
U.S. Net access not all that speedy ("Pathetic") - gibsonf1
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2007-06-25-net-speeds_N.htm
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willarson
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.

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far33d
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
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.

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tx
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.

