ivan: scribbles: On Dial-Up and Being Content

April 20, 2004

on dial-up and being content

The dweebats posting on Slashdot think that dial-up users are ignorant twads; that is, judging from their responses to the recent reference to the NY Times survey. From the article:

In a survey taken in February, the Pew project found that 60 percent of dial-up users said they were not interested in switching to broadband, roughly the same result as in a February 2003 survey.

And Slashdot's comments are the typical bray and neighing of hoo-haa and penis warring about the virtues of broadband.

I use dial-up at home, and I'm fine with it. Here in Japan, I make use of WiFi, which is all neat and dandy but dial-up would be fine too.

I've been on DSL (ah, good ol' NorthPoint), and I've been on T1; and I don't must-needto-haveto have broadband. This is mighty similar to folks who tell you to buy the biggest baddest fastest computers. I don't need all that jazz; I wouldn't use it.

I consider myself a relatively tech-savvy fellow, and I'm not ignorant about the workings of these things; I just make a choice based on what I need. I didn't need anything faster than my Pentium 166 until sometime in 2001 (maybe I still don't, hmm). Linux was extremely effective and met all my needs perfectly without having to shell out extra money upgrading to the shiniest new toy.

I'm not a big-time gamer (well, just occasionally), I'm not a multimedia factory, and I sometimes just want an clean all-text console interface (dealing with windowed environments can slow me down, especially when coding).

Comments

It's pretty funny. Just a week ago, Slashdot dweebats were ranting how people should stop watching TV (oh nos, the evil brainwashing TV) and do something more productive like read a book. And yet they rail against people with dialup, who probably only log onto the internet to check email and do productive things with all the time they're offline like...read a book.

I was going to rant about Slashdot idiocy/hypocrisy on my webpage, but I thought better of it. They're not worth my time. I'm not sure why I still go there; I wish there was another site with news for geeks.

#172 - Posted by: Andy at April 22, 2004 02:27 AM

Hehe, I remember reading a lot when I used my 486 on 14.4 waiting for downloads and rebooting Windows95 (which was often...). When first I got on T1, I was actually complaining a bit about not having enough reading time.

The signal:noise on /.'s been dwindling for quite some time, and I stopped reading comments regularly for a couple years now. Actually, I don't even think I read most of the headlines; using RSS power(woo!), I just sift through the ones that catch my eye, which is something like 1-2 a day.

I remember going to a talk at Cal a while back about how people who want to be real techies working in the techie world should read /. regularly, and ignore the comments. Dude also said that if you want to make money, you should be a dentist--not a a Computer Science major. Really, it's still a good site to get your daily fill of geek news from. I don't read the comments on articles where I already know the response of the /. crowd; I do occasionally get to comments when I'm curious about what the folks are thinking.

Anyhow, back to the matter at hand: dial-up is all some people need!

#173 - Posted by: Ivan at April 22, 2004 03:23 AM