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

Jay Honeck wrote:
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.

As others have said, availability is limited in a lot of areas. We've had
it available for a long time, but only made the switch to cable internet
about 6 months ago, so my wife could VPN to work. Up till then, I felt
that dialup was "good enough". Of course, I'm hooked to the internet all
day long at work. Our connection at the beach is still dialup, so I
don't surf much on weekends.


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!

I'm a big advocate of designing web sites for modem use. I feel that most
people don't really need to spend the extra money for broadband. If
broadband prices eventually drop to dialup levels and become universally
available, then that'll be a different situation. I maintain two small
web pages (http://www.oc-adolfos.com and http://www.oceancityairport.com)
and have intentially made them "simple" in order to allow faster loading
over dialup. I could have made them fancier, but why? They provide the
information I want to provide, and that's the important thing.


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

I suspect the average 56K modem is connecting at somwhere between 33.6K
and 48K

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've been running my browsers with Java disabled for many years. It
hasn't seemed to effect the "quality" of my web browsing. I'm sure that
I'm missing an occasional animated applet, but I figure it's safer from a
security standpoint to disable it. I do allow javascript and flash, and
I realize that they could potentially cause similar problems (malicious
code), but I take the chance with those. As others have pointed out, the
probem with Java, javascript and flash is that the code is executing on
your computer, instead of the web server. Java applets and Flash also
have the secondary "problem" of sometimes being rather large downloads
into your computer, prior to executing (which is also a dialup concern).


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 rarely travel, but when I do, I book over the internet exclusively.

--- Jay




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Jay and Teresa Masino ___(_)___
http://www2.ari.net/jmasino ! ! !
http://www.oceancityairport.com
http://www.oc-adolfos.com