Ah, the efficiency of American technology. Why bother with efficiency
when the user has unlimited speed, unlimited memory, and unlimited patience? I
took two terms of numerical analysis where I earned how to write code that
minimized code, execution time, and error accumulation. When the IBM PC first
appeared with its six significant digits in single precision, that became an
asset. Which is why I chose the Atari 800 as my PC, as it had ten significant
digits. It gave better results when decomposing large matrices.
But, back to telecom efficiency. I cannot watch a single American news
service (ABC, CBS, NBC, etc.) on dialup because they all have imbedded high
resolution graphics and videos in the top page, and they want to download them
all at once instead of in sequence. Just to watch a local news source will
take hours.
On the other hand, the BBC, CBC, and ABC (Australian) for examples only
have low resolution thumbnails on their top pages, and you click on those to
get the "real stuff". The BBC World and Home pages take at most 60 seconds to
fully download. Our local ABC outlet would still be a blank page at 60 seconds.
American web page designers want to be as high-tech as possible to impress
themselves, the users, and the rest of the world, while others want to convey
information to the lowest common denominator, such as those with dialup service.
>
>> Since Windstream owns the modems and both Earthlink and Copper.net
>>lease them, I suspect that it was a Windstream equipment failure, such
>>as someone pulling the cord out of the wall socket.
>
>Not exactly. But there are MANY ways to accomplish the same task.
>
>One of the major changes in the telecom industry is the conversion to
>"soft switches" for the POTS. For the first 20 years of that
>conversion, we did pretty much a one for one replacement with some
>consolidation where it made sense. Over the past three years, the
>industry has changed to consolidate voice switches in such a way that
>geographical location no longer means anything. A person making a
>local phone call in Phoenix to another person in Phoenix might be
>having their voice call routed through Atlanta and Chicago before
>getting back to Phoenix.
>
Chris
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro
- Hunter S. Thompson
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