Bristol, UK, Harbourside website, Comments please ?

[Eric Bohlman]

The word you are searching for is: latency

And, to bring the discussion back to Earth, latency is independent of
bandwidth, so a page that's got 100 images (spacers, sliced images, images
of text, etc.) is going to be slow to load regardless of how fast a
connection the user has.

 

[William Tasso]

...
What is a conspiracy called when it becomes reality?:-(

"Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security, will not
have, nor do they deserve, either one"
~ Thomas Jefferson

 

[William Tasso]

...
them - or even when it comes to the type of web user who
would not take part - even if not rich.

depends how one defines 'rich'

wealth isn't (currently) a major factor in defining broadband usage.

UK costs are (average) £30/month or £1 per day. a fee that is well within
reach of any working adult (e&oe)

What else does £1 buy ...
o 5 cigarettes
o 1/3 pint beer
o 1 liter petrol
o 1/2lb butter
o 1 loaf bread
o 1 tin cola
o 10 minutes parking (central London)
o Sunday newspaper

 

[Bill Logan]

"Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security, will not
have, nor do they deserve, either one"
~ Thomas Jefferson

I just know this is OT but - given the above, what 'has'
happened to america?

 

[Barry Pearson]

Eric Bohlman wrote:
[snip]

Jakob Nielsen and others have actually studied Web users by using eye-
tracking equipment. They've discovered a rather interesting thing
about a lot of the visual elements that designers claim make their
pages more exciting and are therefore worth the increased load time:
the users' eyes never land on them. If the user is asked why, the
response is usually "I thought it was an ad."

I don't know how far the following supprts that. It probably does. But it is
very illuminating reading, based on lots of research. (The first link is the
one-page "print" version).

Criteria for optimal web design (designing for usability)
By Michael L Bernard

http://psychology.wichita.edu/optimalweb/print.htm

http://psychology.wichita.edu/optimalweb/

 

[Barry Pearson]

William Tasso wrote:
[snip]

wealth isn't (currently) a major factor in defining broadband usage.

UK costs are (average) £30/month or £1 per day. a fee that is well
within reach of any working adult (e&oe)

[snip]

Is that what you actually pay, or the marginal extra cost?

I suspect it may be the actual cost, and not take into account that you would
be paying for dial-up anyway.

I came to the conclusion that, since I got cheaper phone calls as well, cable
broadband may even work out no more expensive. (Unfortunately, I had to get
cable TV first!)

 

[Barry Pearson]

Bill Logan wrote:
[snip]

What is a conspiracy called when it becomes reality?:-(

"The delusional rantings of a paranoid conspiracy theorist" (government
spokesperson).

"The truth" (dictionary).

 

[Barry Pearson]

Eric Bohlman wrote:
[snip]

And, to bring the discussion back to Earth, latency is independent of
bandwidth, so a page that's got 100 images (spacers, sliced images,
images of text, etc.) is going to be slow to load regardless of how
fast a connection the user has.

In theory, you can use parallelism to exploit bandwidth, despite the latency
effects, to reduce the problem of having 100 things to do.

In practice, I assume this gets limited to about 2 or 4 things at a time.

 

[William Tasso]

William Tasso wrote:
[snip]

wealth isn't (currently) a major factor in defining broadband usage.

UK costs are (average) £30/month or £1 per day. a fee that is well
within reach of any working adult (e&oe)

[snip]

Is that what you actually pay, or the marginal extra cost?

I based that on a straw poll of advertised aDSL services.

I suspect it may be the actual cost, and not take into account that
you would be paying for dial-up anyway.

Correct - It doesn't take into account that dial up costs would disappear.

I came to the conclusion that, since I got cheaper phone calls as
well, cable broadband may even work out no more expensive.

I moved from ISDN to aDSL - the cost saving was considerable.

(Unfortunately, I had to get cable TV first!)

A family conference has just decided to dump CATV in favour of the
Terrestrial top-up (http://www.topup.tv) service for this household.

 

[Toby A Inkster]

Amoungst the better options here is the like of Walker
wireless or Vodaphone who now offer GPRS so we are talking
about speeds in the range of 1.5 - 2 Mbps which is as fast
if not faster than the average home broadband user gets?

Things have progressed a bit since late '99, early 2000 when I used to
connect my desktop computer to the Internet via my mobile phone (no land
line). I got speeds of 9600 bytes per second.

 

[Toby A Inkster]

What else does £1 buy ...

Where do you shop? Harrods?

o 1/3 pint beer

A pint is usually about £2.50 where I live (West London). I know a place
in Kensington where you can get a pint for under £1.50.

o 1 loaf bread

Or 2.

o 1 tin cola

Or 2. (Or 3 or 4 if you go to a supermarket.)

 

[2gy76s]

On Fri, 16 Apr 2004 17:12:50 GMT, "Andrew Banks"

[To 2gy76s, please don't snip attribution lines as they are there for
a good reason.]

Hee, sorry about that!

 

[Eric Jarvis]

A pint is usually about £2.50 where I live (West London). I know a place
in Kensington where you can get a pint for under £1.50.

I wonder if it's the same place I know?

 

[SpaceGirl]

broadband using the mobile phone

News to me Mr Logan. A wee link perhaps?

I looked into this with my own phone provider, Orange, not so long ago.
Also looked at some others.

The fastest service just about came up to normal dial-up speed.

3G networks range from 150kbps to a couple of megabits per second. You can
go out and buy a "3" phone right now from any highstreet shop; they run the
net at 384kbps - not bad for £25 a month. Vodaphone launched it's own
service last week, but there's no indication yet how fast that is - plus
it's currently limited to plug in cards for laptops, not phone services.

 

[SpaceGirl]

you just got to be kidding

No... why? We do our monthly shops online. We don't have a car... Lots of
big stores now do online shopping for groceries and home delivery. It costs
£8 to come home by taxi from Tescos, or £5 for their home delivery service.
We'd be mad not to! (Plus, it's nice not to do the mall zombie thing...
makes your brain melt).

 

[SpaceGirl]

You've got to be careful here. The company may have a big fat pipe to the
Internet, but that pipe might well be shared by thousands or tens of
thousands of users.

I doubt there are any cells quite that big. Even bog standard cheepo DSL
offers a 50/1 ratio. We're lucky here in that our block has it's own cell
for 10 apartments - so we get 10/1 ratio at 2Mbit.

And do you have evidence that what "appeals to the wealthy" is lots of
gimcracks?

Not 'gimcracks', but style over content. Of course it works. Have you ever
looked around Harvey Nicks? It looks a lot nicer that George at Asda...

Jakob Nielsen and others have actually studied Web users by using eye-
tracking equipment. They've discovered a rather interesting thing about a
lot of the visual elements that designers claim make their pages more
exciting and are therefore worth the increased load time: the users' eyes
never land on them. If the user is asked why, the response is usually "I
thought it was an ad."

Nielsen is a hack... He always focuses on the small things while totally
missing the big picture.

 

[SpaceGirl]

On Fri, 16 Apr 2004 17:12:50 GMT, "Andrew Banks"

[To 2gy76s, please don't snip attribution lines as they are there for
a good reason.]

Well that just bollocks for a start

Your comment is, within this context, bollocks. How am I, as a
user, meant to bookmark an individual page/frame within a Flash
"site"/animation? Oh, sorry, am I not allowed to do that? Do I have to
go back to YOUR "entrance page" each time I want to look at a specific
page within the "site". How do I view the site with graphics off and a
text-only display, for either bandwidth or visibility issues? Flash,
used in this - broken - manner *is* user-UNfriendly.

Flash can be used sensibly, as can cars and guns. However, in this
case, the use of Flash shows that the "designer" either knows SFA
about the web medium for which they are, supposedly, designing or they
just don't care and have good liability insurance in place. Either
this was designed by an over-paid BS'er or a kiddie. Neither of which
are likely to have read the recent press articles about discriminating
websites.

After a quick browse, I don't see anything that (aside from the
pointless slide-in/out's) could not have been achieved with an
accessible HTML layout.

Really... and if you think of the site as an advert, what then? Tell me, can
you bookmark commercials on TV?

 

[Dave]

Really... and if you think of the site as an advert, what then? Tell me, can
you bookmark commercials on TV?

Of course you can, quite a few years ago someone invented something
called a video recorder, perhaps you've heard of them ;p
--

 

[SpaceGirl]

Of course you can, quite a few years ago someone invented something
called a video recorder, perhaps you've heard of them ;p
--

LOL okay *sighs*

 

[William Tasso]

No... why? We do our monthly shops online. We don't have a car...
Lots of big stores now do online shopping for groceries and home
delivery. It costs £8 to come home by taxi from Tescos, or £5 for
their home delivery service. We'd be mad not to!

of course, but think of commuters and all their dead-time sitting on or
waiting for trains/buses etc.

(Plus, it's nice not
to do the mall zombie thing... makes your brain melt).

except in summer when the best views are to be had lurking amongst the chill
cabinets.