Just Don’t Call Me Steve Martin…

03.30.07 | Site

George wrote: I download from a PC because I have an archaic dialup no bandwidth one lane dirt road network at home in a rural spot, and this PC has a 12 lane freeway. And yes I use a MAC at home, jerk.

Ouch.

I considered replying to this friendly contact form submission directly, but I thought readers might get as much a kick out of it as I did. So let’s see if we can’t get to the bottom of what it is that makes me such a jerk…

My hosting plan allows for 30 GB of bandwidth per month. The size of Yasu, compressed in gzip format, is 2.6 MB. Multiply that by the 16,000 plus downloads this month and it comes out to 41,600 MB (or 41.6 GB) of data transferred. That doesn’t even take into account bandwidth for all other site traffic. Nope, that’s Yasu all by itself. All told, I wound up roughly 14 GB in the bandwidth hole site wide because Windows users, in their rabid quest to be able to play games without paying for them, have downloaded my application without first checking to see if it was really what they were looking for. This was the result of some script kiddie also naming his little crack Yasu.

You’ve no doubt figured out that I’ve ponied up the extra cash this month in order to keep my site online. Because I don’t want to have to pay the same expense next month, I made a very sound decision to prevent all Windows users from downloading Yasu anymore. This was simply done to prevent wasted bandwidth, since there’s no such thing as free (as in beer) bandwidth.

So, about this bandwidth I’m preserving. Well, it gets paid for using proceeds from Yasu registrations — no other way. Think about that for a second… Since I’m not getting any cash from the people who are downloading my application the most (as in it doesn’t run on Windows?), wouldn’t it make sense for me to simply not allow them to download it anymore? Yeah, I thought it did too.

Okay. Let’s get back to George. He thinks I’m a jerk because I’ve inconvenienced him since he doesn’t have a fat enough pipe (umm, this would be his own bandwidth) to download 2.6 MB at home. It would appear he thinks I’m supposed to give up 45 GB to the Windows world-at-large in order to personally save him a few minutes on his rickety dial-up connection somewhere in the middle of Podunk. Hmmm. Wow, I guess that does makes me a jerk.

Well darn George, it looks like you were right after all. All I can do is say thanks for pointing out my shortcomings. Can you ever forgive my callous behavior and selfishness? I’ll have a hard time sleeping tonight if you can’t.

All kidding aside, let’s presume for a moment you were serious. Had you simply shared your plight with me, I would have been more than accommodating to work with you (just ask anyone who knows me). But since that didn’t happen, and you resorted to name calling right out of the gate, I’ll just recommend you download one of the many other applications like mine on that 12-lane-freeway PC of yours, burn it to CD (or however it is you shuttle stuff) and go to town with it on your down-on-the-farm Mac. Thanks for getting in touch.