It does. I'm on 2G and HN and the article site are the only usable things I've encountered today [on TMobile's intl roaming thing]
The web sucks if you have a slow connection
371–380 of 622 posts
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#372I found out this the hard way. T-Mobile used to offer 2G internet speeds internationally in 100+ countries included in Simple Choice subscriptions. 2G is limited to 50 kbit/s, that's slower than a 56K modem. While this absolutely fine for background processes (e.g. notifications) and even checking your email, most websites never loaded at these speeds. Resources would time out, and the adverts alone could easily exce…
Disable JavaScript. You’ll be surprised at how most of the web still works and is much faster. Longer battery life on mobile, too.
FWIW, I just tried this in Firefox (set javascript.enabled=false) and went to my bank's website to see how it would fare. Firefox crashed. Tried again with no other tabs open, still crashed. Crash report sent.
OTOH, in Chrome the website actually works fine and feels more snappy with JS disabled. So, thanks for the tip!
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people naively assume that if you can use a resource more efficiently, then total use will go down, "because you don't need as much, right?" See: the entire popular support for efficiency mandates. (Edit: Also, this very example -- I certainly didn't expect that a faster site would allow that many more users: my model was more "either they want to see your site, or they don't", i.e. inelastic demand.) The (c…
This sounds like the reason widening roads doesn't usually ease congestion. Which, really, can be summed up by my favorite Yogi Berra-ism "No one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded."
> This sounds like the reason widening roads doesn't usually ease congestion.
It usually does actually.
What is happening there is that you have different demand levels at different congestion levels. If you alleviate some congestion by widening the road then demand goes up.
That is only a problem if the demand without congestion is higher than what even the wider road can handle. As long as the new road can handle the higher but still finite demand you get when there is no congestion, there is no problem.
In other words, as long as you make the road wide enough for the congestion-free demand level to begin with, that doesn't happen.
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#374Shameless plug but I did something similar in 2014 and used PhantomJS to analyze the content of the top 1000 Alexa sites: http://dangoldin.com/2014/03/09/examining-the-requests-made-...
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds like the reason widening roads doesn't usually ease congestion. Which, really, can be summed up by my favorite Yogi Berra-ism "No one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded."
> This sounds like the reason widening roads doesn't usually ease congestion. It usually does actually. What is happening there is that you have different demand levels at different congestion levels. If you alleviate some congestion by widening the road then demand goes up. That is only a problem if the demand without congestion is higher than what even the wider road can handle. As long as the new road can handle t…
That's technically true, but it assumes away the core, ever-present problems:
- It may not be physically possible to add enough lanes to e.g. handle everyone who would ever want to commute into L.A.
- Even if that road was correctly sized, it still has to dump the traffic into the next road, through the next intersection point. If you've increased the capacity of the freeway but none of smaller road networks that the traffic transitions to, you've just moved the bottleneck, not eliminated it. And that too may be physically impossible.
In any practical situation car transportation efficiency does not scale well enough that you can avoid addressing the demand side.
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#376Kudos to the author for making the post readable using a 32kbps connection. My apartment does not have a landline, not to mention any other form of wired communication, so my internet connection is relegated to a Wi-Fi router that's separated by two walls(friendly neighbour) and a GSM modem that, after using the paltry 14GB of transfer it provides, falls back to a 32kbps connection. Things that work in these circumst…
> - Slack(ok, this one sort of works, but is not consistent).
Use the IRC bridge. It's a lot easier on your bandwidth/resources.
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This sounds like the reason widening roads doesn't usually ease congestion. It usually does actually. What is happening there is that you have different demand levels at different congestion levels. If you alleviate some congestion by widening the road then demand goes up. That is only a problem if the demand without congestion is higher than what even the wider road can handle. As long as the new road can handle t…
That's technically true, but it assumes away the core, ever-present problems: - It may not be physically possible to add enough lanes to e.g. handle everyone who would ever want to commute into L.A. - Even if that road was correctly sized, it still has to dump the traffic into the next road, through the next intersection point. If you've increased the capacity of the freeway but none of smaller road networks that the…
It isn't physically impossible to use eminent domain to seize all the property around the roads and then build 32 lane roads all over Los Angeles.
That is a separate question from how stupid that is in comparison to the alternative of building higher density residential housing closer to where people work and with better mass transit.
But if people don't want to do that either, you have to pick your poison.
And there really are many cases (Los Angeles notwithstanding) where adding one lane isn't enough but adding two is and where that genuinely is the most reasonable option.
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people naively assume that if you can use a resource more efficiently, then total use will go down, "because you don't need as much, right?" See: the entire popular support for efficiency mandates. (Edit: Also, this very example -- I certainly didn't expect that a faster site would allow that many more users: my model was more "either they want to see your site, or they don't", i.e. inelastic demand.) The (c…
This sounds like the reason widening roads doesn't usually ease congestion. Which, really, can be summed up by my favorite Yogi Berra-ism "No one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded."
all the cars on this new lane are not on another road adding to the traffic tho. Maybe it eases the traffic elsewhere There is a finite amount of cars after all
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is the same anecdote: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters
One wonders how a user that takes 2 minutes to load 98KB is actually able to watch a video. Even by the most optimistic estimations, a video that is a few minutes long at 480p will weigh in at 10 megabytes, meaning it'll take them OVER 3 HOURS to download the entire thing. You would probably be able to browse (slowly), read comments, but not actually do much else.
> Even by the most optimistic estimations, a video that is a few minutes long at 480p will weigh in at 10 megabytes, meaning it'll take them OVER 3 HOURS to download the entire thing.
Right there in the same link, it says that the video page was a megabyte. It's the sentence directly after the 'two minutes' but. The sentence even has some 'all caps' words in it - even skimming, your eye is drawn to it. Why on earth did you stop reading halfway through the penultimate paragraph?
Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah when I used to run over my T-Mobile data allotment (in the US) and they dropped me to whatever speed they throttle you to when your "high speed" data is gone, Google Maps wouldn't load, Facebook wouldn't load, YouTube wouldn't load. I remember using all of those things back in the days when a 3G connection was a luxury, back when Windows was the best smartphone platform. What happened between then and now that s…
High paying customers are going to have high speed connections. No one will talk about it, but it's discrimination. If you are on a slow connection, they don't want your kind on their site. If you try, they will mock you for not knowing your place.
It seems more plausible to me that they just don't want to take the trouble to support low-bandwidth connections than that they're actively pumping up the space to keep out poor people.