You can yell all you want for the advertisers to "just go away", but the problem is, the collective "we" that use the Internet DEMANDED that monster, with our insistence on free services everywhere.
I don't like the ad banners a bit, but I also realize I'm grown used to the idea of visiting my choice of tech or news sites without paying monthly subscription fees. I use several free email sites, and I've got a places that host my photo collections for free and keep backups of 2GB or so of my files for free.
I've been on the internet since 1984. Back then, there was all kinds of discussion and many, many 'services' and info. And guess how it all got there? Why, what do you know? It was done out of the kindness of people's hearts.
Then about 1988, the marketers showed up. It's been downhill ever since.
So can humans do things for each other just to be nice? Yes, as long as those humans don't include marketing assholes.
I've been on the internet since 1984. Back then, there was all kinds of discussion and many, many 'services' and info. And guess how it all got there? Why, what do you know? It was done out of the kindness of people's hearts.
Right, sure, because you can deploy a massive service like gmail to millions and millions of people out of the "kindness of people's hearts".
Seriously, dude, get out of your mom's fucking basement and learn to live in the real world. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars building a
To be fair, the guy is correct about how the net worked back around '84. But like you say, there were FAR fewer regular users back then, and most content was plain ASCII text, suitable for transfer via dial-up modem speeds.
As you scale everything up, costs increase.
Also, I'd argue that an awful lot of those "free" services you saw on the net back in the mid 80's were FAR from free. They were simply being funded by your tax dollars or by the tuition dollars of students, since much of it was built and hoste
In general, as you scale up, costs go down due to economies of scale.
The costs of actually moving bits around have gone way down since the 80s -- I now have a ~4,700,000 bps (according to speedtest.net) WiMax link for less (counting for inflation) than I paid in the late 1980s for a phone line I could only use to move data at 2,400 bps. (9,600 and 56k modems didn't come into common usage for ordinary folks until the 1990s.) Improvement: a factor of over 1,900.
The costs of storage are tremendously lower. Back in 1988 or so my first hard disk cost on the order of $200. It held 30 MB -- 30,000,000 bytes. One can get terrabyte disks -- 1,000,000,000,000 bytes -- now, for less money. Improvement: over 33,000 times.
And the costs of twiddling bits are far, far lower than they were in the late 80s. My first PC operated at 8 MHz -- "Turbo" mode. My current box, old and pokey as it is, runs at 2210 Mhz. Let's say the overall cost was roughly the same, though I remember my dad paying something on the order of $5,000 for our first PC. (A Victor 9000 [oldcomputers.net] that could run both CP/M and MS-DOS, wow!) Improvement, over 270 times -- and that's not counting the improvement in what gets done per tick. My current box rates 4420.08 BogoMIPS [wikipedia.org]; using the conversions at that article, my * MHz "Turbo" PC would have rated about.032 BogoMIPS. Improvement: over 138,000 times.
True, but you're only looking at the "how many bytes can I move/store for my dollar" aspect of things. The problem is, everything on the content side was exponentially increasing at the same time!
EG. Despite the vast improvement in Internet transfer speeds over what my 2400 or 9600BPS modem could do - I still wind up able to read the typical web-based message forum at about the same speed I could read online BBS forum content back then! Why? Because when all the content was straight ASCII text, even 240
Felson's Law:
To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from
many is research.
re: Just go away (Score:5, Insightful)
You can yell all you want for the advertisers to "just go away", but the problem is, the collective "we" that use the Internet DEMANDED that monster, with our insistence on free services everywhere.
I don't like the ad banners a bit, but I also realize I'm grown used to the idea of visiting my choice of tech or news sites without paying monthly subscription fees. I use several free email sites, and I've got a places that host my photo collections for free and keep backups of 2GB or so of my files for free.
That's the way it was. (Score:5, Insightful)
Then about 1988, the marketers showed up. It's been downhill ever since.
So can humans do things for each other just to be nice? Yes, as long as those humans don't include marketing assholes.
Re: (Score:-1, Troll)
I've been on the internet since 1984. Back then, there was all kinds of discussion and many, many 'services' and info. And guess how it all got there? Why, what do you know? It was done out of the kindness of people's hearts.
Right, sure, because you can deploy a massive service like gmail to millions and millions of people out of the "kindness of people's hearts".
Seriously, dude, get out of your mom's fucking basement and learn to live in the real world. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars building a
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
To be fair, the guy is correct about how the net worked back around '84. But like you say, there were FAR fewer regular users back then, and most content was plain ASCII text, suitable for transfer via dial-up modem speeds.
As you scale everything up, costs increase.
Also, I'd argue that an awful lot of those "free" services you saw on the net back in the mid 80's were FAR from free. They were simply being funded by your tax dollars or by the tuition dollars of students, since much of it was built and hoste
Re:That's the way it was. (Score:1)
In general, as you scale up, costs go down due to economies of scale.
The costs of actually moving bits around have gone way down since the 80s -- I now have a ~4,700,000 bps (according to speedtest.net) WiMax link for less (counting for inflation) than I paid in the late 1980s for a phone line I could only use to move data at 2,400 bps. (9,600 and 56k modems didn't come into common usage for ordinary folks until the 1990s.) Improvement: a factor of over 1,900.
The costs of storage are tremendously lower. Back in 1988 or so my first hard disk cost on the order of $200. It held 30 MB -- 30,000,000 bytes. One can get terrabyte disks -- 1,000,000,000,000 bytes -- now, for less money. Improvement: over 33,000 times.
And the costs of twiddling bits are far, far lower than they were in the late 80s. My first PC operated at 8 MHz -- "Turbo" mode. My current box, old and pokey as it is, runs at 2210 Mhz. Let's say the overall cost was roughly the same, though I remember my dad paying something on the order of $5,000 for our first PC. (A Victor 9000 [oldcomputers.net] that could run both CP/M and MS-DOS, wow!) Improvement, over 270 times -- and that's not counting the improvement in what gets done per tick. My current box rates 4420.08 BogoMIPS [wikipedia.org]; using the conversions at that article, my * MHz "Turbo" PC would have rated about .032 BogoMIPS. Improvement: over 138,000 times.
re: economies of scale (Score:2)
True, but you're only looking at the "how many bytes can I move/store for my dollar" aspect of things. The problem is, everything on the content side was exponentially increasing at the same time!
EG. Despite the vast improvement in Internet transfer speeds over what my 2400 or 9600BPS modem could do - I still wind up able to read the typical web-based message forum at about the same speed I could read online BBS forum content back then! Why? Because when all the content was straight ASCII text, even 240