes me wonder how often this happens - and if the call centers have this in their knowledge base. I could just imagine a tech support guy asking if they have sand paper or an emery board.
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