Bristol, UK, Harbourside website, Comments please ?

[William Tasso]

Where do you shop? Harrods?


A pint is usually about £2.50 where I live (West London).

Mr Inkster, you are splitting hairs. If I had enough to spare, I'd join
you.

I know a
place in Kensington where you can get a pint for under £1.50.

me too, but I also know plenty places where beer costs more than £3.00

Or 2.

Please, I am referring to bread, not that ersatz splodge than is sold in the
brightly coloured plastic bags.

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

I don't - except in dire circumstances.

 

[Charles Sweeney]

I got speeds of 9600 bytes per second.

Still do Toby with Orange's standard data calls. I also have GPRS with them
which isn't much quicker. Last time I checked, they also had a "high speed"
connection which just about amounted to dial-up speed.

 

[Charles Sweeney]

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.

Very interesting. Amazing how things change in a few months!

 

[Charles Sweeney]

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!)

I pay £25 per month for broadband, Blueyonder/Telewest cable.

I had to take my phone line with them too, at £10 per month.

As you suggest, I was already paying a line rental to BT, plus their dial-up
Anytime service, or whatever it's called. So some of this cost is marginal.

I wasn't obliged to take the TV service, which was convenient because I
don't have a TV!

 

[Charles Sweeney]

me too, but I also know plenty places where beer costs more than £3.00

Get you lot with your Kensington watering holes, pah!!

I twice had coffee at a pavement cafe in South Kensington. Only two months
left on the payments.

 

[William Tasso]

Get you lot with your Kensington watering holes, pah!!

I twice had coffee at a pavement cafe in South Kensington. Only two
months left on the payments.

Kensington is a big borough (burgh to you) - has a bio-diversity all of its
own. Done that way deliberately so the posh totty know how to find a bit of
rough.

 

[{R}]

In uk.net.web.authoring on 17 Apr 2004 04:49:44 GMT, Eric Bohlman

}And, to bring the discussion back to Earth, latency is independent of
}bandwidth,

Yes.

}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.

Total rubbish; the speed of loading of any site is almost directly
proportional to the available bandwidth, up to the point where there is
some other limiting factor.

{R}

 

[mark | r]

some nice touches but it looks disjointed...

mark

 

[Neal]

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

If web design is going to become advertising design, no one will stay.

Besides, an ad is meant to get you interested in a product or service. If
they come to your website, they likely already are interested. Why waste
resources on a Flash advertisement when they are already in the store?

 

[Jim Ley]

There's a break point where the speed is high enough to enjoy full screen
multimedia and still have it download instantly.

Except of course a local PVR is a much more likely model to win that
battle, it works with the same equipment people are used to matching
video on, and has some of the largest and most successful marketing
companies behind it.

On demand video, isn't even being pushed by my local cableco.

We have 2mbit cable here in
Edinburgh, for about £50 a month. We can happily watch full-screen video
with no waiting, and have other machines in our house surf perfectly
uninterupted too. Try doing that on a 512k or 256k line...

Why would I want to waste the bandwidth - 2mb isn't really good enough
for decent video + audio, it's adequate, but nothing more.

Everyone is resistant to change... but when the net becomes just another
thing you do from the TV,

Oops, that's highly unlikely to happen (video on demand maybe, but the
internet one, TV's are passive, the internet is an active medium)

Pretty much all cellphones coming out now are broadband

Er, no. It's near impossible to get a broadband data-connection,
there are no EDGE services in the UK, and few phones are enabled
anyway, and the 3G data service is limited to the thames valley and
London, then it just rolls over to GPRS rates.

A cellphone and a TV also require very different things, so your
conclusion that the net becomes something you do from the TV somewhat
jars with the mobilephone reference.

Jim.

 

[Jim Ley]

it's better than a library though...it's a library with a tea room
containing a huge range of experts on various subjects

They also don't mind if you shout, and are much more relaxed about
requiring clothing.

Jim.

 

[Jim Ley]

A-hem, if I may jump in here? While even I recognise that
access to broadband is not universal I note that at least
here broadband is now becvomming widely available on mobile
devices. Cards are out there that enable hand helds and
laptops to connect via broadband using the mobile phone
system.

The only solution available in the UK on this vodaphones, it'll cost
you around 100 UKP per month for 1GB downloaded + 50p MB thereafter,
download speeds within london and thames valley will be up 300kbs,
upload speed is comparable to dialup - so latency can be pretty high.
All other areas are covered by GPRS, so speed is comparable to dialup.

Jim.

 

[Bill Logan]

Still do Toby with Orange's standard data calls. I also have GPRS with them
which isn't much quicker. Last time I checked, they also had a "high speed"
connection which just about amounted to dial-up speed.

That is to be expected with GPRS which is only 2.5G
technology.

The new mobile system being used here with vodaphone is 3G
run on WCDMA/UMTS
which does deliver speeds between 1.5Gbps and 2Gbps.

I understand Europe is going to be using the same system but
I think the UK has gone the other way, like our Telecom
which is using GPRS combining it with EDGE which does not
deliver the same speeds as WCDMA/UMTS

 

[Jim Ley]

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.

There is no dataservice available from 3 - whilst yes you can get data
at the 384kbps, it's walled garden data, and it costs per MB, you
cannot access the general internet on a 3 phone, (yet)

Voda is your only option, and then not over much of the country, and
it's considerably more expensive than the above rates.

Jim.

 

[Jim Ley]

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

c'mon every wetherspoons in west London is at the 1.90 mark, members
clubs also abound.

Jim.

 

[Jim Ley]

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...

No, you're comparing a shop that targets a particular segment of a
community which specifically wants style - they are a subset of people
and the union of those and the wealthy is not 1-1, it's simply that
it's only worth marketing to those style focussed people who are also
wealthy, since they're the only ones who can afford it.

Jim.

 

[Bill Logan]

Except of course a local PVR is a much more likely model to win that
battle, it works with the same equipment people are used to matching
video on, and has some of the largest and most successful marketing
companies behind it.

On demand video, isn't even being pushed by my local cableco. line...

Why would I want to waste the bandwidth - 2mb isn't really good enough
for decent video + audio, it's adequate, but nothing more.


Oops, that's highly unlikely to happen (video on demand maybe, but the
internet one, TV's are passive, the internet is an active medium)

Er, no. It's near impossible to get a broadband data-connection,
there are no EDGE services in the UK, and few phones are enabled
anyway, and the 3G data service is limited to the thames valley and
London, then it just rolls over to GPRS rates.

A cellphone and a TV also require very different things, so your
conclusion that the net becomes something you do from the TV somewhat
jars with the mobilephone reference.

In the UK perhaps, other parts of the world are already
using the mentioned technologies country wide.

 

[Eric Jarvis]

They also don't mind if you shout, and are much more relaxed about
requiring clothing.

you still in the southern hemisphere, Jim?...because right now in sarf
Lunnon there's no way of relaxing about clothing unless you stay under the
duvet whilst using the computer

erm...well yes...doesn't everyone have computer access from their bed
these days?

 

[Jim Ley]

you still in the southern hemisphere, Jim?...because right now in sarf
Lunnon there's no way of relaxing about clothing unless you stay under the
duvet whilst using the computer

You need to come further west obviously, 'cos I am in London at the
moment (although I may well be leaving in about a month) and it's been
too hot for duvet's for a fair while.

erm...well yes...doesn't everyone have computer access from their bed
these days?

computer yes, I have 2, no net access other than GPRS though.

Jim.

 

[Owen Rees]

In uk.net.web.authoring on 17 Apr 2004 04:49:44 GMT, Eric Bohlman
}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.

Total rubbish; the speed of loading of any site is almost directly
proportional to the available bandwidth, up to the point where there is
some other limiting factor.

Eric is right that breaking the page content into a large number of
pieces slows things down.

There are at least two factors involved. Firstly, there is an overhead
of headers in the download direction for each piece, so the total data
that has to be downloaded to retrieve the same effective content is
larger. Three is also more to be uploaded in the multiple requests, but
that may happen in parallel with things being downloaded, so not make a
significant difference.

Secondly, even if you are using HTTP 1.1 and keeping the TCP connection
open, there is an extra round trip of request and response for each
piece that is serialised after one of the others in the download. If you
were to open 100 new connections to retrieve the 100 images, you would
gain some parallelism, but that is generally considered to be an evil
thing to do. If you are not keeping the TCP connection open, but using
the older approach of closing the connection after each request, the TCP
three way connection handshake and slow start mechanism will add a lot
more delay if you limit yourself to a moderate number of connections.

If you have a very high bandwidth connection to the server, the
additional overhead associated with sliced images is very obvious. I
have observed this with a page that contained an image sliced into 45
pieces on one page, and loaded as a single image on another page, both
being retrieved over a 100Mb LAN. The difference was so great that the
page was redesigned to use the single image rather than the slices.

Bandwidth may be the most common limiting factor for WAN connections,
and for the sites that are created in practice, but it is not hard to
make the other factors dominate under some conditions.