• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

I HATE, HATE, *HATE* GOOGLE!

fagin said:
And I use Adblock Plus. I even sent a donation to the developer. I rarely see any sort of ads, except in FB feeds.
My online experience is just fine. And I've been online since I had a 5k? modem that looked like two big black doughnuts you pushed a phone into.
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I didn't know they ever got that fast. The acoustic coupler modem I had was 300 baud. When I found a deal on a second-hand direct connect modem from a local university's surplus sales I grabbed that and jumped up to 1200 bps. This was a year or so after the first Hayes Smartmodem.

Screamin', man.
 
And when 300 baud came along it was like heaven on Earth compared to slower modems. And talk about a monopoly - did anybody own anything other than a Hayes modem?

Didn't modems get up to 56K before separate modems went the way of the dodo?
 
SezMe said:
And when 300 baud came along it was like heaven on Earth compared to slower modems. And talk about a monopoly - did anybody own anything other than a Hayes modem?
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The modem I got from Duke U. Surplus was some kind of industrial grade modem they had ditched when upgrading servers. I can't even remember who made it, but it definitely wasn't Hayes. This was around '83 or so. I had to gimmick up Procomm scripts to get it to work with the Hayes command set.

My first new in the box consumer modem was a US Robotics Sportster that pushed 9600bps. Then I upgraded (second hand) to a Courier Dual Standard which managed 14.4kbps.

USRs were very popular with the BBS community. Especially Fidonet people. Much more so than Hayes.


Didn't modems get up to 56K before separate modems went the way of the dodo?
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Late '90s. V.90 standard. USR sold a bunch of those, too. Also Rockwell and Motorola, who teamed up to try and take on USR.
 
I hate adverts. I pretty much arrange things so that I don't ever see them, adblock, judicious use of the BBC and various streaming services. I can pretty much watch what I want when I want and never, ever see an advert.

This situation won't last as I'm afraid I'm just having everyone else pay for the content I'm watching - that's okay, I'm not so invested in it that I'd be prepared to pay for it. If it's between me paying for it and me never seeing it, I'll take not seeing it, I only watch it cos it's free.
 
quadraginta said:
The modem I got from Duke U. Surplus was some kind of industrial grade modem they had ditched when upgrading servers. I can't even remember who made it, but it definitely wasn't Hayes. This was around '83 or so. I had to gimmick up Procomm scripts to get it to work with the Hayes command set.

My first new in the box consumer modem was a US Robotics Sportster that pushed 9600bps. Then I upgraded (second hand) to a Courier Dual Standard which managed 14.4kbps.

USRs were very popular with the BBS community. Especially Fidonet people. Much more so than Hayes.




Late '90s. V.90 standard. USR sold a bunch of those, too. Also Rockwell and Motorola, who teamed up to try and take on USR.
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That modem hook-up sound was a short lived, but iconic sound. Neither my parents nor my kids would ever recognize it, but I don't think folks my age will ever forget it after hearing it so often.
 
SezMe said:
And when 300 baud came along it was like heaven on Earth compared to slower modems. And talk about a monopoly - did anybody own anything other than a Hayes modem?
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Commodore.
1. 1650, 300 baud.
2. 1660, 300 baud but with touchtone dialing.
3. 1670, 1200 baud, Hayes compatible (mostly)!
 
SezMe said:
And when 300 baud came along it was like heaven on Earth compared to slower modems. And talk about a monopoly - did anybody own anything other than a Hayes modem?
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Yes, I used Motorola, Supra and US Robotics but they all cost more than Hayes (and offered features not available from Hayes, e.g. synchronous mini-computer connections)
 
SezMe said:
Man, you go centuries further back than I do. :p
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To the days when we could hook up a modem that actually downloaded faster than the computer could process the data*. ;)

*Not a joke, though admittedly the Commodore 64 was long in the tooth by the time 2400 baud modems came along. My world was 1 MHz for a long time.
 
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Babbylonian said:
To the days when we could hook up a modem that actually downloaded faster than the computer could process the data*. ;)

*Not a joke, though admittedly the Commodore 64 was long in the tooth by the time 2400 baud modems came along. My world was 1 MHz for a long time.
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I remember that issue, it got really bad when CRC error detection was added to Xmodem. I was using a 0.9MHz CoCo at the time and would force the modem to slow down so that the PC could keep up with the CRC calculation/verification.
 
Can we please get back to hating google?

God bless duckduckgo.com!
 
Blue Mountain said:
Ouch! So I can look forward to even more of this crap?

So now I'm thinking of ways YouTube can impose its ads even more than they do now. How about--

  • Interrupting the video at random intervals to bring you a message from a "sponsor" (probably more like an ad from some random company that had nothing whatsoever to do with the video)
  • Perhaps every third or fourth video you play would simply dispense with the video altogether and play an ad instead
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They actually kind of do the above two already. If you watch certain videos longer than about 30 mins, they're split into segments with an advert between each segment.

And about 60-40% of the time when I click on a video, I have to sit through an advert first.
 
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