- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.zip
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Well, sounds like this is the end, guys. It was good getting to know you. I knew those 30-day free trials would run out eventually.
AOL used to setup kiosk systems at computer stores so customers could experience AOL in the store, and each store was given a login account. Long after the kiosks went down, these accounts remained active, providing those employees “in the know” with free AOL all throughout its pay-by-the-hour years.
But I only needed three more 30 day trials to finish downloading cd2 of the phantom menace cam that I started in 1999…
… In the U.S., for instance, the latest government census data indicates approximately a quarter of a million remaining dial-up holdouts.
One of the natural successors for internet connectivity in hard-to-reach places is satellite, with around eight million subscribers in the U.S. …
…and a similar disparity in cost.
Wow this is one of those instances where I’m simultaneously surprised something still exists and also find it to make a lot of sense that it still exists.
Yeah. Increasingly reliable satellite internet really killed their bottom line over the last few years.
Any alternatives to the Starlink?
The other satellite players (Hughesnet, Viasat), the fixed 5G boxes (although places sufficiently rural to seriously consider dialup may not have 5G), probably some smaller boutique dialup ISPs.
I read months ago that Amazon was stepping into the game but I haven’t heard anything since then.
What we really need to compete against Starlink’s network full of small satellites threatening a Kessler syndrome incident is a second network full of small satellites threatening s Kessler syndrome incident. And a third and a fourth.
Or put fiber everywhere.
Starlink satellites are in low Earth orbit. They could still cause Kessler syndrome, but aren’t as much of a concern as higher orbits.
Here are some quotes regarding this from and Aerospace America article
Regarding satellite proliferation, while there are many more satellites, the company responsible for most of them, SpaceX, places its Starlink satellites in a low orbit so they can naturally deorbit relatively soon — within five or six years, per SpaceX — if they fail.
At around 400 kilometers and into the 500-km realm — home to ISS and the SpaceX Starlink satellites among others — atmospheric drag plays a major role. Dead satellites and debris usually slow and burn up in the atmosphere in just a few years. This natural cleansing process accelerates when the sun becomes more active and solar coronal mass ejections strike Earth and cause the atmosphere to swell. “In those altitudes, we can probably do a lot and we will be forgiven,” Linares says.
That’s just “the worst possible consequences won’t happen”. The danger at higher orbits is that things wouldn’t come down, and we couldn’t safely launch rockets past that orbit. That wouldn’t happen here, but destroying everything in LEO would still be pretty bad. Astronauts would likely die.
Currently, no one compares to Starlink, unfortunately. It’s really that much better. Source: FiL has been on the beta since the first constellation went up.
While not the same thing, cellular internet is not bad these days. I’ve been on T-Mobile’s internet connection for a couple years and other than CGNAT making self-hosting harder, it’s been pretty solid. This is in a rural area where we got to choose between Cable or go get fucked for high speed internet for a long time.
Kuiper and Guowang are currently launching satellites. It will probably be a few years before they are operational though.
YOU’VE GOT MAIL!
That’s not what I wanted, hew-man!
I thought we all had a collective and unsaid agreement not to talk about this one
Statute of limitations ran out.
Your mailbox is full!
Ah the USR sportster. An ubiquitous workhorse of the early '90s
Wow 34 Years of Dialup. Who still uses dial up? I guess that naive of me and is coming from a place of privelege.
But still dial up??!
If you live in a rural area, it seems plausible
Even simple pages are now at least 1-2MB big. News pages without an ad blocker and Autoplay videos can easily try to download 10 or more MB per page load. On 56kbits dial up, 10MB will take about 25 mins in the best case.
25 minutes later
Cookie popup
*clicks button*
Updating your preferences…
Yea I guess so. Man that must be difficult.
Up until probably about a decade ago I would occasionally go into small shops that used dial up to process credit card payments. There may still be some places doing that but I haven’t noticed it in a while.
After it is debut?
Goodbye!
GET OFF THE INTERNET! I NEED TO MAKE A CALL!
Ok, mum! Let me just upload my geocities site.
This was pretty much the very first thing I did when I got a job. Fit a second line for modem use!
I did that too, then i discovered i could log two computers into EverQuest and dual box.
back in the early 00s I used to do AOL tech support. Even then a lot of people were on cable or DSL. Vast majority of calls we got were from people out in the boonies or the elderly so it doesn’t surprise me that there are still a good chunk of people on dialup.
Actually by that point most of our calls weren’t even for Dial Up. the thing with AOL support back then was if the user also had other computer issues unrelated to AOL that they brought up while on the line with us we HAD to address them and try to do support for it. Callers would discover this fact and use AOL tech support as a defacto go to tech support for ALL computer issues. They’d start off with some random easy to fix (they knew how to fix) dialup issue and then would say “oh wow you fixed it, I wish you could also help me with this problem I’ve been having for awhile with…” and yup, we’d roll our eyes and say “oh, what what’s wrong?” A good chunk of my calls, believe it or not, would be for printer issues.
FFS will people ever use “it’s” and “its” correctly ?
It’s not are fault, it’s the school’s!
Look, just because your one of the people who understands it, doesn’t mean their one of the ones who do.
I would of got it right
wood have
Sigh
This comment hurt
Eye twitch at intentionally wrong use of they’re/their/there
Your instead of you’re.
Also that
Yeah its so annoying when someone uses the wrong one
Oh you.
My autocorrect always tries to correct “its” to it’s" no matter the context
Same. But that shouldn’t be a factor in a professional publication.
“Could of” and similar phonetic replacements making no sense whatsoever irritate me more.
Here at least the logic is arbitrary, “Anna’s apartment” and “school’s leadership” vs “Anna’s waiting” and “school’s empty”, but “its tail” vs “it’s cold”.
OK, I’m not a native speaker as it may be clear.
The one that kills me is the positive use of “anymore,” which I’ve come to learn is colloquial to Northern Ireland and the midwest US, but good lord it just doesn’t sound right when people say stuff like “everybody’s cool anymore” instead of “everybody’s cool now.” For some reason I felt like it was becoming more common but now I’m thinking it might just be my exposure to midwest.social.
Huh; never heard that use, before. Sounds incredibly wrong to be, as well.
Fwiw, the logic is, “its” isn’t quite the equivalent of “Anna’s” or “school’s.”
Rather it’s the equivalent of “his,” “hers,” and “theirs.” Also “mine” but that’s just irregular af. In other words, possessive pronouns don’t take an apostrophe while possessive nouns do.
It’s not a LOT of logic, a pretty shaky ladder, but there it is. 0
(Oh, and for both nouns and pronouns, position in the sentence makes a difference whether to use a contraction at all, or go with the separate “is.” But that’s a horse of a different color!)
First, could be autocorrect, and second: How many languages do you speak FFS?
I worked there from 2002-2005. Was 2 cubicles down from the guy responsible for sending out the “free trial!” CDs. Fun times
I still have one, still in the cellophane. I use it as a coaster.
You got more use out of it than most
Imagine the shear amount of waste that guy helped put on the planet! A few spots away from a real life villain!
Oh yeah that dude made a LOT of trash. But we were working the elevator on the Death Star, man. It wasn’t his idea to do it, just his job to execute it. I suppose he could have refused to do it on principle, but they’d have another person hired within an hour. Ethics and values rarely put a roof over your head, though. AOL was the biggest employer in the area and their executive suite was ruthless. Blame them, not the guy clicking the button.
Do you remember what you guys were using to burn millions of CDs at the time? Genuinely curious how it was done at that scale, as I think it was one of the biggest CD campaigns.
At that scale discs are stamped, not individually burned. Same as how music CDs and DVDs were made.
No idea. He clicked a button, they went out. I’m sure there was a big factory in China. Anytime new registrations were down for the month, send out another batch.
Wow. I didn’t know that dial up was still a thing in the US
Capitalism milked that shit D R Y.
Oh wow, dial-up in Germany died 20+ years ago. I’m surprised that’s still a thing. Well, was. But until now is really staggering. I wonder what you could even still do over such a connection, considering that even messenger services and email now use 3-5MB just completing the server handshake.
Just over the weekend I browsed trough my old blog (yes, those were a thing too) to check which year I did some remodeling on our house and stumbled on a note where I complained about slow 3G connection about 10 years ago. Compared to traditional dial-up that’s still orders of magnitude faster(~10/1Mbps back then on our location) but on a snowy day (with severe packet loss) it apparently took 10 minutes to get Skype and XMPP to even log in and over a minute to get SSH session open.
I suppose you can just barely get email trough today and even then you better not be in a hurry.
Actually, dial-up in Germany died 2 years ago: https://www.teltarif.de/internet/by-call/
And since dial-up just uses a regular phone connection, there’s nothing stopping you from dialing up a dial-up provider from a different country, so dial-up still works in Germany.
In fact, you can host your own dial-up gateway at any time. All you need is a PC with both a dial-up modem (which are still readily available on places like Amazon or Galaxus) and an internet connection. Set both interfaces to bridge mode and you are your own little dial-up provider.
In some places this is still used in place of a VPN. Just put a dial-up modem inside the private network, connect it to a phone line and dial-up from the outside to get into the private network. Add a phone number allow-list to prevent access by unauthorized people.
The technology is ancient and not in wide-spread use anymore, obviously, and hasn’t been in a long time. But that’s the same pretty much anywhere. The main reason why AOL still had the service running (and why German providers did until 2023 too) is because it costs almost nothing to keep the service running for the handful of people who are still paying incredibly expensive internet contracts from the 90s.
Similar story with analogue telephone lines. In Austria there are only ~4000 customers left who use analogue telephone. But it costs nothing to keep it around and the people running it haven’t updated their phone contracts in 20+ years and thus pay crazy prices.
I miss the old internet.
