Star-Shadow
11-09-2003, 01:18 AM
As the entire World Wide Web marches steadily into the future -- taking along just about everybody for this increasingly wondrous ride -- we poor, pathetic, neglected Webbers are once again left behind ... choking on dust, stumbling around in the dark, teetering on the precipice of that thing which ate ~Boba Fett~ in Return of The Jedi, circa Star Wars.
First, the well-known Bravenet website sharply kicked all Webbers in the head, by making virtually everything everywhere useless for the LBB. They didn't do so intentionally, of course. Twas merely an upgrade to their source code. Yet whatever the reason, their unspoken message remains quite clear to our humble kind -- ‘Take your BS pile-o-junk, and go find a place that caters to primitives!’
Wanna know just how deep Webber frustration has become? I can't even access my old account there, to delete the darn thing! Nor can I get to my old guestbook, with its two year's worth of sentimental offerings. Nor can the WebTv box cursor click on about 90% of their text links. They won't even highlight. My unit can't recognize Bravenet text links as being a freakin' link! Man, is that outrageous, or what?!
Now, the equally well-known JavaScript Source site is nearly non-existent to Webber World as well. Every bit of text on every page is ‘backlit’ (for lack of a better term) with such a deep shade of blue, that the text thereupon is nothing more than a blurry blob of smoky-grey smudge. Actually, it looks kinda cool -- until ya remember there's supposed to be a once-valuable website somewhere!
At least their text links still work. For the moment, anyway. And by highlighting the page, the already ‘backlit’ text becomes just barely visible enough to squint one's way around the site. So now I'm considering a ‘newsgroup pool’ in which folks will vie for prizes by guessing how many more days or weeks we have left with the place -- not that there's much use left at present.
Perhaps this pool will become a popular form of Webber entertainment -- ‘Guess which website shall be the next to completely reject our so-called browser!’ A pitiful attitude, but one that's seemingly warranted by our constantly degenerating situation. Shed a tear, oh PC Zoners, for we, your unfortunate cousins.
In my nearly 4 years of observing the WebTv community, I have seen a good many sites made by Webber hands. A lot of them really kick butt -- they're imaginative, original, and competently executed -- all made even more amazing by the fact that we work with a piece of equipment which suffers from a large and growing list of truly significant handicaps.
I often joke about how our community is repeatedly ‘neglected’ by one ‘outsider’ website after another, upon discovering that yet another place has grown useless to the LBB. Truth be told, the only neglect we really experience is from our own ISP -- who continues to focus on operational characteristics that are completely unrelated to surfing the Web (chat, television, whatever, etc), while letting our machines fall further and further behind the times where both software and hardware are concerned. You would never know that this operation is under mighty Microsoft management.
Because the LBB is not a computer, I suppose we don't need an equivalent amount of sheer power and hyper speed. Yet on the other hand, it's utterly ridiculous that we are kept maddeningly confined to a kiddy realm of 8-bit processors, tiny handfuls of RAM, and a clock-speed surpassed by my Hewlett-Packard HP-48GX calculator. Nevertheless, it's where we remain -- and where, I fear, we'll long be staying.
By MSN's own decision-making process, the day grows near when Webber ranks will consist of nothing more than people for whom the Internet exists as just a minor curiosity. Folks whose primary online interest shall revolve around finding pen-pals, weekend chat rooms, and, perhaps, the occasional surfing session -- on those increasingly rare pages which will somehow still function for the one-time revolutionary Little Black Box.
Everyone else shall have abandoned it in droves -- an action necessitated by evolutionary processes which, had they chosen to continue as Webbers, would have left them forever trapped in an all-encompassing cybernetic blackhole of forever lost visions.
First, the well-known Bravenet website sharply kicked all Webbers in the head, by making virtually everything everywhere useless for the LBB. They didn't do so intentionally, of course. Twas merely an upgrade to their source code. Yet whatever the reason, their unspoken message remains quite clear to our humble kind -- ‘Take your BS pile-o-junk, and go find a place that caters to primitives!’
Wanna know just how deep Webber frustration has become? I can't even access my old account there, to delete the darn thing! Nor can I get to my old guestbook, with its two year's worth of sentimental offerings. Nor can the WebTv box cursor click on about 90% of their text links. They won't even highlight. My unit can't recognize Bravenet text links as being a freakin' link! Man, is that outrageous, or what?!
Now, the equally well-known JavaScript Source site is nearly non-existent to Webber World as well. Every bit of text on every page is ‘backlit’ (for lack of a better term) with such a deep shade of blue, that the text thereupon is nothing more than a blurry blob of smoky-grey smudge. Actually, it looks kinda cool -- until ya remember there's supposed to be a once-valuable website somewhere!
At least their text links still work. For the moment, anyway. And by highlighting the page, the already ‘backlit’ text becomes just barely visible enough to squint one's way around the site. So now I'm considering a ‘newsgroup pool’ in which folks will vie for prizes by guessing how many more days or weeks we have left with the place -- not that there's much use left at present.
Perhaps this pool will become a popular form of Webber entertainment -- ‘Guess which website shall be the next to completely reject our so-called browser!’ A pitiful attitude, but one that's seemingly warranted by our constantly degenerating situation. Shed a tear, oh PC Zoners, for we, your unfortunate cousins.
In my nearly 4 years of observing the WebTv community, I have seen a good many sites made by Webber hands. A lot of them really kick butt -- they're imaginative, original, and competently executed -- all made even more amazing by the fact that we work with a piece of equipment which suffers from a large and growing list of truly significant handicaps.
I often joke about how our community is repeatedly ‘neglected’ by one ‘outsider’ website after another, upon discovering that yet another place has grown useless to the LBB. Truth be told, the only neglect we really experience is from our own ISP -- who continues to focus on operational characteristics that are completely unrelated to surfing the Web (chat, television, whatever, etc), while letting our machines fall further and further behind the times where both software and hardware are concerned. You would never know that this operation is under mighty Microsoft management.
Because the LBB is not a computer, I suppose we don't need an equivalent amount of sheer power and hyper speed. Yet on the other hand, it's utterly ridiculous that we are kept maddeningly confined to a kiddy realm of 8-bit processors, tiny handfuls of RAM, and a clock-speed surpassed by my Hewlett-Packard HP-48GX calculator. Nevertheless, it's where we remain -- and where, I fear, we'll long be staying.
By MSN's own decision-making process, the day grows near when Webber ranks will consist of nothing more than people for whom the Internet exists as just a minor curiosity. Folks whose primary online interest shall revolve around finding pen-pals, weekend chat rooms, and, perhaps, the occasional surfing session -- on those increasingly rare pages which will somehow still function for the one-time revolutionary Little Black Box.
Everyone else shall have abandoned it in droves -- an action necessitated by evolutionary processes which, had they chosen to continue as Webbers, would have left them forever trapped in an all-encompassing cybernetic blackhole of forever lost visions.