Internet Rant

Those who know me know I have some issues with the current festering pile of leperous vileness infesting the World Wide Web.

Chief among these is anything that slows down the delivery of the webpage I'm wanting to look at, and it goes infinity times more for anything that is simply going to be a signpost to where I really want to be.

I sometimes (rarely) use my laptop to connect to the web while on the train, where my Wi-Fi service is spotty at best and passing between different access points as I ride. It is therefore paramount that pages load quickly, especially if they are just being loaded to grab the next waypoint on my (usually unwanted) voyage of discovery.

It should therefore come as no surprise that today I am enraged that I sat waiting for a bleeping secondary site to answer the bleeping phone in order that Google could start showing me the link for the site I actually wanted to see (one of the ad-service sites) and then the bleeping site I wanted wouldn't load because it was waiting for Google analytics to answer the bleeping phone. Naturally, by the time I had the site I wanted up and began the process of untangling the resource I needed to see from the visual chaos that passes for design, the Wi-Fi connection had been lost.

I see many angry young things arguing that as soon as more memory becomes available for a PC, Microsoft fills it with cruft. I see just about no-one complaining of the incomprehensible dash to fill bleeding-edge bandwidth with digital vomit, forcing those of us who bought our machines before last Tuesday to endure design assumptions at the web-server end that are not true at the client end. Amazon is a case in point. Get a slow connection and you might as well not bother to load their site as it wallows, trying to pre-load rollovers and banners and Azathoth-knows what else, none of which is central to the business of locating the new Larry Niven novel and buying it.

For years I had to explain to people that the rest of the world was not built around free local telephone service and that V90 dial-up was not a world standard. My father once had to face paying a three hour long-distance telephone charge in order to download an update. Does anyone here begin to see another reason other than stupidity for not applying the latest patches to Windows? I never saw a business so intent of marginalizing its consumer base.

And don't get me started on the Javascript stupidity, in which the quest for shiny website bling has opened up everyone to insidious hijacks that have one's credit card in Chechnya faster than one can say "point, click and ship".

Gah!