Category: Rants
You call this a social media site?
Features include: a 1998 styled webpage, boring text links and a joke Asian guy in a wifebeater.
As usual, when my school attempts to do anything regarding technology, they get it completely wrong. Rather than wasting precious resources developing this rubbish, they should spend some time fixing the completely flawed school website, that was just recently redesigned into a broken linked, visually horrifying disasterpiece. They should be fixing our failure Luminis portal, which was down all “weekend” (meaning it was down from Friday to Tuesday) for an upgrade. But forget about that, we need to focus on a social networking site for students and staff, because that’s of utmost importance.
“The success of Facebook and MySpace show that users want a forum to socialize,
engage, and learn – their way,” says Scott Barnett, director of Web Communications at Fairfield. “Fairfield LIVE was built on a robust platform and channels the best of the social media experience into one space – with the privacy and toolset needed on the backend that does this very wisely.”
Let me tell you something, Mr. Barnett: You are a moron. The success of Facebook and MySpace show that users want to use Facebook and MySpace – not garbage being developed by KickApps (anyone ever hear of KickApps?) My ass looks better than the school website, and you’re partnering with some crappy, fly by night social media company that pretty much sold you a version of MySpace. What are you guys blind? Can’t you see that it looks absolutely awful in comparison to Facebook and other modern web 2.o social media sites? Who is on the committee that worked on it and approved it. Apparently, it’s probably a bunch of freshmen that were brainwashed by the administration and think IE 5.5 is blazing technology! Apparently, if you are employed at this school and are involved with anything web related, the requirements include: complete blindness to modern web styles and design, a keen eye for 1998 text based websites, the ability to create text links and the ability to paste corny JavaScript effects into the HTML code of a page.
God knows how much this cost. The school is cutting staff, firing professors and doing everything possible to save a buck in this recession, but we’re rolling out garbage sites that no one will use. Get over yourselves. Save money and the embarrassment of releasing a site that might have been cool in 1998 on my 33.6k dial-up modem. Idiots.
Crippled Internet
September 8, 2009
Computer/ Tech Related, Rants
4 Comments
Portfolioso
Okay, so I’m back at school if you haven’t noticed lately. I haven’t posted because I’ve been busy. You know, I devote 100% of my time to studying and other scholarly activities, so I have zero free time for any fun. Anyway, a big F you to our network people here on campus for crippling our internet. I am completely jealous of all you bitches in your beach houses with your Optimum Online (and that’s saying a lot because I hate Optimum Online – Verizon FiOS is 10000 times better, but we don’t get that here because AT&T owns Connecticut’s ass, with the exception of Greenwich because that really doesn’t count as CT. As a matter of fact, Westchester should just take that over to make us richer). But I digest…
So I do a speed test and it’s telling me my down/up speed is 20MBPS/10MBPS. Awesome. But in reality, internet pages take forever to load. When I go to youtube, 30 second videos don’t load for a few minutes. My Pandora radio is choppy. Why? Packet inspection and manipulation. In very simple terms, they have a machine that says “Hey, this is YouTube (or internet radio, or other video, etc). It’s not important, let’s delay this traffic and let some other thing through” or “OMG this is a torrent. Let’s not let this through at all.”
The only proof you need that my school fucks with the internet connection:
Let’s explain that graphic to our non-technical folks. The red lines you see represent download bandwidth as I loaded a YouTube video. As you can see, it is very choppy. Each gap is about 1 second long, and where you don’t see red, nothing is being downloaded. A very good internet connection (or one without packet manipulation) will not have gaps and will download the video continuously. The speed will only be limited by your ISP’s max downstream bandwidth or Youtube’s servers. As you can see here, not only is YouTube traffic limited to about 500kbps, but it downloads for a second, then pauses for a second. According to my speed test, I should be loading things at 20MBPS right? Wrong. As the image above shows, YouTube videos max out at 500kbps. Although the speed reported my internet speed to be 20MBPS, only web traffic gets that full amount of bandwidth. When the packet shaper detects that it’s downloading YouTube video, it crushes the speed to almost nothing. While I should be getting 20MBPS, but when watching YouTube here on campus, I get a measly 0.48MBPS. So this is why it takes a long time to load a video here on campus. Now I did these tests at 2:30AM with very little network traffic. During the day and peak homework times, that 20MBPS may go down to 2MBPS. So imagine what the packet shaper has to do to keep that traffic flowing (and this is when things don’t load).
Is this packet manipulation necessary? Yes. Unfortunately if they didn’t have a packet shaper, everyone would kill the traffic and it would be unusably slow. But it’s just very inconvenient and doesn’t work well, and I’m grumpy all day long because of it. I was at the beach earlier and downloaded about 700MB of [completely legal, non-copyrighted content licensed under Creative Commons] in about 15 minutes. Over here, that doesn’t fly. And if you try to pull that off by bypassing their filters (yes it’s possible if you’re skillful), you get put on the “holy shit you just used too much bandwidth” list. I’ve been on that asshole a few times before. It’s not fun because they take your connection and make it 56k in some sick effort to punish you. Then you need to fight them to re-enable your internet while they sit back and laugh at your for weeks at a time. “OOOOOOO you used over 1GB in one day. I’m telling… You’re the new anti-Christ.”
You all suck and I hate your shitty network. I go from Verizon FiOS to this junk. Huge downgrade and disappointment.