TravisinFlorida said:
to be honest, i didn't wait for the download. i'm betting that not many others did either.
I appreciate your candor. Currently, my post has had 94 Views, maybe 5 from myself, maybe 5 from you, and 1 or 2 from austinm08. That leaves about 82 other views from members who didn’t feel compelled to reply. Rapidshare shows it has been downloaded 9 times in the 4 days since I uploaded it (82/9 = 9.1). So, apparently 9 “newbies” felt the info might be useful enough to “wait” for the download. So, you may be correct to say that “...not many others...” felt like “waiting x seconds to wait for a download...” It may very well be that “waiting” for a free bit (5.27KB) of potentially useful info is in fact a fairly critical matter for some of us. That said, of course, we can't determine “exactly” why these viewers chose NOT to download it, based on the simple stats that we have to work with. We can, however, safely predict at least 3 possible reasons why they chose NOT to download it: 1) they didn't want to “wait for a download” as you have indicated, 2) some members simply don't download “anything”, for security reasons, from people they don't know and trust. and 3) it simply didn't seem like something they could use—based on my brief description of the info in the file; after all, there's a 50/50 chance that all “newbies” have already primed their machines in order “to optimize system resources for” recording sessions. That's the reason I stated that “Constructive feedback is VERY welcome...” Thanks for helping me think this through. So, excluding my own “views”, as well as your's and austinm08's (because we already know you guys don't like to “wait”), we’re left with 82 other known views.
Now then, let's look a bit more critically at this notion of time spent “waiting” for a 5.27KB file download from rapidshare by comparing it to the time it might take for a member to simply copy/paste the text to create a new notepad.txt. I believe the copy/paste procedure would go something like this: 1) clk/drag to highlight the text, 2) right clk and select copy, 3) clk to minimize the screen, 4) clk to open notepad, 5) clk to paste the text, 6) clk on File and select Save as, 7) type in a filename, and clk Save. This might take every bit of 30sec.
So, I thought maybe a quicker way would be to simply clk on File in your browser, clk Save as, clk to choose to save it as either an .html or a .txt doc, and clk Save. I tried this both ways using the yahoo IE browser (.html and .txt), and wound up each time with a “PhotoParade” file on my desktop. I tried to open it and got an error msg. I clicked “OK”, which brought up a tastefully designed screenshot invitation to visit “PhotoParade.com” in order to download the software needed to view the file. Hmmm. Never ran into this before using the yahoo browser, but I’ll have to check it out because it looked pretty cool.
Of course, I realize that not everyone uses yahoo dsl, so I decided to try the same procedure using plain ol' IE to save the page as a .txt file. This worked quickly enough to produce a .txt file that you may or may not want to take the time to re-name for clarity (to edit out the lengthy header ahead of the actual filename), although the file itself was cluttered with a fair amount of extraneous HR.com text that would take only a few seconds to cut and re-save (depending on how LAZY you feel at the moment). Using IE I found that the whole File/Save as and re-naming thing took about 20sec. Add to that maybe another 15sec to open the file, edit out the extraneous HR.com text in the document itself, and re-save it.
Using the rapidshare link that I provided, without logging in as a Premium user, it took me exactly 30sec. No need to re-name the file, to or edit out any extraneous text. 1) clk on the link, 2) scroll down, clk on “Free”, 3) enter the 4 digit key shown, 4) clk download, 5) clk Save, 6) clk Save again and the dl takes less than 1 sec with a high-speed connection, or maybe as much 60 sec for dial-up if you're located thousands of miles from the nearest rapidshare server. (30sec)
Yeh, I know there are dozens of ways to save data, and that various browsers, operating-systems, and softwares can all be tweaked to save things pretty much however you’d like to do so. Everybody has their favorite ways, and you just had to go and ask me why I use that “…horrid rapidshare thing?”
BTW. With 5,176 posts you hardly seem like a “newbie”, which makes me wonder how you even wound up reading my post to begin with (especially when you've already admitted to being LAZY). Maybe you've confused laziness with “boredom”, and simply wound up reading my post and eventually chiding me out of shear boredom...or, maybe you ARE a newbie intent on cranking out a shit-load of one-liner posts that amount to little more than expressions of laziness, what you like, what you don't like, etc. No offense taken here, bro.
