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Message from Steven
===================
Sindi wrote:
>
> Prague's Classic http://sradio.tv/asx/654.asx (32K)
> Norway Oslo      http://sradio.tv/asx/971.asx (40K
> RDP Portugal     http://sradio.tv/asx/1072.asx (32K)
> Otto Opera House http://sradio.tv/asx/603.asx (32K)
> Otto Baroque     http://sradio.tv/asx/24014.asx (32K)

I don't like 32K and 40K streams.  They take up so 
much bandwidth on my dialup connection that I can't
do anything else online without exhausting the 
stream.  20K and 24K streams are fine -- as long as 
I fill the cache first, I can do my normal online 
browsing, emailing and googling. I love 8K and 16K 
streams, although they are getting harder to find 
these days.  I have three 16K streams and one 8K 
stream that I regularly listen to.  They are talk 
stations (no music) so the audio quality is fine.  
There used to be a lot more 16K streams, but most 
of them have "upgraded" to an unusable format 
(swf or 48K plus).  My favorite talk station, 
which streamed happily at 12K for many years, 
is now streaming at 128K (talk only, no music).  
Ridiculous.  

The streams get fatter and fatter, the graphics
get denser and denser, the webpages are filled
with more and more junk.  This is completely 
unnecessary.  My ears can't hear the difference 
between a 16K stream (non-music) and a 128K 
stream.  My eyes can't see the difference 
between a 100kb graphic and a 1000kb graphic.
But, what I do notice, what is blindingly
obvious, is how that useless bloat clogs my 
hardware.

My first computer was a great wordprocessor,
had some wonderful games, and displayed
nice graphics.  It could even take a 300
baud modem (although it was too expensive
for me).  My current computer is 1000 times
faster and has 30,000 times the RAM.  Surely
that makes it unbelievably quick and powerful.  
Nope.  Feed my computer a typical webpage and 
it goes into a feverish trance, emerging after
several minutes with an unreadable overlapping 
display (because some idiot thinks an 800x600 
screen has insufficient pixels to display his 
graphical masterpiece).

I few years ago, I could watch videos over 
my dailup connection.  Those videos are long
gone, and now static graphics and audio streams 
are becoming too fat for dialup.  Most dialup
users have upgraded to DSL, but I'm beginning
to see content that is too fat for ordinary
DSL.  Apparently DSL2 (or whatever it's called)
is now the baseline.  Tomorrow, no doubt, the
content will be too fat for DSL2, and everyone
will need fibre to the door.  And then what?
Will this madness ever stop?

Cheers,
Steven