Where's the Beef?

But, no matter how much someone whines about this whole mess we've gotten ourselves into, the Internet is here to stay. Not only that, but it keeps getting bigger and bigger. And with it, the bandwidth requirements are now to the point where a T1 isn't going to do you much good, unless you have one running straight into the back of your computer. With the new 56K modems out there, even that ISDN line you dropped a bundle on a year ago isn't very fast anymore, all things considered. Strangely enough, even the 10 megabit LAN we have in the den (and usually waste on Descent) is starting to have some lag problems, although I have dismissed this as another one of the skirmishes between my three feuding systems that has suddenly become prevalent in the den (Can anyone out there recommend a psychiatrist who specializes in neurotic computers?)

The scary part about the whole thing is how much faster the Net is getting bigger. We have to wonder exactly what's filling up all of this space... But on the other hand, I get the sneaking suspicion that we really don't want to know. There are some pretty bad Web sites out there, and then there are the really bad ones. These are the ones that are making a mess of the whole place, clogging bandwidth and cluttering hard disks with poorly organized HTML code, GIFs that look like they came straight out of KidPix, and many of them deal in such thought-provoking topics as "10,000,001 reasons why Fluffy, my dear sweet little kitty cat is the cutest animal on Earth." It's a good thing that cat's don't have the intelligence to actually DESIGN Web pages, or we may start seing things like "10,000,001 reasons that all humans should serve cats as scratching posts for therest of eternity."

Even though we don't have felines and other such creatures writing out HTML code to threaten their untimate destruction of human society (which is probably a good thing.) The ugly truth about this is that there are some really bad websites out there. Unless you have been living underground for the last 5 years, or are one of the poor unforunate souls out there who hasn't been able to advance past using Lynx on a system with a 300-baud modem, this is probably old news here (and I know they're still out there, just last week, while on the phones at work, I talked with one person who had 3 networked PCs at home just as we do, but still ran their business on an Apple IIe, of all things! That's the problem with having fifteen years worth of data stored on a system that you probably aren't going to get it off of.) Here are a few warning signs that the website you're looking at right now ps probably contributing to the destruction of life as we know it by clogging our precious bandwidth:)

• The author is trying to get you to send money for no reason. This may have been funny the first time we saw this one, but now it's just plain old. The first one out there was the Amazing Send-Me-A-Dollar Page, which has allegedly raised well over $200 by now. This has spawned quite a few imitators, none of which is any good, and most of who have raised little more than a ruckus. Unfortunately, nobody in their right mind is gullible enough to actually look at any of these sites. The problem is that a frightening number of us are not in our right minds,

• They are trying to sell you something. Sure, this one does nearly fall into the same category as the previous one, but there are some sites out there that do nothing but try to sell you stuff. Not the big commercial sites (even though most of those are pretty bad as is,) but some sites that exist only to sell one thing. I am sure that we would jump at the chance to transmit our credit card info unsecured over the net under the peircing scrutiny of hackers all over the place just to get the priovilege of getting a T-shirt with a picture of Fluffy on it. Quite frankly, I think that to many of us, coughing up a hairball would be preferable to this garbage.

• They're trying to convince you of something. There are plenty of wackos out there in our society, and most of us need not look any further than the next door neighbors (the ones who always seem to be out redecorating their yard to make it look more like their home planet.) Given the amazingly large number of looneys out there, it would be impossible to keep them from spilling out onto the Net. As hard as some of these people may try, it will take a lot of convincing to get me to believe that most of our world's political leaders are channeling the spirit of Bozo the Clown (well okay, so maybe you won't have a hard time convincing me of that one, but that's beside the point.)

• They're trying to kill themselves. Some people, in the quest for content for their Web sites, have gone to extreme measures. I have seen people on the Web who have Lit barbecue grills with liquid oxygen, torture marshmallow bunnies, claiming it to be in the name of science), and even someone who has put a nitro system on a moped. If you put life and limb at risk for the sole purpose of having somethign cool to put on a Web site, you need your head examined (even if you have to bring it to the shrink in a ziploc bag.)

Copyright (C) 1997 Brian Lutz. All rights reserved. I fix machines because you can't fix people.