This music video was the reason we decided to upgrade the CD-ROM drive on our family computer, since it could not play without stuttering on our existing one.
I think folks forget this was part of it. PC's were being sold as supporting "multimedia" and Intel was selling chips with "Multimedia extensions". Just playing a video at all was a big deal.
Video was rare. You weren't downloading videos over 56k dialup (I remember leaving the modem running all night to download movie trailers from Apples Trailers website (only available in Quicktime format of course)
Not so much in the 90s; But during 2003/2004, with a 56k modem, an unlimited dialup plan, a second phone line, software to redial when the internet dropped, and bittorrent: I was managing to download roughly 150-200MB of data per day (sometimes more)
I could download one of those 350 DivX/Xvid rips every second day. At one point, someone was posting 60MB .rmvb encodes of Stargate SG1. From memory, the quality wasn't great, but I could download 2-3 per day.
I wish I still had some of those 60MB .rmvb encodes, just so I could see exactly how bad the quality was. But I deleted them all, and they seem to have disappeared from the internet.
The "RealMedia Variable Bitrate" codec was essentially a prototype of H.264 (which is still widely used today) but predating it by a year or two.
I remember getting my hands on a rip of Titanic, burned onto 3 CD-ROMs in 1997/1998 before it was released to video. I used the CD burner at school to sell copies to other students, and got in trouble for it lol. Just having a copy of the movie before it was released was really something.
I just went through a bunch of old CDs that had DivX rips on them a couple of years ago. Binders with hundreds of CDs. I thought that they would still look decent and I was going to back them up... back to my hard drive. But no they were really terrible. I donated the binder to Goodwill, hoping that someone might find the surprise...
They were fine when you had a CRT TV to play them on, we even had a DVD player from LiteOn that would play DivX videos back then.
I downloaded a shit-ton of anime over 56k via CuteMX in 2000. I used to start the download before bed and then watch the episode the next day after school.
Little 12fps postage-stamp-sized RealPlayer/RealMedia video files. I still have them if you want to check them out.
I am going through something very similar. My entire family is on the same T-Mobile plan, and on recent iPhones - however, my wife's phone is the only one where RCS fails to work over Wi-Fi (only works over cellular). I've reset her network settings completely, no dice. T-Mobile support is worthless on this and basically just offered to recreate her eSim (didn't work). Apple said I need to talk to T-Mobile, not them. When she's off Wi-Fi, it seems to work. I honestly have no idea what could be broken here.
I remember hanging out in #mpeg3 on EFNet many many years ago and becoming an acquaintance of Justin Frankel while he was working on this. I had made a skin and even a few tray icons for him to use in the app, and some of them are in here. I can't remember 100% which ones were mine, but the punchlabel one definitely was. My name is in the credits too: https://github.com/WinampDesktop/winamp/blob/0695744fd658c42...
Meanwhile, I've had two USW-Lite-16-POE's fail just outside their two year warranty period, alongside a CloudKey and other equipment from them. It's just junk and they don't stand behind it. I'm transitioning away from them as best I can. The only thing I have left is my gateway and some APs.
The hard drive on my Cloudkey Gen2 Plus failed less than a year after I bought it. I don’t blame Ubiquiti for a hard drive failure. I blame them for designing the device to be fanless but constantly hot to the touch (44 degrees as I’m writing this, with two 120mm fans right next to it). Countless support posts complaining about poor hard drive lifespan in that kind of environment, but never a response from Ubiquiti or a redesign.
If you still want to use SOHO equipment, I like Aruba instant-on a lot. Their APs are just as good as Ubiquiti's and you don't need a separate doodad to control them, the first one you set up can control the others.
I have never had a truly successful (by my standards) auto park with my Tesla (with USS). It either fails to "enable" - meaning I can't even start it - or it takes so long to do it's maneuvers I may as well have just done it myself - and when it does complete, it's not centered like I would like - or it gave me a heart attack getting too close to some other car, etc.
Used gandi for forever, then they had a major hardware issue and lost customer's data and kinda was rude about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22001822 - so I decided to move my business elsewhere.
I had a weird issue the other day (two days ago?) too where trying to load Microsoft Store/check for updates would just completely freeze the program. And also my start menu would not execute apps - I could search for them and hit enter to run them - but nothing would happen.
I'm wondering if it was related to some of this. You're absolutely right that an OS should never "soft-lock" on cloud/networking issues. It's insane to me that we still deal with this as programmers in the year 2021. Write asynchronous code. Expect network slowness or weirdness.
