- Super-fast Internet doesn't make my well-aged computer any faster.
- There were combat-sized dust bunnies under my desk, despite frequent exploration by long-haired, dust-friendly Holden Wu.
- The Phone Company now runs glass right from the pole to the modem in your house, or at least they do around here. While the tech commented that the fiber is "kinda brittle," he treated it with no greater caution than phone techs treat copper, and the SC connectors only required a simple cutter and crimper to install, not a slow, high-skill fusion splicer.
- Strange New Worlds is the most Star Trek-y Star Trek since the original series. We just finished the second season, with Carol Kane standing out delightfully as the ship's new chief engineer. While there are some plausibility issues with Captain Pike's Enterprise, starting with impossibly lavish quarters compared to TOS, it's a return to telling good space-opera stories with clear heroes and villains, handwaving its way through the science, and shunning the ponderous, self-impressed dignity that can afflict the franchise. It's good fun. TOS characters are beginning to show up one by one, and with a known endpoint for Captain Pike's arc, there's a chance the series may segue into, well, let's not get ahead of ourselves....
Super fast internet is not useful to me. I was thrilled when a 2400 baud phone modem could get me words faster than I could read them. Everything since then is superfluous unless you're playing games, which I don't.
ReplyDeleteNever loaded a picture-heavy web page, have we? Seems unlikely. Even with an adblocker, simple news sites carry a massive payload of junk -- fonts, background, photos, video and so on.
ReplyDelete1991 is gone. The text-based Internet of newsreaders and e-mail programs is gone. Speed helps deal with the glut of ads and images. Even ignoring that, my phone provider is discontinuing DSL. I could install glass or drop off the Internet.
That's pretty funny, Bob. The web page on which you just commented on would take so long to download at 2400 bps that you go make a cup of tea while you waited.
ReplyDeleteEven smallish photos take a seeming eternity at 56k. When I was first on staff at TFL in 2000, we still had a policy of closing threads when they reached ~100k in size so as not to overtax people who were on dialup connections, and that was a pretty bare bones BBS package.
The RAW photo files I upload to editors these days are frequently 24MP or more.