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from the hope-we-don't-drain-the-battery dept.
Low-tech Magazine explains how to build a low-tech web site, using its own (solar powered) web site as an example. They cover both the web design and the actual hardware in use, an Olimex A20. The idea is to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing the content, seeing as complex designs with Javascript have burdensome resource requirements that translate into increased use of electricity. Renewable power sources alone are not enough to address the growing energy use of the Internet. Their server is also self-hosted so there's no need for third-party tracking and cookies either.
Low-tech Magazine was born in 2007 and has seen minimal changes ever since. Because a website redesign was long overdue — and because we try to practice what we preach — we decided to build a low-tech, self-hosted, and solar-powered version of Low-tech Magazine. The new blog is designed to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content.
Earlier on SN:
Conservative Web Development (2018)
About a Third of All Web Sites Run on WordPress (2018)
Please, Keep your Blog Light (2018)
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Thursday September 27 2018, @07:08PM (6 children)
> Which has largely been replaced with ad-supported streaming services like Pandora and Spotify.
Not quite. For one Piracy is still rampant. Even bit-torrent is still a sizable bulk of net traffic, despite being the "out of date" method of piracy nowadays.
Secondly, There is a wealth of completely ad-free internet radio stations, most likely more than Pandora/Spotify, however not being a single "central" type business, it is very hard to gauge the total number of stations/listeners.
those ad-free internet radio stations existed before online advertising, and would exist after. Quite frankly I prefer them to spotify/pandora any day of the week.
> Much of which is ad-supported.
The only one I have used that has ads is youtube, and to be honest, if youtube vanished tomorrow it would not be the end of the world to me, at best it would be a mild irritation for a short time. Plenty of other places to get videos from. I would even consider paying for a youtube like subscription service if I really had the need for on-demand streaming video, or perhaps some kind of "pay-per-stream" in lieu of adverts.
Plenty of ways to adapt to a world without online advertising.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Pino P on Thursday September 27 2018, @07:12PM (1 child)
You prefer them. But do enough of your neighbors prefer them to make it profitable for your ISP to continue to offer your present level of service in your neighborhood?
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Thursday September 27 2018, @09:49PM
Does it matter? Internet radio is such a low bandwidth requirement that even if all my neighbours listened to it every day, or not at all, it would be the difference of a couple of megabits/s, not enough to subsidise broadband massively.
I am pretty sure that within the ISPs corporate structure, overall we provided a profit for them, otherwise they would not bother serving us. If demand for fast connections dropped (which I doubt would happen, pretty much everyone over here uses Iplayer or netflix/amazon, etc.. which are massive bandwidth hogs), then contention ratios would change to keep the balance, llowing those of us left either to utilise more of the pipe for a higher price, or utilise the same pipe for the same price.
I really don't see the logic in claiming I need all my neighbours to be digital gluttons just so I can have broadband. That makes no sense really, because we all have telephone lines, so if all my neighbours dropped their net connections tomorrow, I would get shunted onto another ring, and be on my merry way. The ISP may decide to shut down a ring to save some money after migrating us, and as a result costs would not change substantially.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday September 28 2018, @03:57AM (3 children)
" For one Piracy is still rampant. Even bit-torrent is still a sizable bulk of net traffic, despite being the "out of date" method of piracy nowadays."
What's the up-to-date method??
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @05:58AM
RFC1149 [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday September 28 2018, @11:52AM (1 child)
streamripping seems to be the most popular at the moment, as well as these "third party" streamer sites that have KODI Plugins, and which keep getting shut down.
I don't consider it a "better" method, just one that is more popular now (and hence why the IP industries have taken to prosecuting streamripping and KODI stream sites, and concentrating less on torrent sites).
I guess for the non computer nerds, far easier to get ahold of a pre-built Kodi box with these plugins, and just stream like you would netflix or whatever (plus instant gratification). Easier than faffing about with torrent sites/clients/magnet links, and then having to wait until it is downloaded, or for peers to come online, etc...
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday September 28 2018, @02:04PM
Ah. For a moment I feared we were back to speeding station wagons.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.