OT - Internet and on-line booking questions for the group

"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
news:QiFtd.157408$V41.134990@attbi_s52...
I turn once again to you, the great internet gurus of aviation, for
answers
to the mysteries of the web...

Yesterday NPR announced that only a third of internet users are connected
at
high speed, using either DSL or cable. This truly surprised me, and I'm
absolutely amazed that so few people have made the jump to high-speed
internet -- I could never, ever go back to dial-up, and have been on cable
modem for years.

Because of this rather shocking statistic I instantly redesigned our
webpage
so that the home page is smaller and opens more quickly. (According to
what
Frontpage was telling me, it would have taken several minutes to open over
a
28.8 modem!) It never dawned on me to design the page for dial-up,
because
I thought slow connections were on there way out!

WEBSITE QUESTIONS for the group, if you please:
**************************************************
1. Does anyone know what the average speed modem is being used by the 70%
of
people still using dial-up?

I'm still on dialup (56K). Heck, I'm still on rabbit ears. I really only
regularly use the internet for email, so broadband wouldn't really be all
that advantagous. It would help with large attachments and software updates,
but I find ways around it and I have broadband at work. Where I live, the
only option right now is cable; no DSL. High speed internet is not a good
value for me, it doesn't fit my use profile.


2. I hear people say that Java is "evil" all the time -- yet it seems that
every cool effect on a webpage requires Java. What is bad about Java
scripting? How about "Flashmedia"?


I don't know much about these technologies, but I know a lot about using
them. I CAN'T STAND web designs which try desparately to be cool or fancy.
The ones with intro pages with stuff flying all over the place and
sounds/music drive me crazy not to mention the fact that they take too long
to load on my home machine. Also, if I am surfing at work, I avoid the
websites that are visually loud because they attract attention. Most really
professional websites are crisp, efficient and somewhat subdued.


An ON-LINE BOOKING question for the group, if you please:
**************************************************
How many of you guys actually make real-time, on-line hotel reservations?
My gut feel has always been that we would eventually have to jump on this
band-wagon, because more and more people are booking on-line. However,
this
newly released figure, showing such low high-speed internet usage, really
makes me wonder if people are actually using on-line bookings much, or if
this is a tiny minority using it only occasionally.

I use online bookings quite a bit. My dialup connection has nothing to do
with my ability to use the internet to reserve airline tickets, hotel rooms,
rental cars, or to simply buy things. I have done all these things many many
times. Compared to my high speed connection at work, it probably only takes
a couple of minutes longer for me to these operations at home vs.at work,
which isn't much.

If I have a special request, I like to use the phone. But even if I use the
phone, I go to Expedia (my favorite right now) and look up which hotels are
around the area that I am visiting, put them on a map and decide which
hotels I will consider due to proximity to my area of interest. I find that
if a hotel isn't in Expedia, I won't know it is there. One problem I find is
that sometimes Expedia doesn't give the local phone number of the hotel.
This is irritating. I will also use other hotel finders to see if I am
missing a good hotel, so I am not fixated on Expedia.

HTH,

-Trent
PP-ASEL