Mt Whitney Zone Forums The Chat Room Cool Videos

That's a good video, John. Very informative.

Here it is:



P.S. To embed a video, you get the share/embed code from YouTube, and paste it in your message. THEN you must change the markup below the posting window to "using HTML and UBBCode"

Thanks Steve. I may use that in the future, but it seems to me that on long pages, with lots of videos, the loading process is really slowed down. Do you agree?

you can thank Comcast and Verizon's lawyers for your slower loads. Get used to an Internet that sucks.


Meanwhile another new video to test how much they are throttling content to avoid any further network upgrades until we are dead last in the world in bandwidth:

One Day on Cathedral from Shawn Reeder on Vimeo.

I need to get Bulldog34 and his family to watch that video. About two summers back, we were up there, but nobody got to the top. Bob P was taking Bulldog up the technical side, I went up with his wife and daughter on the hiker side.

John, the long pages with many videos don't seem to take very long to load, but maybe it is my connection. ...in fact, checking speedtest.net, I get a download speed of 23.2. You?

If you ever need to look up instructions on displaying pictures or videos, click on the "picture gallery" forum, and there is a link right at the top: Instructions... It takes you to a thread with three posts: Uploading pictures, displaying pictures, and displaying YouTube videos.

As for the Comcast and Verizon stuff: I believe wagga told me that down in OZ, the cable companies installing connections are required to install two cables (or maybe it is fiber optic lines) to each house. And then everyone has a choice of two different cable providers, which I would think would improve competition and bring prices down. I know I chafe every month when I see my $200 Comcast bill (Internet+phone+Cable w/ 3 TV boxes)

In OZ they may have some cost benefits from the competition, but their ISPs all do usage based billing (metered internet), which is just another way of stifling growth and protecting old business models and reducing the need to improve the infrastructure.

Meanwhile, if you are lucky to live in a Google fiber served community (3 cities now, a few dozen coming soon), you have 1000mbps to the home.

Business and government forces will continue to shape our online experience and given few understand how any of this works, they get away with policies that stifle progress and innovation in order to protect their interests.

These things do erode over time. Just look at smartphone plans: I never got one until last year, because ATT wanted $150 per phone per month and I have two teenagers. However, since last fall, I am paying between $35 and $45 for three smartphones combined, because I use a carrier who resells excess bandwidth of the big name phone companies without the free device perks and other limitations, but they do exist (Ting, Virgin Mobile, etc).

Unlike wireless, the problem with broadband is that in most places people don't have a choice like you pointed out. This may be changing, too, but slowly and only regionally (meanwhile the big companies are merging to become even bigger).

For example, in my home town the municipal water & light utility is investigating fiber to the home home, justified as a infrastructure investment mostly. They have seen what fiber did to business development in locations like Provo UT.

Speedtest - don't be fooled by those numbers. All this meters is the throughput you are getting from your device to the nearest Speedtest server, bypassing protocol based throttling and all the downstream congestion you may be faced with trying to access content that's not hosted near your home in a cache box at your ISP's local data center (they may or may not have Netflix cache appliances there, and then not all content is on these caches - don't expect that foreign art movie to be hosted on a server nearby...).

Given the bandwidth we are quoted by ISPs and measure with Speedtest, we should have no problems with 5mbit full HD content at any time, but Netflix stats show that in the US, we are far off from that bandwidth, no matter what your ISP is telling you about your connection. They take their numbers from actual access data which is real world data, not "up to 60 megabit" adverting BS:

http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/results/usa/graph

Note how Comcast has dropped 25% since October 2013, before the courts gave it green light to do whatever they want with traffic on their network.

Bandwidth shaping isn't new - cable companies have done it forever, with their asymmetrical connections. However, they are getting more and more sophisticated, well beyond "slow down bit torrents to 100kbps" brute force rules.

For example, to make your connection appear snappy fast, even the slowest 18mbps cable plan where I live will reach 60mbps for the first second or two - enough to have web pages load in a hurry. However, the moment any request continues for more than a few seconds, the brake is pulled and your download speeds will quickly approach the limit you are paying for, and then the ISP may slow it further based on content and origin to reduce their costs or reduce load on their shared infrastructure.

Over time, things do move forward: 5 years ago Netflix wasn't even thinking of streaming anything over 1.5mbps, but now they do manage to squeeze through the occasional 4mbps stream, which still stinks compared to what real "high definition" video requires, but consumers are completely youtube desensitized when it comes to video quality

Very interesting, Fishmonger; thanks! Not sure I can absorb all you wrote. I can certainly see you are heavily involved in the internet data transmission industry.

Hi Steve,
The delay I'm speaking of seems to be due to each of the embedded videos needing to make contact with the outside, and download information about the video. If you click on page 35 (previous page), and then scroll up/down you will see most videos are only black spots until the video information is fetched from where ever it comes from.
My connection is fast/speedtest. Normally 50+, but as Fishmonger points out this is only a small part of the equation.

Some AC/DC?

page 35 fully loads in 5 seconds on my ancient dual core laptop, 18mbps cable connection. In my office on 10gbps I can blow up the local speedtest server, but even there it takes a few seconds, probably because the servers need to access hard drives to retrieve the content. If all these videos were the viral kind that has millions of views, it would go much faster since they move those files into RAM caches or at least onto fast access SSD drives.

Note that each of these embedded videos consist several files that come from various servers, first an html page (the iframe you paste in), then usually a Flash player and some javascript files, a JPEG file as preview image that is then loaded. Youtube probably has some tracking files on there, which will come from a different server, and I am sure there's other stuff that requires your browser to go looking all over the place. The videos themselves aren't accessed at all until you click on one of the players.

I filter out about 1500 domain names on my system that are known junk that slow you down and do nothing but tell the big internet companies what you are up to or litter your screen with ads. Ditching these sites from your web experience makes things faster. Worth doing if you are not afraid to edit the "hosts" file on your PC: how to make the internet suck less.

Did you know that a site like newegg.com loads over 200 different domains when you connect to their home page? 200+ servers, and many with nothing else to do but to slow you down while trying to track your internet activity. If you ever got an email from Amazon a day after just looking at something, offering a coupon code for the type of product you viewed, that's where all that crap comes from.

Even if you don't log in anywhere with a user name, they can identify you pretty clearly. Almost every client leaves behind a unique fingerprint when it connects to a web server. The only way to protect yourself from such tracking is to block the sites that do that. See above link...

Interesting graphic here.

The 2Cellos video is incredible. ...and their other ones on YouTube are nice to watch. Those guys are good!

Hi Fishmonger,
Great link (I think). I copied and pasted the page into notepad, saved as a .txt file, deleted the .txt, changed the name of the current hosts file to hosts_old (in case I needed it again), moved the new hosts file into the folder, and "think" my internet experience is improved. Hard to tell, but I am looking forward to an absence of advertisements based on my browsing/searches.
One question: Do I need to merge the two hosts files (Old and New)? The only entry (other than comments) in the old files is:
127.0.0.1 localhost
::1 localhost
Thanks,
John
Never mind the question. I just noticed that the new hosts file has this entry.

Everyone, I copied all the valuable Internet tuning info to a new thread. Please continue discussing it over there.

:-) replace and forget. For those who haven't tried it, you may get some security warnings when you attempt to edit the file. What I usually do is rename the original file, which it will let you do without warnings, and then copy the new one in. Also need to restart the browser at least. Note that if you use Chrome, it will completely ignore your hosts file and show ads anyway. They don't tell you that when they give you that browser as an "upgrade." I only use Chrome when IE11 has issues, but I refuse to put up with tracking and advertising.

A good place to test if ads are gone is steepandcheap.com - The page now shows only their offers, while other boxes show sseveral gray spaces with "Ad" written on the background, but the ad is gone.

Another effect is that some of the advertising "sponsored" links shown in google searches (especially those top right on the first page) will fire off pages with "this page could not be found"

If your Netflix doesn't totally suck, this movie is available now. A lesson in what can go wrong when conditions are perfect. Very well done documentary of the deadliest day in modern mountaineering history

The Summit Official Trailer

Douce Menace

Just a pleasure to watch, even if you already know most of the processes that shape a mountain

The Weight of Mountains

how cool is this? some never grow up

Metropolis II (The Movie)

one for the Mandelbrot fans. Silly title, great animation

musicians with guns - overstepping artifacts

I had no idea what a "stickbomb" was, but clearly a Subaru has it covered:




and the making of link