171–180 of 186 posts
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Cloudflare's undercounts my download by 25% and my upload by 75% (versus both speedtest.net and my observed sustained data rates). Also reports double the latency.
Undercounts it by what barometer?
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Your argument is sound. It certainly takes a good deal of skill to create good code. And yes, good code makes it easier to create a better product. And yes it's easier to build a better company on a better product. But history is littered with "worse products" that won in the marketplace. It turns out that all the attributes you name are helpful but not necessary . Good marketing trumps good product. We see this over…
> So, assuming we can all make "good enough" code Your entire argument hinges on "good enough". Problem is: you can never know if something is "good enough", except in hindsight for those products that succeeded. I'm upvoting you because your comment is well made, and certainly common, even if it is nothing more than a tautology :)
The problem with presenting good examples is that decades of sustained marketing is hard to overcome even with facts which are immediately obvious. Indeed good marketing has already negated those facts.
For example smoking is objectively terrible and yet was (and is) very popular for decades. Tobacco might be out, but vaping is still cool; same message as before.
From outside its easy to spot US examples because their absurdity is obvious to outsiders. It's harder to see examples in one's own society (because we have our own marketers.)
In software land there is obviously lots and lots of complete rubbish. Most of it gets no marketing at all. But is Windows the best OS? Is Chrome the best browser? Is Google the best search engine? Is Facebook the best social network?
Or do each of those have a competitor with "better code" that has no marketing and gets no traction?
When IBM hooked up with MS was it because of good code? When Sun bought MySql was it for the customer base, and Brand, or the code?
Did Facebook buy WhatsApp for 18 billion because of the code? Fo you think they compared the code to some other messenger with 100 users, or did the 400 million people using WhatsApp matter more?
In truth every product you ever heard of, and ever used, was good enough. Github is full of projects with really great code and no users.
There's a fundamental disconnect between business people and codesmiths. The programmer wants another year to craft perfection. The business needs to start selling and earning next week.
Good code lasts longer, and is better for the company in the long run. Engineers know this. Companies know they have to ship, and sell and earn, to survive at all. Engineers sneer at marketing, the product should be good enough. (Tell that to Amiga.) Marketeers are frustrated by Engineers who want to build forever and never ship. (Any wonder they want to replace us with AI.)
Yes AI products are objectively worse. But if history tells us anything; that doesn't matter.
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For Swedish users: https://www.bredbandskollen.se/ >
Finnish https://bittimittari.fi/en/measurement
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All it takes to defeat the business model is https://openspeedtest.com/
evidently putting “open” in the name of a website doesn’t suddenly make it not-bad.
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All it takes to defeat the business model is https://openspeedtest.com/
Or https://speed.cloudflare.com/
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Apple has their own internal speed app due to privacy concerns.
And on macOS Apple has `networkQuality` on the command line which runs a speed test against presumably the iCloud servers
• ussea4-edge-fx-012.aaplimg.com
• mensura.cdn-apple.com/api/v1/gm/large
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Same for me: download was okay, upload was completely wrong
My very limited experience in this space is that measuring uploads is actually quite a bit trickier and harder to nail down than download speeds
I am not sure why this old news is surfacing here today but I can give my 2 cents, since I sold speedchecker.com last year and were directly competing with Ookla. The main business is selling the data. You use Speedtest.net to troubleshoot your connection but metrics captured with the test alongside location data give telcos invaluable insights on where they should improve their networks. Telcos pay 6 figures annuall…