When you see "Hacker News Hug" on here (recently due to Cloudflare's issues) or Reddit's "Hug of Death", the original was "Slashdotted", when tech people hosted personal sites on their _own_ home DSL (even Dial-up via Dynamic DNS!) connections. These asynchronous connections had terrible upload speed by design.
If their webpage hit the front news of Slashdot, their upload bandwidth very quickly ran out due to the torrent of traffic!
My brother writes xkcd. In 2006 I was living at home while attending community college. At the time, his site was still hosted on the old HP desktop that used to sit in our family room and now sat in his old bedroom. One day I was playing in an unofficial Counter-Strike tournament when one of his comics (possibly "Pi Equals"[1]) got posted to either Slashdot or Boing Boing. My ping immediately went from probably ~25 ms to over 300, and then I timed out completely. I think it took us a couple hours to get our connection back, which I assume involved getting a new IP address.
This strip had a profound effect on my life after I read it for the first time. To this day it still means a lot to me. Thank you for sharing your story and to your brother for sharing his art.
Not really. For example cable internet (and ADSL) goes thru cable (shocking knowledge, I know). Cable have limited bandwidth, and as it is just a single cable, not RX/TX pair as it is for ethernet and it has limited bandwidth
Which essentially means you have X bandwidth to distribute between upstream and downstream. And it's far more profitable to sell X 40/10 Mbit connections vs selling a bunch of 25/25 Mbit ones, where most people there won't be using upload all that much.
I feel like no, trying it out (though on my Mac using zsh and not a 25 year old Linux box) the slash being first makes it reference the root directory.
"Hey check out this website I discovered - it's called Slashdot"
"It's called what!?"
"Slashdot"
"How do you spell that?"
"http://slashdot.org"
"Hang on, what? How many slashes and dots?"
